The Nation - 28.10.2019

FROM LEFT: STEVE JOBS, JOHN SCULLEY, AND STEVE WOZNIAK, 1984 (AP / SAL VEDER)

O

ne of Apple cofounder Steve

Jobs’s most audacious marketing

triumphs is rarely mentioned in

the paeans to his genius that re-

main a staple of business content

farms. In 1982, Jobs offered to donate a

computer to every K–12 school in Amer-

ica, provided Congress pass a bill giving

Apple substantial tax write-offs for the

donations. When he arrived in Wash-

ington, DC, to lobby for what became

known as the Apple Bill, the 28-year-old

CEO looked “more like a summer intern

than the head of a $600-million-a-year

corporation,” according to The Wash-

ington Post, but he already showed signs

of his famous arrogance. He barraged

the legislators with white papers and

proclaimed that they “would be crazy

not to take us up on this.” Jobs knew the

strength of his hand: A mania for com-

puter literacy was sweeping the nation

as an answer to the competitive threats

of globalization and the reescalation of

the Cold War’s technology and space

races. Yet even as preparing students for

the Information Age became a national

priority, the Reagan era’s budget cuts

meant that few schools could afford a

brand-new $2,400 Apple II computer.

The Apple Bill passed the House over-

whelmingly but then died in the Senate

after a bureaucratic snafu for which Jobs

forever blamed Republican Senator Bob

Dole of Kansas, then chair of the Finance

Committee. Yet all was not lost: A sim-

ilar bill passed in California, and Apple

flooded its home state with almost 10,000

computers. Apple’s success in California

gave it a leg up in the lucrative educa-

tion market as states around the country

began to computerize their classrooms.

But education was not radically trans-

formed, unless you count a spike in The

Oregon Trail–related deaths from dysen-

tery. If anything, those who have studied

the rapid introduction of computers into

classrooms in the 1980s and ’90s tend

to conclude that it exacerbated inequi-

ties. Elite students and schools zoomed

smoothly into cyberspace, while poorer

schools fell further behind, bogged down

by a lack of training and resources.

A young, charismatic geek hawks his

Books & the Arts

THE CONFIDENCE GAME

How Silicon Valley broke the economy

by ADRIAN CHEN

Adrian Chen is a freelance writer. He is work-

ing on a book about Internet culture.