BBC Computer Literacy Project 1980 – 1989

After the atom they did the bbc micro and then the electron which was supposed to be a cheaper version of the bbc micro, though interesting history on that with issues I vaugly recall.

http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/33746/Acorn-Atom-TRAN...

has some nice nostalgia content to compliment this.

FOr me 1967, zx81 was first computer, school was a ICL 2902/3 via acoustic coupler and teletype connection that was painful and with bad lines, 30 minutes handshake was kinda how it felt to get connected. Then RM machine and in last year at school we got our token BBC micro that the teacher was overprotective with, almost had to let him know which key you was going to press in advance.

>The real tragedy was this was followed by the utterly useless national "ICT" curriculum in schools which was essentially all about teaching kids how to use Microsoft Office, and probably discouraged an entire generation of kids from getting involved in software. This still makes me angry.

Totally and completely agree and to some extent, still feeling that today.

90's was painful - how many times did you have the convo about work and you would say you work in IT and some peon would say, aha yes I can do that - I know Word. Some painful times back then, as they proceeded to ego rub all down your sanity.

I would also add that games in many ways did curtail people exploring computers a bit as in the early days, you had to write your own or type them in, today, none of that and in many respects - totally shut out of modifying them to learn. But some exceptions, just not the norm.

I owned a System One, I had to work picking Apples through the summer to save up enough to buy it. I remember picking through every detail of the system in a way that isn't really possible now. It was basic but I managed to write a few games and a simple interpreted language on it.

I ended up giving it away to somebody on HN after they left mentioned an interest: http://forum.6502.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=3362

Similar memories for me too. Born in '69 and also felt part of a unique period in tech and the UK.

In case you haven't seen it, I would definitely recommend watching the BBC film Micro Men (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n5b92). Enjoy.

Also born in 1965 and had an Acorn Atom. Went to two schools that had Research Machines 380Z systems. Didn't take any lessons in computing or ICT.

I had decided that I was going to be a computer programmer around 1975, I remember having to talk to careers advisers and the job didn't exist as a defined thing that you could do.

'65 here as well. We had the Acorn Atom at school when I was 16, but I found it underwhelming. My interest in computing didn't really start until 1983 when I started using System 7 Unix on a PDP/11 in college.

>The real tragedy was this was followed by the utterly useless national "ICT" curriculum in schools which was essentially all about teaching kids how to use Microsoft Office, and probably discouraged an entire generation of kids from getting involved in software. This still makes me angry.

My own experience of the ICT curriculum in 2011/2012 was very similar. Pre-GCSE had some stuff about building websites with Dreamweaver. The teacher showed us a banking website, and pointed out various UI elements, and our task was to make a website of our own. Unfortunately, we had to do it completely backwards. As part of some "integrated skills" approach, we had to make the website's text buttons, of size exactly 400x200 using Photoshop, and then place them onto the page. I decided that it was silly to do that, so I made the buttons with HTML and CSS. At that point, I was told I should have used Photoshop to make the buttons. I used Photoshop to make reasonably sized buttons to place on the page, and I was again told to make 400x200 buttons. I think after a while I just gave up. This was at a private school, too - which at least ostensibly placed some emphasis on nurturing "gifted and talented" students. I don't know if HTML and CSS counted for that, but I didn't feel nurtured at all.

The GCSE portion of the ICT curriculum was based around creating a database, documentation and pre-made queries with MS Access. Some fancy VBscript dialogue boxes and LIKE queries seemed to get me good marks with it. It was still a far cry from what I wanted to do.

At A-level, same story. We were instructed to make a site with Joomla according to the "client specification" one one hand, and do an exam on things like the meaning of SaaS on the other hand. The documentation process for the Joomla site was utterly inane, needing to include a screenshot of every way you modified it from the basic version of the site to include the "features" (features in this case was selecting and customizing Joomla addons through the web interface). I decided to write some code for a passworded portal, and play around with the HTML/CSS, which apparently didn't impress the examiners much.

It turns out that the only thing I could do at sixth form (for readers outside of Britain this means the stage of education for 16 to 18s) that required some programming was a BTEC, and BTECs don't curry favour with the university admissions process.

It's a miracle I wasn't turned away from computers after all that. In my first year of studying EE, I talked to some computer science students, many of whom told me that they hadn't done any programming before. Ironically, the only reason why I didn't get to do computer science was because I got a B instead of an A in my "ICT" A-level - the Joomla web customization part (the exam was fine). From what I can gather, the university admissions process implicitly works like this:

- Can you program and demonstrate open source work? We don't care. What are your grades like?

