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Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

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Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#51

Post by jdietrich »

PaulAJ wrote: post #46
jdietrich wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scale of ambition is completely different. The Computer Literacy Project put a computer in every school and led to 141 TV programmes over a decade. At the highest levels of government, it was seen as an urgent priority. We wanted to be a world leader in software and we heavily invested to make that at least plausible on a per-capita basis. Today, there's lots of ambition but very little follow-through. They talk…

Your last words are ironic. Anyone writing on the subject at the time would have ended with "we're being left in the dust by Japan".

At the time, we were. Japan were miles ahead in the semiconductor industry, which was the key part of the computer industry in the 70s. Both Britain and Japan squandered their competitive advantages in a remarkably short period of time; Britain failed to effectively commercialise a large base of skilled software developers, while Japan failed to pivot into software and saw their semiconductor industry become commodified into irrelevance.

Technology changes on very short timescales. No advantage lasts for long, no matter how great that advantage might be. You have to keep investing, you have to keep experimenting, you have to be prepared to radically pivot, otherwise someone else will take advantage of your complacency and knock you out of the game.

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#52

Post by nmstoker »

Lio wrote: post #11
telesilla wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Acorn was my first programming computer at school - I didn't know it was from BBC Micro lineage! We were pretty lucky to have about 20 of them. I did NOT make enough use of this resource as a teenager, to my adult self's chagrin. This was largely because as a teenage girl, the last thing that was gonna happen was spending my lunch hours in the computer room where boys were playing adventure games. Lame. (Future m…

Acorn was the manufacturer rather than the model. So the Acorn logo was on the back of the BBC computers, the Electron and on later Archimedes lines.

I suspect that telesilla knew that and merely missed out the word Electron by mistake (given the post it was a response to mentioning the Electron connection).

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#53

Post by mrguyorama »

martincmartin wrote: post #13
russfink wrote: post #12

In the U.S. as a kid, they aired some of these programs. On one episode, they showed a computer playing tic-tac-toe (naughts and crosses) and claimed that it learned as it went. To this day, I don't know how it did that - maybe building a simple game tree? Still impressive. I always wanted one, but could afford only the TS-1000 (ZX81 but black). I was like 12.

I did this as a kid in the 1980s. :) If you exploit the symmetry, so that there are only 3 initial moves (center, corner and edge) its manageable to do by hand. Don't even need a computer. And here's an old Scientific American article about a device that learns a simplified subset of chess called Hexapawn. It's not a computer, but about 25 matchboxes. :) https://www.gwern.net/docs/rl/1991-gardner-ch8amatchboxgamel...

That matchbox "computer" in action, courtesy of Standupmaths

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9c-_neaxeU

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#54

Post by Wildgoose »

jacquesm wrote: post #39
Lio wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Acorn was the manufacturer rather than the model. So the Acorn logo was on the back of the BBC computers, the Electron and on later Archimedes lines.

This one started it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_System_1 And this was the breakthrough Acorn Atom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Atom The lessons learned there all went into the BBC Micro.

I still my have my Acorn Atom - a FANTASTIC computer.

The manual was exceptionally good as well, with the catchy title "Atomic Theory and Practise". I taught myself to program using that.

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#55

Post by notahacker »

growlist wrote: post #36
pjc50 wrote: post #4

The computer literacy project was basically the last UK government attempt at doing industrial policy. It was a huge success, so they gave up on it and have abandoned industrial policy to market forces and financialisation. We have gone from that to "eff business". https://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=2019-02-14b.1068....

> It was a huge success, so they gave up on it This made me chuckle. I hear it again and again with regard to British innovation and entrepreneurship to the degree that it's almost a cliche, but would be interested to know if there's anything solid behind the idea (and that's not a snarky 'sources?' comment BTW, just genuinely interested to know if this supposed phenomenon has been substantiated). Is it just the case…

The short answer is that the UK government from 1979 to 1997 was pretty hostile towards the entire idea, with the exception of a few specific pet projects like the BBC micro, and subsequent governments were lukewarm.

Some the projects were brilliant engineering but commercially never stood a chance like Concorde; other projects like the amalgamation of struggling private car companies as a part-nationalised state one were renowned for the sort of mediocrity and mismanagement that made privatisation and abandonment of industrial subsidies politically fashionable, even independently from those approaches helping pay for tax cuts.

