Re: The Centre for Computing History
I have a feeling I was perceived to be *that* kid in my school - I loved the BBC micros and spent many hours reading the manuals.
With the support of a very enthusiastic teacher, I wrote menus for all the various disks we had such that you could boot to the menu with shift+break and be able to load the various stuff without needing to know how to use it. This was all a huge part of my initiation into the world of computing
As we all learn from mistakes I certainly learnt a lot very quickly when I tried a CMOS Reset from the BBC Master's manual only to discover that it meant it wouldn't even have enough config by default to load the DFS ROM. I remember spending several hours with my teacher coping settings from another machine and figuring out a bunch of other things which weren't working.
I think you're completely right about the end of lessons in computing... All the schools in the UK hastily ripped out all the BBC micros which were 'instant-on' and very 'hackable' machines with BBC Basic and a whole wealth of interfaces plus a massive catalogue of educational software and games; and they replaced them with Windows 95 PCs which took forever to start up (or to do anything, come to think of it), had nothing useful built-in (notepad and solitaire really don't count) and were so easily broken that they became shrouded by a policy of fear and discouragement because the teachers had no idea how to fix them and any 'damage' would leave a machine unusable until the outsourced tech support could get around to reinstalling it. Therefore any deviation from the lesson 'script' would be met with stern punishment.
Some places passed through the Acorn Archimedes before reaching the same destination. I liked the Archimedes although it too lacked the instant gratification of BASIC or other toys without loading extra software.
I still blame Microsoft for the fact that two or maybe three generations after me learnt nothing beyond a bit of Excel or maybe a very simple 'database' in Access. The joy of computing was sucked right out of these awful white boxes.
I'm very grateful and relieved that my kids are growing up in an era of the Raspberry Pi, Arduino and similar. They're likely to learn scratch at school and will have the option to learn to code as part of the curriculum. This is good news indeed. Although nothing will bring back the magical era of all those different 8-bit sub-128k home and school computers of the 80s.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
