As a kid who grew up in the public schools in Minnesota, MECC was amazing, and Apple II’s were everywhere. Each classroom had a computer, and our school had an entire computer lab. We had access to every piece of MECC software — history, math, spelling, social studies, and many other titles like Print Shop. All of the software was very, very good.
There are a few stories about Oregon Trail, one of the most popular games that was originally written by a few Carleton students for the public schools on older computer hardware that was then rewritten for the Apple II. (It’s so iconic, Xennials in America are sometimes nicknamed the “Oregon Trail Generation” because of how pervasive the game was in schools to help teach about the westward migration in the mid-19th century.) Supposedly, Apple put in a bid at the last minute with the state and won the school contract, and they had a virtual monopoly in the public schools in Minnesota.
Hell I grew up in WA and maybe we had a similar program because every elementary classroom had at least one //e full time, several more in the library and like a dozen on carts that they could roll into any classroom. I didn't see any other type of computer in any of my schools until high school where we had a lab of PCs for 'business' a lab of apple //gs' for programming classes (pascal), and several macs in the graphics arts lab for doing layout on.
I remember playing oregon trail while studying the westward migration, I remember sitting in the classroom during lunch fiddling with turtle graphics. Either the district or the school had a turtle robot that you could hook up via serial and it would drive around on a piece of butcher paper on the floor and draw with a sharpie.
> Supposedly, Apple put in a bid at the last minute with the state and won the school contract, and they had a virtual monopoly in the public schools in Minnesota.
Dale LaFrenz, who was helping administer MECC, states [1] that Apple won the bid because they filed the only compliant bid. The board was leaning towards TRS-80, but Radio Shack didn't want to bother with the state's bureaucratic bid process.
I'd say certianly yes. At my company we've set up an experiment: we've forked our monorepo and gave several agents (OpenClaw, Claude code, GH Copilot reviewer, Codex) full R/W access and a Slack channel where we give them tasks and they carry them out. The fork shows 490 commits ahead, 10 commits behind our real repo (we're only a couple people, and use "Squash and merge" on PRs).
They naturally produce bugs at an astonishing rate, and we don't review the code ourselves, but the project is growing faster than their context windows, and I believe we'll drop it soon.
14x is insane, especially since the quality and quantity of IRL software has barely budged.
One could hope that we'd use these newfound agentic coding powers to actually realize value, improve quality, etc. Instead I see enshittification and stagnation. What are we even doing with all these tokens?
If it can't provide the service, it should stop selling until it can.
This is like the AOL dialup busy signal fiasco of the mid-90's all over again. Except this time, instead of getting mad, people are making excuses for the poor, beleaguered trillion-dollar company.
I really don't understand people saying that this is due to AI commits and it is all the volume's fault.
A volume increase that is a single order of magnitude (which 14x is) should not result in this level of failures.
When I compare what Github does and the volumes vs social media companies, payment companies, video platforms, etc, it just doesn't make sense that it is just a volume problem.
It looks a lot more like a platform that already has baseline issues that are compounded by increased volume.
You're absolutely right! AI could be very helpful in this situation!
Oh no wait... the outage is with out AI itself, so how can AI help? Allow me to re-evaluate.
Fublutenuating...
Yes, let's ask AI!
Oh no wait... the outage is with AI itself, I already correctly identified this above.
Bubbluating...
It seems you will have to rely on your engineering skills to solve this problem yourself, ie, you're cooked! I will auto-renew your subscription to ensure you can be sure you'll have access to AI to solve this problem if it ever comes back online.
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