Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro
twobithistory.org
twobithistory.org
We have gone from that to "eff business". https://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=2019-02-14b.1068....
Today, there's lots of ambition but very little follow-through. They talk a good game, but it's all piecemeal and penny-ante. It's very difficult to actually find out the specifics of what the government is spending, but it's abundantly clear that we're being left in the dust by China.
Today, there's lots of ambition but very little follow-through
A huge portion of us left the country to take our software skills to countries we would be paid competitive salaries and have a high quality of life. Those countries are exploiting the UK's investment by offering a high quality of life and a streamlined path through their immigration policies, pillaging UK developers and negating the billions of dollars the UK spent to get ahead.
Having kept a close eye on the development market in the UK for the past 20 years, it's becoming apparent that there will never be an opportunity to bring our skills back home.
It's no good investing in education if you don't provide the opportunity for that education to bring long term benefit to the UK. You need to keep the people once you've trained them and they're just not going to stick around while other countries salaries and immigration policies make it easy to take those skills where they're going to be guaranteed easy access to a high quality of life. Those developers are never going to come back if they face the prospect of losing 80% of their salary and their partner not being able to work for for a period during the immigration process.
This is a huge gap that the UK seriously needs to look at. There's no point in having an industrial policy that trains people if you're just going to lose a huge portion of them at the end of that training, never to see them again.
As I live in Scotland I pay 40 percent tax on everything I earn over 41 thousand pounds.
I take it you went to the States ? Is it even possible for someone my age to get there to work?
The U.S. may be considered a racist hell hole, but just like everywhere else, it's really the few loudest ones that make a bad name for everyone else. On the whole, Americans are wonderful people living in a system that offers them a reasonably high standard of living for a reasonable work/life balance. They've got some issues, just like any country.
They've got a shit political system that just occasionally manages to be a beacon of light and hope to the rest of the world; a shit debacle of a medical industry that somehow has a couple of shining examples that manage to stand shoulder to shoulder with the best hospitals in the world; and an education system that fails about as many as it helps, yet still somehow manages to pull out a few of the best schools in the world. Quite how this is, I'm not sure.
Don't let stereotypes and bad press colour your perspective of a culture you don't know anything about. Visit, go attend some interviews, spend time to find places there you love. Spend time with people. Form your own opinions. You may be surprised.
Technology changes on very short timescales. No advantage lasts for long, no matter how great that advantage might be. You have to keep investing, you have to keep experimenting, you have to be prepared to radically pivot, otherwise someone else will take advantage of your complacency and knock you out of the game.
This made me chuckle. I hear it again and again with regard to British innovation and entrepreneurship to the degree that it's almost a cliche, but would be interested to know if there's anything solid behind the idea (and that's not a snarky 'sources?' comment BTW, just genuinely interested to know if this supposed phenomenon has been substantiated). Is it just the case that circumstances conspired against the UK? Is there something in the culture that led the UK to give up too easily in favour of easy money elsewhere? Was the UK deliberately undermined by e.g. the US (Black Arrow, TSR2)?
A lot of this needs to be seen in the context of post-imperial decline, and (in the 70s at least) serious financial difficulties. We could probably have made some of TSR2, Black Arrow, Magnox, APT, Concorde, Trident/Polaris, etc big successes with adequate funding, but we could never have done all of them. It looks like Concorde was one of the ones that was chosen to be funded to completion, partly due to the personal intervention of Tony Benn.
(Possible counterexample: the three V-bombers)
A lot of things were funded to the first failure but not to the first success. A common problem - NASA would never have been able to do what SpaceX did because the funding would have been pulled on the first failed landing, despite this being an anticipated part of the development plan.
In the private sector, any history of this would have to cover the class system and industrial action. Also CP Snow's "Two Cultures".
I would probably also list the UK's small mindedness towards immigration; the US was a magnet for fleeing scientists and intellectual refugees after the war. Much of SV's success is due to immigration or internal migration: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/30/us-tech-companies-founded-by...
Some the projects were brilliant engineering but commercially never stood a chance like Concorde; other projects like the amalgamation of struggling private car companies as a part-nationalised state one were renowned for the sort of mediocrity and mismanagement that made privatisation and abandonment of industrial subsidies politically fashionable, even independently from those approaches helping pay for tax cuts.
The BBC Micro is arguably an outstandingly successful pivot instead. Promoting computer lessons at schools might have been a huge success in encouraging more parents to buy PCs, but parents bought commodity hardware running Windows/DOS, and after that it became natural for schools to shift towards purchasing the same thing with connectivity to the newfangled world wide web rather than Acorn's specialised systems providing educational wordprocessors with speech synthesis that ran on a floppy disk. Even without that trend, specialised hardware/software products specific for the UK educational market was never an ideal niche to be in anyway, whereas licensing ARM chips turned out to be a very lucrative and long term business for one of Acorn's subsidiaries instead.
