But the real draw was playing video games, which was only permitted on weekends. Hours and hours of Chuckie Egg, Cylon Attack, Stryker's Run, etc.
Though for some the challenges in hacking games and redoing boot loaders did happen, it was more niche scene wise and not part of schooling.
One school I went to had "computer club" after school to use BBC Micros.
We were playing games on them: Thrust, Imogen and Repton.
When I was 6, I couldn't get beyond the 4th level. Now, I have completed a few of the level sets, but I'm still stuck on others.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.superiorin...
This logical jump doesn't seem to make sense to me. Almost every developed country on earth used Microsoft Office in the second half of the 90s and the 00s. Why do you think in the UK it was specifically caused by it being taught in school, when it was also successful everywhere else when it was not taught in school?
> This logical jump doesn't seem to make sense to me. Almost every developed country on earth used Microsoft Office in the second half of the 90s and the 00s. Why do you think in the UK it was specifically caused by it being taught in school, when it was also successful everywhere else when it was not taught in school?
Because the reason why every developed country used Microsoft products was corruption (you can call it lobbying if you feel good).
That is a MAJOR jump, from teaching programming to teaching word processing.
These machines were all zero-setup hands-on BASIC environments. A lot of people used them for games, a smaller number typed in listings by hand from paper magazines, an even smaller number learned assembly programming.
It was incredibly easy and cheap to set up a games company. You wrote your game (hard - but not that hard), you paid a relatively small fee to have some tapes duplicated, you put an ad in the back of one or more magazines, and when the orders came in by post you sent them out by post. Marketing? Send games in for review and maybe hire a stall at a computer fair.
If the game was even slightly better than average it would sell.
The result was that anyone born between around 1960 and 1970 had cheap access to good-enough hardware on which to learn simple programming and a ready-made business model they could copy, all requiring next to no start-up capital.
There was a shake-out in the mid 80s. The PC arrived and business-ised the market, raising the cost of entry. Games became more challenging to develop as graphics techniques became more sophisticated. The 16-bit machines arrived, which took things up a level as dev tools started to cost real money.
So by the 90s the scene was an industry. Schools were largely irrelevant to it. Some schools had "computer clubs", and the BBC had promoted BASIC for a while, but in 1991 8-bit BASIC started to be replaced by VB, which wasn't a school-level topic. Windows 3.1 programming was hugely more complex than either BASIC or assembler and the tools were insanely expensive. By now the cost of entry was far beyond the resources of most teens/students, and alternatives like Delphi (Pascal) couldn't sell directly to schools like Microsoft could. And even if they could, most parents weren't going to buy their kids a PC to play on, because PCs cost as much as a car.
Schools taught Office because there was no longer a useful entry-level for developers. And anyone who'd been up through the 80s was now working as a developer and getting paid a lot more than they'd get as an ICT teacher.
tl;dr the industry cut out the educational system. "Business-ising" the technology starved a generation of access to affordable computing and the high cost of entry made it very difficult for talented teens to build the next generation of businesses.
The second part is much more of an issue than the first part.
My father was a teacher at a fairly expensive private school, where the pay was a fair bit higher than normal. The ICT teacher was a friend of my dad's, and helped me if he visited. He could do some programming, and taught the students using robots (Fischertechnik and later Lego) and Visual Basic. Both were options on the curriculum, but many ICT teachers chose the "easier" options, i.e. word processing, graphics, presentations.
The robots lent themselves very well to introductory programming. There was a model of automatic sliding doors, a fork-lift truck (with a light sensor for line following), and a lift. All had appropriate sensors and switches to control them, and the computer had software to program graphically, or in text.
Though iirc there is some history about the building used and current RPi production - though that may be that they are both in Wales.
But many great initiatives back then, then we just sold it all off/let it go.
ICL sold to microsoft, Inmos....history footnote.
Only thing that lasted was ARM and even that was sold off.
RPi been amazing at capturing those early days, but never be the same as early days, that was it, today - choice saturation and that boils down to games based systems like consoles and indeed phones soaking up the attention of the masses.
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.