It is hard to overstate the impact that having a BBC micro in my 1980s rural primary school had on my career, without that I'd almost certainly have had a very different path through life. My eternal gratitude to whichever executive or politician decided to fund that program.
The politician was Margaret Thatcher and the Department Of Trade And Industry (the website calls it Transport and Industry which looks like a typo as transport was the Ministry of Transport) paid 50% of the cost for schools purchasing computers from the Research Machines 380Z, the BBC Micro plus (I didn't know this) the Spectrum.
Placing this under the DTI, instead of Ministry of Education, suggests the intention was to encourage success stories precisely like yours; build skills for future employment in industry and building IT literate professionals to enable future UK trade. Surprisingly forward looking for any government department!
We were lucky enough to have both the 380Z and the BBC Micro (plus some Acorn Atom's as budget alternatives and a number of Apple ][ that pre-dated the whole computers in schools program) plus ECONET ! Our Computing Department head was involved in setting up the program, so we lucky and got a bit of almost everything except the Spectrum. We also had a few different languages available, Comal, Pascal plus the obvious BBC BASIC. I also got to play with a BASIC Compiler (Apple ][ Expediter if I recall the name correctly). I was incredibly lucky as a result of the teacher being involved in setting up the program and the early Computing courses and examinations.
Thatcher was not prime minister when the DTI was established. She was prime minister when the BBC Micro was developed and released. Did she play some role in the development or approval of the project?
I helped my math teacher (we didn't have computer science yet) set up econet in the computer lab so learned all about how it worked (all of which I've now forgotten) and took advantage of its lack of security for the rest of the year.
We also transitioned from actual typewriters to beebs in typing class, and I ended up writing a user(/idiots) guide for the beeb word processor.
When the BBC micro arrived at my tiny rural school the elderly teacher had been given instructions for how to type in and run a simple "hello world" style program to demonstrate what this amazing machine could do.
She began copy-typing in the program and then invited each of us to sit at the keyboard and add our names to what I imagine was a simple print statement.
Finally, after quite some time going around the whole class one by one, the program was ready and she pressed return and ..
Syntax error
The machine was promptly powered off and put back in the box.
It would be a few years before it reemerged and, thankfully, captured my interest.
Lots of late 30's/early 40-something Brits in this sub thread I think :D
BBC Micro was the first computer I ever used, in 1986 upon entering primary school. I remember learning DART and programing the turtle to move around using LOGO (we actually had a physical version too from what I remember).
My elderly year 1 primary school teacher disliked the computer, however, and told us we needed to spend the time learning to write in pen because "we wouldn't be able to carry a computer on our back for the rest of our lives"!
My parents soon bought an Acorn A3000 (32bit home computing in 1988!) and I would type out BASIC programs from books from the library and then later edit them to discover I could do my own programming. I don't think there was any free/open source (what we used to call 'shareware') WIMP tools so being about 10 years old my programming was strictly relegated to BASIC as that's all we had.
I'm a bit depressed to think that Margaret Thatcher had a direct impact on my career in tech, however :/
A few years ago UK schools were flooded with BBC:Micro Bits - everyone in my son's year-group received one.
I think the idea was similar, seed a new generation with technical know-how. I'm not sure if it will work this time - I guess we will have to wait and see.
It was really. I worked at the beeb when it was being worked on and it was very much tyring to strip back all the cludgy layers built up and get real interaction with the device, much the same way as the original did. Yes, there were Pi's but there's a lot more to the stack in that.
Hopefully they don't overheat (that was part of my testing I helped with :) )
As for it's efficacy, it definitely sparked a few minds but I don't think anywhere near the effect the original had. There's so many more distraction nowadays for kids too.
Most my friends had Spectrums, i was looking forward to gaming when Santa would surely bring me one too. Alas i got an Acorn Electron. Turns out, having the different system that my extended friend group meant i spent time messing about with coding than gaming. So whilst 'young james' was probably unreasonably unhappy with that Christmas, i think in hindsight it was amazing :)
Similar. That Christmas when my dad & I started working through the BBC BASIC manual, I thought that this was the exciting experience of owning a computer which my friends were all on about (and I was excited by it!)
...It was only some time later I learned about loading pre-written programs (games) on it.
But the reason I started coding in BASIC was because when we received a ZX Spectrum for Christmas one year the cassette player was broken - no preloaded games for us.
I was always more interested in programming, and hacking games for infinite lives than actually playing games!
Exactly that. In some ways i'd love to have some of that old code, as icky as it would likely be to view now.
Does make me wonder how kids of today just start coding, without having to fuss about dev environments. Listening to my young nephew talking about doing python at school sounded encouraging, but python is hardly "I want to learn to python, starting coding in python". Lots of fiddling about. Still he seems to enjoy it.
Less so having them in school, but I cut my programming teeth on an Acorn Electron, then later a BBC Master, that we had at home.
Mostly in BASIC (a better implementation than most common 8-bits had: proper procs & functions rather than just GOTO/GOSUB and decent variable name length limits) but later with a bit of 6502 assembler added in for sprite drawing/moving & similar (BBC BASIC had a built-in multi-pass assembler – another significant point in its favour).
I doubt I'd be where I am today if I'd not had that (and my parents had not had the foresight to let me stretch bed-time rules when doing something learn-y rather than just playing games!).
It was the Electron for me. Bought it new for the equivalent of less than #100 when Acorn discontinued it, the only computer I could afford from my allowance. Incidentally it also forced me to learn German and English as a kid, to be able to read the manuals and Acorn Magazine.
Second to learning to read, that machine probably had the largest influence on my career
The archive of the BBC's Computer Literacy Project, of which the BBC Micro was a key part, is now online. Lots of fascinating programmes:
https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/