- Oh, you didn't include the requisite number of screenshots showing which buttons you clicked to customize a CMS-built website? Sorry, you're just not fit to do computer science. That's all about information technology, didn't you know?

A younger relative did the "computer science" course at school, which is designed to replace or run alongside "ICT". Although better, the questions they asked were inane, and the written exam requires them to write syntactically correct Python code in a big box the size of a page, followed by some questions as to what a BSOD indicates and what "RAM" stands for.

In my experience, non-ICT classes do just fine in teaching people how to use MS Office. You have to write essays for English, and make presentations for History. The fact that there's a class dedicated just for learning how to use MS Office and Adobe products is horrible. The whole school system seems bent on inefficiency and inertia. I've learned more Japanese vocab with Anki (spaced repetition flashcard software) and grammar with a textbook self-studying in the space of a month, for less than an hour a day, than I learned French vocab and grammar for two years in school with weekly vocab tests and three timetabled hours during school time a week. Why don't schools make Anki decks for their students to practice every day, and ask for the Anki stats report each week? Why are history lessons built around remembering which year King John died? Why don't maths classes include any work with computers?

I was born in 83 and i remember the changes to the computing course being discussed by my teacher at the time. I did the last year of the 'old' course, which as I like to tell people had 6502 asm in it. He was an old school electrical engineer and wasn't' happy about the coming changes to the curriculum!

If I recall correctly, the government made a decision at the time get rid of all the interesting stuff and change it to IT only with word etc. and that sounds like what you had to do. My opinion would be the raspberry pi movement was in part a direct response to this. Getting back to the old ways we taught kids in this country and providing the cheap accessible technology such as spectrums that people like me could actually have in their bedrooms. Plus every school i think had a BBC micro, which i think was pretty impressive foresight for the time.

I was born in 76, so I do vaguely remember the BBC computer literacy programmes - I think we were shown episodes on the big TV that the teacher would wheel into the classroom on a trolley.

I don't remember there being a lot of programming content in the school curriculum per se, but BASIC programming generally was absolutely massive back then. On the 8-bit micros we had at the time, it wasn't even possible to load a game without typing a BASIC command, and it was only a small step from there to writing small programs to print rude words on the screen.

Both I and an entire generation of UK programmers learned to program from the Usborne computing books, some of which they've now made available free in PDF form: https://usborne.com/browse-books/features/computer-and-codin...

'78 here.

As an aside, nobody writes BBC BASIC on a C64. You write the C64 variant. BBC BASIC was specific to the BBC Computers. Many magazines and books had different listings for each machine. ;-)

I was awarded one of the first A* grades in the UK for GCSE Computer Science, because I was in the first year that was on the National Curriculum. My understanding is that within 2-3 years, the curriculum changed dramatically

In my generation, Logo programming was taught at primary school. BASIC was taught in "first year" (which is now Year 7), at secondary school. Most programming was taught though if you elected to do Computer Science in Year 10 onwards, and the GCSE required a project to be undertaken. Mine was a sort of theatre booking system.

I remember when about 14 talking to my deputy headteacher about the future of teaching computer science. She was convinced that it would die out before I graduated university because "computing would just be in every lesson". That was the direction the UK gov did take, and a wrong call IMHO.

By the time I got to A-Level, the curriculum was a mess. Most pupils had Amigas and Atari STs at home, the labs at my college were full of PCs and the programming part of the curriculum was QBasic led, but the text books were still talking about mainframes and punch cards.

The government seems to have tapped out and waited to see what would happen next. In a decade of doing STEM outreach, I found it infuriating that no real curriculum existed in schools other than how to use office tools. That seems to have changed now, but it's not exactly a great curriculum, still.

The story I heard was that the UK Government, when designing a new curriculum for computing, consulted with Microsoft on what to include in the curriculum. Microsoft said office software would be really important and used the opportunity to pitch their own products. Now because everyone learned Office in school it's the thing that got used in the workplace and this self perpetuated up until a few years ago when (in England) I.C.T, which was the new name for the subject, got replaced by Computer Science which focused more on programming.

When I studied I.C.T, if the teacher knew how to code, she sure as hell didn't show it. What was it like with the BBC micros? Did the teacher know enough to teach the class? I know this is a problem with the current Computer Science curriculum.

I was born in 78 and went to school in the south.

There was a BBC Micro at primary school.

We didnt have any sort of structured way of learning it (or maybe I was just too young).

There was educational material, like "grannies garden", and "pod" where you could type "pod can pop" to make the poor tomato explode.

