Which was funny to me because it wasn't until well past 2000 that any of my educational systems were Windows; grade school was Apple IIs and early Macs (one was color!) and high school had higher end Macs.
Cheap clones able to run 1-2-3 was a big part of it, but the real lightning bolt for everyone I knew was Windows 95 and the Internet. And most of the kids I knew would push their parents towards the Windows for the games.
In U.K. it was really common for people to have 8-bit micros even into the late 80s. Typically Amstrad and Commodores (with machines from Sinclair before that) while schools had BBC Micros (from Acorn). Though there was a plethora of machines around at that time that most people have since forgotten about, like the Dragon 32 / 64.
Europe, and the U.K. particularly, had a really strong computer hardware industry in those days. In fact France has the Minitel which is itself a really fascinating technology and shaped early French computing trends in a differ way to England and USA too.
Going back to the U.K., you’d see a few people, usually people with a little more money, but Atari or Amiga machines but more often people jumped from C64 or Amstrad CPC micro computers to IBM-compatible PCs. There definitely were people who had an Apple Mac, but it wasn’t the norm where I lived.
Showing my age a little here, but my high school still ran Windows 3.x (I don’t think it was even 3.1. Pretty sure it was 3.0 on 286s). It was all Microsoft Office too. I ran Lotus at home but Microsoft Word and Excel had already conquered the schools, at least from what I saw. But we had Corel Draw instead of PowerPoint. Not sure why. Maybe PowerPoint hadn’t been released yet?
I wasn’t around for the earliest iterations of PowerPoint but according to Wikipedia [0] for its first several years, PP was Mac-only (mid-1987 to mid-1990)…even though MS had acquired the PP developer as it’s first big Silicon Valley acquisition.
PowerPoint for Windows was first released in 1990 and was bundled into “Office” but didn’t have the deep interoperability with other Office apps until about 1993.
Do you remember what year your school only had CorelDraw?
Cheap clones able to run 1-2-3 was a big part of it, but the real lightning bolt for everyone I knew was Windows 95 and the Internet. And most of the kids I knew would push their parents towards the Windows for the games.