When I was ~10, my parents spent £129.99 (a lot of money for them at the time) to buy me an Acorn Electron (a cut down version of the BBC Micro).
One thing that was frustrating for me at the time is that I had no one to answer questions. For example, I was writing some 6502 assembly to do something simple (I don't remember what) and the book (either the user guide that came in the box, or the Acorn Electron Advanced User Guide) said I had to provide some value using two's complement. I had no idea what it was or how to find an answer. So I wrote a letter (yes, with a stamp, in the mail) to a Teletext page where these things were discussed, and a few days/weeks later they actually answered my question on one of the pages.
So the Acorn logo was on the back of the BBC computers, the Electron and on later Archimedes lines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_System_1
And this was the breakthrough Acorn Atom:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Atom
The lessons learned there all went into the BBC Micro.
The manual was exceptionally good as well, with the catchy title "Atomic Theory and Practise". I taught myself to program using that.
I do remember from the time that referring the Electron simply as The Acorn (due the prominent Acorn logo on the top) was very common so my reading it as such in the parent post didn’t seem unusual.
I always assumed it was because the BBC Micro had such strong branding that people didn’t realise it was an Acorn product. The logo was there on the back but very small.
I never tried it. I'm not sure whether acoustic coupling would have worked well enough to load successfully.
I think they broadcast every program multiple times, though.
Same issue when I got a BBC B. No reference beyond the simple user guide, and I couldn’t find anything out about other books that might be available by asking at the library, because they didn’t understand what I was asking about.
Getting onto the Internet in 1994 made a huge difference!
Only just in 40s here so I was a bit late for the TV programs, but the Acorn computers (Micros and Master Series on trollies in school, and an Electron then later a Master at home) are essentially why I've ended up as a senior-developer-come-DBA.
A large part of that is BBC Basic. Compared to anything else available at home at the time it was magical. Instantly accessible (10 PRINT "Expletive" 20 GOTO 10), had proper sub-procedures & functions and long identifier names (so you could create usefully structured code), build-in multi-pass assembler for when you started to need/want lower level access, many of BASIC's parts could be accessed in a documented manner from assembled code too and not just those where it was providing a thin wrapper around other ROM functions, ...
That and many type-in examples in magazines of the time to try, learn from and modify: from "frivolous" one-liners (usually producing something pretty on screen), through little "ten liner" games and other demos, to much larger projects. Heck, they fuelled some of my interest in mathematics too as those examples sometimes explored concepts such as fractals, strange attractors, 3D transforms, and so on, while making the pretty display (the explanations were fairly superficial, but usually had the right keywords for me to go lookup more detail in the library when my interest was awoken).
By the time I left primary school, we had three or four!
In primary one, I remember some very simple `cat and mouse' game.
Later on, a text adventure game, possibly something to do with a frog. And then Granny's Garden, and The Flowers of Crystal.
At some point, I got permission to basically mess around on one during some lunchtimes.
There is so much more I could say!
Never saw a Concept Keyboard though, it looks both forward thinking and antiquated (reminiscent of the ZX81). But as it happens I read about an Amiga version of this keyboard just the other day. It was expensive: https://archive.org/details/amigaformatmagazine-026/page/n13...
I remember there was a Part 2 for Granny's Garden, but it wasn't there when you did the default load key combo. You had to *CAT then CHAIN the second file.
I recall being 7/8 years old and a student fetching me to go to the other classroom to load it for another class!
I don't recall actually having classes there so perhaps I only used them at lunch hours. We did also have a BBC Micro-on-a-trolley in my form room though, and I do remember vaguely impressing my classmates by "hacking" some BASIC Lunar Lander game to start with -1 lives, ensuring the "decrement, check against zero" game over condition would never trip. Though in reality that just gave some of the kids licence to never relinquish control, since their game never finished.
There were a handful of us who had parents who worked in the computer/tech/software industry, it was hilarious cause some of us were already ahead of the teachers by 10 or 11. I had taken my first BASIC class in 4th grade at a local college.
The teachers were reading from a script teaching us about how to switch between insert and delete mode on the keyboard and giving us assignments that amounted to writing out a sentence and then editing it in a word processor and there were a handful of us kids ready to do BASIC, etc..
Me? I know we had a BBC at our school, but I did my coding on the computer I had, a rubber-keyed 48k ZX Spectrum. That's what my friends had too. Nobody I knew owned a BBC, so it was wheeled out now and again and somehow a class was supposed to share it in 45-minute windows. Didn't really work.
I have fond memories of GG, and some kind of game where you were Prime Minister and you had to raise taxes, and handle unemployment. I guess a text-based sim-city, of a kind!
I find it astonishing how well thought out this machine was.
I've implemented a the memory module (256 bytes!) the ALU and am just moving into the CPU section now. The book builds up from creating a "bit" out of a few NAND gates, onto registers, the data bus etc
It's actually been a very rewarding little project, yes it's far removed from x86 and modern systems but I think the principles are there to build knowledge on.
