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this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2026
181 points (97.9% liked)
Mildly Interesting
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This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.
This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?
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When I was in high school in the late '80s there was a rumor that the school owned an electron microscope. The school was in a fairly affluent area so it was certainly within the realm of possibility, but I certainly never saw it and didn't know anyone who had.
Affluent enough someone could spend a couple M in the 80s?
Or they're bought a used one from a nearby fab. Though the service contracts are no joke cost wise.
That's probably why it was never used.
Or donated from a facility that upgraded, to use that educational donation as a tax write off.
The story was that it was donated by the parent of a student who worked for a company that made them.
The 80s were wild man.
The company I work for now balks about $6k for the annual employee appreciation. Back in the 80s they spent $50k (in 80s $$) on a float for the small town's annual parade.
See one of those is marketing. The other is effectively payroll. Companies will spend a ton of money on useless marketing because it has a 0.0001% chance of increased revenue... but will refuse to pay a penny more than they are required to employees because that's always an expense.
I didn't finish public school, but where I went to college, you could graduate without ever touching a computer unless you were pursuing an IT degree and, even then, you only had to use one occasionally.
We had 2 full classrooms with computers, a big deal back then (the swedish "Compis" computer with floppy drives and one hard drive in one of the classrooms). Our class got to use them once (1) in 3 years.