Because it booted straight into BBC Basic I quickly found out how to print things with different colours to the screen.

I went to 3 different secondary schools and they all had BBC Micros, Archimedes and PCs.

There didnt seem to be any teaching about programming.

There were books around about stuff about 6502, but it was a bit beyond me at age 12.

The kids interested in computers would go and use them at the lunch breaks.

By the 90s the only computing related teaching was about how to use word processors.

Later I took computer studies at college where we learned coding proper, funnily we still had an "ICT" module, which was really "how to type".

I was born in 1970 in the south. I guess I was lucky that my dad was an engineer and tinkerer, somehow I got introduced to electronics via a magazine "Practical Electronics"? I recall building basic circuits with a soldering iron around 1982-83.

About that time these kinds of magazines (which I think my Dad brought back from work) started to discuss and show adverts for the early 8 bit machines. My interest switched from electronics to programming.

There was no way my family could afford even a kit. I remember hanging around a store like Curry's that sold the early computers and typing in simple 2 and 3 line programs to print things to the screen. The shop assistants had a full time job resetting the machines to stop the endless scrolling of rude words or our names.

Around 1984 my grandfather was made redundant and used some of the money to buy us a BBC Micro. It changed my life.

Until reading your post I had assumed that the late 80's when I was studying computing at college and then university were a time of massive boom in computing education - that I was at the forefront of a massive wave of programmers being educated up. I realize I was very, very lucky.

I was born in '76. We had a BBC Micro at primary school. I spent some time on it typing in basic listings from a library book, but I did that on my own initiative. It was mostly used to play JCB Digger and Killa Gorilla. I think it all depended on how much of a computer enthusiast your teacher was.

At high school we had a computer room filled with RM Nimbus PCs, but nobody to teach IT. They were used mostly for word processing and simple DTP by teachers of other subjects. I found out the computer room was empty during PE lessons so I used to hide there when skiving off from football practice.

All my computer knowledge back then came from computer magazines and messing around on my Amstrad CPC and then Amiga. It was actually damned hard to get decent programming information, especially if you had no money. Libraries only had books for C64, or first-wave home computers like the ZX81. I don't think I ever saw an Amstrad CPC book in the wild.

I found it very frustrating to be honest. Definitely set back my programming career. It took me years to go from initial interest to professional programmer, largely because I had no access to learning materials.

I was born in Australia in 1970, and learned programming as a natural progression from the electronics kits and soldering-iron based things I was doing with my favourite uncle, who was a Ham-radio enthusiast and had everything we needed in his radio shack to build ourselves a little digital computer, in 1978. I was 8 years old, and therefore perfectly timed to grow up with computing.

By 1983, I had written my first commercial software (to control a laser light-show for one of my Dad's night-clubs) and moved on to 'real computers' - in my case, an Oric-1 and then an Amstrad CPC6128 which I wired up to a modem, and with which I promptly discovered Unix and C programming on a local university system, courtesy of a friends' login being provided to me for the purpose of testing my modem ...

In the 90's, things took a turn for the worse in my opinion, when everything became Microsoft-oriented, and the field was renamed to "IT" instead of Computer Science. I watched with dismay as a lot of my colleagues and associates, still in school (where I'd dropped out of high school), learned "Visual Basic" and other such nonsense.

It really seems like there was a period in the 90's where computer education went backwards.

But nowadays, people are realising that all these old machines still work, and are still quite relevant when it comes to teaching kids how computers work. A day with a raspberry Pi is one thing - but a week with an 8-bit machine is another thing entirely, and between these two worlds, big connections can be made by the budding student of computer science.

I had an identical experience, me being bored with screwing around with MS Office nearly caused me to fail GCSE IT, I was so bored by the time the database module came around that I submitted a mySQL backed eCommerce site as my final project.

I don't know how much things have changed in the 10 years I've been out of education, but back then you had to take learning into your own hands to get a glimpse of any real computing.

I was born in the early 80's, but was very lucky to have a father that worked with technology at work, and so we had computers at home - they were outdated, so I think it was whatever work was throwing out! Later we had a Commodore 64 and Atari STE too, but like you, it was the C64 that really got me interested beyond gaming.

In the early years while I was at primary school, there was a ZX Spectrum, which was exclusively used for young kids to play games on - at some point it must have broken though, because it disappeared and was never seen again :(

Later on a BBC microcomputer appeared, but this was guarded fiercely by the head in her office (I guess she used it for typing?!). On the 1 or 2 occasions it was brought out (literally 1 or 2, I guess the school inspectors were in or something...), we played around with Logo and the Turtle - but that was it.

