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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
by discretion22 4y ago
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.
https://briansmithonline.com/computing/national-curriculum/computers-in-schools.html https://briansmithonline.com/computing/national-curriculum/c...
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.
- FujiApple 4y agoThanks for the history, really interesting. > Surprisingly forward looking for any government department! Indeed!
- asadhayatt 4y agothat was awesome
- lambic 4y agoI 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.
- ecpottinger 4y agoHere it was PetNet, it was amazing how much more the students knew about the computers than the teachers who were suppose to teach them.
- tomjakubowski 4y agoThatcher 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? Wikipedia's history doesn't mention anything about politicians being involved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro#History
- watmough 4y agoPretty sure Kenneth Baker was involved. I'll look into this some more and check back. ... Yes, Kenneth Baker was appointed Minister for Information Technology in 1981, by PM Margaret Thatcher. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Baker,_Baron_Baker_of_Dorking#Early_ministerial_career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Baker,_Baron_Baker_of_... [wikipedia] https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=kenneth+baker+bbc+micro https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=kenneth... [lots of good links here] source: I'm old, and Google is still awesome.
- tomjakubowski 4y agoThanks. It seems Baker championed the project from the start.
- anigbrowl 4y agoIronic considering the hostility of free market evangelists to any sort of industrial policy.