People might say what's the point, your day job is gluing libraries together to run websites and stuff who cares about hardware, but I think that's a shame because from what I can tell it's not that complicated and makes what is going on under the hood a little easier to reason about, even if you don't understand the complexities of modern processors
I'm looking forward to getting my little computer to run toy programs :)
First of all, the article is right in opining that the pathways to computer literacy in general, and programming in particular, are not really all that accessible anymore. The problem becomes even worse due to the sheer number of "teaching" tools available. My friend had trouble even finding the right setting. It would have to be a device or an environment that seems relevant and recognizable to the kid, yet at the same time it must be approachable, well documented, didactically meaningful, and entertaining in a way that would motivate someone who could just play any game instead of making one.
Second, being a tech-illiterate kid today is not a pain point anymore. Devices, apps, and entertainment media are easy enough for anybody to use. Kids are, somewhat reasonably, asking why they should spend any energy on this, to what end?
At first I thought this was a problem. One of my friend's kids quit before the effort started essentially saying "this seems boring, why do I need this?" and the other quit after the first introduction with "nah, I'd rather do something else". I think this is actually fine. It has always been the case that being interested in computers came easier to social outcasts, and kids who had a genuine internal motivation towards technology. The web start up bubble may have skewed this perception for a time, because suddenly there was a lot of money accessible even for people with at best a passing interest in programming. But those days are petering out.
Computing never had a broad appeal, except during short fads. I don't think we need more people in computing and programming. If anything, we need less, because the job market for programmers is likely not going to get better.
Finally, I question whether there is an upside to teaching computing to kids who don't feel a connection to it. I actually agree with my friend's kids here: for what? Using software is as easy and productive as never before. Yes, being a programmer, I see the glaring issues in today's software, but if we're honest we have gained a lot more than we lost in terms of what the "unskilled" user can do.
There are even better-paying jobs in managing those people who are using programs to manipulate data.
> Maybe those kids are too young for that to be relevant, but that's also the best time to start learning.
They're 10 and 13, not too young in my opinion to make a judgement call about what is of interest to them. I agree it's a good time to start learning, but my point is that it's probably not a useful subject to force upon people.
Realistically, there will always be kids who feel intrinsically drawn towards computing. They'll learn it regardless. The question is what we do with the rest. Having been a programmer for more than 30 years, I'm hesitant to argue in favor of making more people embark on a career that involves programming than strictly necessary.
The Micro:bit is a simple and cheap embedded ARM board with a selection of sensors, an LED matrix, Bluetooth LE and alligator clip compatible IO. There is a progressive syllabus of programming, from drag-and-drop code blocks to MicroPython and Swift. The board can be programmed directly from the browser over USB, or directly from a mobile app over Bluetooth.
Most importantly, it's tremendous fun. It's basically a Defcon badge with child-friendly programming tools. Just like a Defcon badge, it instantly inspires curiosity and creativity.
You don't have to be good at software for the learning to be worthwhile. There's a major potential lightbulb moment for anyone who gets to the point where they realise just how complex the technology that keeps us all alive is, and just how unwise it is to take it for granted.
But there's also no point in trying to relive the past. 70s/80s computer culture was partly driven by the fact that computers seemed to be expensive, room-filling, and mysterious. Now computers are ubiquitous, tiny, and absolutely mundane. So the mystery and inaccessibility have disappeared, and kids need a more direct motivation.
Saying "You'll be able to get a good job" is not a valid approach, because for all anyone knows in 10-15 years AI will have automated away all those well-paying jobs.
But someone who has some curiosity about how things work, and some experience of making them work, will always be able to ride the future better than someone who has never tried and never understood why they might need to care.
> But someone who has some curiosity about how things work, and some experience of making them work
That's probably the biggest issue. I don't blame kids for not seeing a meaningful niche there, because we're entering a time where the inner workings of things are abstracted away, and often times they're even hidden away by force.
"Have you ever thought about how text appears on a screen?" is something I could latch on to as a kid, it's very difficult to transfer that perspective to a person growing up today. I'm not necessarily lamenting this. There will always be people who get into computing no matter what. But I don't see a worse path for those who don't. There are many things modern humans in general are not literate about, and I suspect computing will join these fields.
Fun times.
Learning computing back then did involve getting right down to bits and bytes and assembly language if you wanted to push yourself. It resulted in an underlying understanding of computing which may be missing this days.
We might further wonder about what to teach for futures non von Neumann architectures. What is the Jacob’s loom if a multi core machine? The organ of a quantum computer?
And here's an old Scientific American article about a device that learns a simplified subset of chess called Hexapawn. It's not a computer, but about 25 matchboxes. :)
https://www.gwern.net/docs/rl/1991-gardner-ch8amatchboxgamel...
Alone it wasn't sufficient to program in assembly, but the BASIC tutorials/documentation were adequate.