At secondary school, there was a computing department filled with PCs, with 1 teacher to around 30 pupils. Perhaps by design because of that poor ratio, the tasks were ridiculously simple - I recall finishing 50-minute lessons in less than 5 minutes. You'd leave secondary school with no more knowledge than how to type in a 2nd-rate word processor and how to add 2 cells together in a 2nd-rate spreadsheet - as you say, the whole thing was tailored towards simple office work.

I agree about the lack of resources - there was essentially nothing in schools. There weren't many technical books available through libraries either, or if there were I couldn't find them. My father bought a regular magazine, PC World (I loved it!), but until the internet came along, that was the sum total of my bank of computing knowledge.

So, yeah, if I hadn't been lucky enough to be in a middle-class family with computers at home, I'm sure my entire life now would be completely different.

I was born in '88, also in the midlands, and had a very similar experience. I can't recall even encountering a computer until high school and then as you say it was just learning basic word processing and making posters in Publisher etc.

The good news is I have a younger brother born in '98 and his experience was entirely different. They were using computers all through primary school and were taught Python at high school.

It's amazing the difference just ten years can make.

This mirrors my experience exactly. I was really interested in computers and I wanted to learn to program so I could make games.

When I was 10 I went to the library and managed to get hold of a book on C. I took it home, studied it and then typed the programs into Notepad on Windows 95. I had no compiler and no internet. It was literally years before I actually ran a program I had written.

> I was born ‘89 and in the midlands of the UK, so I missed these programmes

Did your school not follow the national curriculum?

Computer science content was there during the period you (and I) were at school it just wasn't made very clear that it was computer science. Maybe this is a good thing? Just teach it like a regular part of what people are already doing in their fundamental classes.

I think you will have done data structures and algorithms in the discrete part of your maths A-level, including sorting and graph algorithms, and asymptotic analysis.

You will possibly also have had the option of a computing A-level, which featured genuine CS topics like data normal forms, assembly programming, and memory allocation.

I think people are unfairly hash when they talk about previous UK CS education in schools.

I don't know of other countries routinely teaching their 16 year olds asymptotic analysis of Dijkstra's algorithm.

Yes with a twist - a couple of years older than you which meant my school was selling its then-old BBCs for a fiver when I was eight years old or so. I got started, programming on a BBC Master as a child. An amazing spec for its time, and just as educational as it was a decade earlier.

I'm just about old enough to remember the BBC project itself, and yes: it was basically the only effort to teach people to program, which was part of why it was so unique and impressive. Computing GCSE was largely useless.

Did my computer O level in 86. No reference to the BBC Micro at all. Punch cards tho. Punch cards were something I needed to know about. I had a BBC Micro at home and the O level seemed like something from the 1800s. Turned me off formal computer science education until Andrew Ng's machine learning course decades later.

But the literacy program convinced my mum and dad to buy the BBC Micro in the first place, and I learned to program 6502, and then ARM2 on its successor, and right now I have a job and am very thankful for it, and for my parents foresight.

And that is the precise reason that the Raspberry Pi was born. Your age group was particularly unfortunate to be the first wave where the user interface of computers was being almost exclusively designed for non-technical users, so the delights of a programming prompt as the first thing you saw on power up were no more.

I was born in 1969 and our school had computer literacy O Levels that included BASIC programming on a Research Machines Link 480Z. (This would have been in 1985 / 1986)

A few years later I went back for an open day and they'd moved to PCs, but reduced the programming content.

> I was born ‘89 and in the midlands of the UK, so I missed these programmes

In the real world, outside of BBC fantasies about its own importance, no kid in the 80s (ie, an inconsequential number) became computer literate a) at school or b) on a BBC Micro or c) due to a boring TV series about a computer they didn't own, couldn't afford and couldn't use, because virtually no teacher had any idea what to do with one.

Sir Clive Sinclair (character assassinated by the BBC in a drama about itself, Micro Men) is virtually single-handedly responsible for the computer literacy of British kids in the (certainly early/mid) 1980s, producing the affordable multi-million selling computers they actually used, typed programs into and established a gigantic British gaming industry with.

We had computer labs full of Apple II's in the 1980's but they were only for games and typing tutors.

We weren't allowed to program them out of fear that we would break them.

Your experience very closely mirrors mine but then I was also born in 89 and lived in the Midlands.

Or watch Chris Curry, Steve Furber and Hermann Hauser watching "Micro Men": http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/news/55409/

> When were these programmes shown on regular British TV? '72 here and don't remember it at all.

Throughout the '80s.

There's a timeline on the website: https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/timeline