"I’d imagine that for a large amount of computer programmers (currently in their 30’s)..."
40s/50s surely. the 80s is 30 years ago.
40s/50s surely. the 80s is 30 years ago.
Most of my colleagues from the UK went through a similar curve, taking in Atari and Amiga machines at home not just as games machines but piqued by their capability to produce software of their own.
The UK 8-bit market was one of the biggest economic helpers the country has had in generations. We then went about squandering it.
Whilst I was a teenager the school curriculums moved to teaching PowerPoint and Excel which basically meant STEM entrants at University fell off. I was one of the last years to be able to learn how to code at school.
Detecting an impeding and urgent skills gap, a couple of years ago a proper computer science GCSE was kicked off (by the much maligned, but on this occasion perhaps quite right, Michael Gove MP), but only 11% of pupils in the UK sat it last year, and most schools are struggling to hire teachers so the quality of the kids they're turning out is a problem for us as a country and economy.
This is something I'm spending a lot of time thinking about right now. An open-source set of text books with teacher notes might help a lot of kids get exposure to the skills they need for the workplace in 30 years, the way I got exposure.
Yes, the RPi and microbits stuff is part of that, but there needs to be some steps beyond that. Kids need to be able to go home, look at the PC or laptop and think "I could make something on that", and get the guidance needed to do so.
Yep, that's exactly my programming history!
> The UK 8-bit market was one of the biggest economic helpers the country has had in generations. We then went about squandering it.
Yeah, such a shame that happened. I wonder why?
We now have the Raspberry Pi to fill the "home computer" niche but it's a very different proposition to the home computer of the 1980's.
Acorn did go on to come up with the next but one generation of computers, the 10 or so ARM cores in every smart phone.
In terms of defaults matter, shipping with a programming language by default is great. Also shipping with a 400 page manual explaining how to use that language was great, which Acorn did until about 1995 I guess.
I was the first person in my school to use the school computer. I can't say we had programming lessons that often, did Logo in secondary school, but only the graphical parts. But the teachers let us type in programs from magazines, learn ourselves. Depends on what teacher you had really, if they knew programming they probably taught it. That's what I do now.
I remember there were a couple of BBC Micros sat getting dusty in the corners of a couple of classrooms in both my infant (year 1-2) and junior (year 3-6) schools, but we never used them.
Instead we had brand new Windows machines on which we learnt Powerpoint, Excel and used Encarta. Joy.
I'm sorry, that may have been your experience, but that statement is simply not true.
In the early 80s - when you say you were being taught BASIC at an age when most people are still learning to read - I was in middle school, and the only thing anybody was allowed to do on the school's single BBC was play Frak a handful of times.
Not only were there no computer lessons in middle school there were none in my high school either, until 1988, at which time we did not learn BASIC or C, but whatever database software the BBC was using.
The 1980s was a heyday of British kids being into computers and programming (creating a massive games industry), but it has essentially nothing to do with the piss-poor education system of the UK or a computer that had virtually no users outside of state institutions.
Kids in that decade were doing it for themselves, at home, not in school, primarily on the ZX Spectrum.
I was born in 1971 and both my primary and secondary schools had LINK 480Z computers by Research Machines. The primary school only had the one, but the secondary school had a lab with 12 or 16 (I forget) of them. Later on it replaced them with a larger number of RM Nimbus PCs (again from Research Machines) which used 80186 processors. Yes, you read that right: 80186 processors. As you'd expect, they were not properly compatible with real PCs.
I was lucky enough to get a BBC Micro at home a couple of years after starting secondary school; my parents held off because they thought that maybe it was just a short-term interest. I think they might be convinced by now.
But yes, I guess I should've extended it a bit :-)