This thread reminds me of when I was (*mumblemumble* old) back in 1986, whatever general interest computer magazine the family was subscribed to at the time (I honestly can't remember, it may have been "Compute!") ran a contest where the winner could pick between either a Mac Plus with an external hard drive or an IBM PC/AT of some configuration with a hard disk and a color monitor, I don't know if it was CGA or EGA. I'm pretty certain if the family had won back then we would have chosen the AT but I probably would have lobbied for the Mac at least a little just out of curiosity; Macs were "exotic" out in the sticks back then.

(Realistically the AT would have been the "correct" choice for a number of reasons but if we had won it it probably would have been repeatedly gutted and upgraded with new motherboards well into the mid 90's, as happened to the boat-anchor AT clone we ended up with a year or two later.)

Tell the truth I was pretty anti-Apple II at the time, so if I'd won the contest described here back then I would have been pretty tempted to pick the Plus over the IIgs simply out of spite. When I was in elementary school it was the rich kids who owned Apple IIs and if your school had Apples in the computer lab, which most did, they'd lord their ability to take disks home over the other kids. (You really had to love how the teachers were so willing to run off pirate copies of the lab software for those jerks...)

(The secondary schools the area, however, mostly had PC clones. Way to be consistent guys, but another argument for the PC/AT!)