> In the UK programming was taught on BBC Micros in pretty much every school from the age of 5-6 years old as part of the school curriculum. I'm sorry, that ma

> In the UK programming was taught on BBC Micros in pretty much every school from the age of 5-6 years old as part of the school curriculum. I'm sorry, that may have been your experience, but that statement is simply not true. In the early 80s - when you say you were being taught BASIC at an age when most people are still learning to read - I was in middle school, and the only thing anybody was allowed to do on the school's single BBC was play Frak a handful of times. Not only were there no computer lessons in middle school there were none in my high school either, until 1988, at which time we did not learn BASIC or C, but whatever database software the BBC was using. The 1980s was a heyday of British kids being into computers and programming (creating a massive games industry), but it has essentially nothing to do with the piss-poor education system of the UK or a computer that had virtually no users outside of state institutions. Kids in that decade were doing it for themselves, at home, not in school, primarily on the ZX Spectrum.