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...