I totally agree with John's letter. When I was in primary school we had access to a BBC Micro with a Logo turtle which we could program ourselves. In senior school we had a BBC Master with the Domesday project, which was amazing at the time with decent resolution photos! The school was also lucky enough to have a ring network of BBC Micros with a shared Winchester Hard Drive. Later, we got access to Acorn Archimedes computers.

The thing that all these BBC/Acorn computers had in common was immediate access to a BASIC interpreter, and with the Archimedes, inline assembler. We had a great teacher who taught us how to use binary in bitwise operations. We were encouraged to write a program for GCSE computer studies and I wrote a library catalogue database without a backend database! A friend wrote a graphical calculator that he then went on to sell commercially. There was a regular Computer Club every Wednesday after school where you could do whatever you wanted - play games, write code, use *SHEET to do some maths...

All these things propelled me, later in life, to become a software developer and I'm glad I was given the skills necessary from school. Today, it's all about trying to get spyware infested computers to print from Microsoft Word in less than half an hour. A low-level hardware platform that is instantly programmable is a noble aim and I salute the Raspberry Pi chaps and hope you succeed!