The BBC Micro is arguably an outstandingly successful pivot instead. Promoting computer lessons at schools might have been a huge success in encouraging more parents to buy PCs, but parents bought commodity hardware running Windows/DOS, and after that it became natural for schools to shift towards purchasing the same thing with connectivity to the newfangled world wide web rather than Acorn's specialised systems providing educational wordprocessors with speech synthesis that ran on a floppy disk. Even without that trend, specialised hardware/software products specific for the UK educational market was never an ideal niche to be in anyway, whereas licensing ARM chips turned out to be a very lucrative and long term business for one of Acorn's subsidiaries instead.

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#56

Post by Udo »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #48
Udo wrote: post #16

When a friend attempted to teach basic programming to his kids, I realized we're in trouble (for some definition of trouble, see below). First of all, the article is right in opining that the pathways to computer literacy in general, and programming in particular, are not really all that accessible anymore. The problem becomes even worse due to the sheer number of "teaching" tools available. My friend had trouble eve…

There's a case for programming being a subset of literacy - like art, music, science, literature, and knowing how to make and post popular videos on YouTube. You don't have to be good at software for the learning to be worthwhile. There's a major potential lightbulb moment for anyone who gets to the point where they realise just how complex the technology that keeps us all alive is, and just how unwise it is to take…

I completely agree with the sentiment. Even if you're not going to do it as a job, knowing how to program enables you to think about problems in a different way, plus you occasionally still get to solve problems that other people cannot. And I also agree that advertising job prospects to kids is disingenuous.

> But someone who has some curiosity about how things work, and some experience of making them work

That's probably the biggest issue. I don't blame kids for not seeing a meaningful niche there, because we're entering a time where the inner workings of things are abstracted away, and often times they're even hidden away by force.

"Have you ever thought about how text appears on a screen?" is something I could latch on to as a kid, it's very difficult to transfer that perspective to a person growing up today. I'm not necessarily lamenting this. There will always be people who get into computing no matter what. But I don't see a worse path for those who don't. There are many things modern humans in general are not literate about, and I suspect computing will join these fields.

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#57

Post by stevekemp »

spzb wrote: post #2

There's a lot of us mid-forties IT staff who owe our careers to the BBC Micro and accompanying TV programmes. It would come as a huge surprise to today's kids but my school had just one computer (a BBC Micro, of course) which was wheeled on a trolley from one classroom to the next. We'd all take turns, usually in groups of three or four, to run whatever educational game was related to the work we were doing (usually…

I wonder how many peoples's eyes would light up if I said "Granny's Garden?"

Me? I know we had a BBC at our school, but I did my coding on the computer I had, a rubber-keyed 48k ZX Spectrum. That's what my friends had too. Nobody I knew owned a BBC, so it was wheeled out now and again and somehow a class was supposed to share it in 45-minute windows. Didn't really work.

I have fond memories of GG, and some kind of game where you were Prime Minister and you had to raise taxes, and handle unemployment. I guess a text-based sim-city, of a kind!

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#58

Post by stevekemp »

jlarcombe wrote: post #38
CmdrKrool wrote: post #27

I had a Spectrum at the time but looking back, I'm impressed by the thoroughness of the manual that came with the BBC Micro. From connecting the leads to BASIC to ROM system calls to assembly language, in one book. http://bbc.nvg.org/doc/BBCUserGuide-1.00.pdf

Yes, though actually the ZX Spectrum was also pretty good.. the famous Chapter 24 about the memory map was my first introduction to such matters and left a deep impression at a young age.

I still have the orange-covered spiral-bound ZX Spectrum manual, complete with the Z80 opcodes and binary/hex numbers alongside them.

Alone it wasn't sufficient to program in assembly, but the BASIC tutorials/documentation were adequate.

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#59

Post by TomAnthony »

parenthesis wrote: post #18
spzb wrote: post #2

There's a lot of us mid-forties IT staff who owe our careers to the BBC Micro and accompanying TV programmes. It would come as a huge surprise to today's kids but my school had just one computer (a BBC Micro, of course) which was wheeled on a trolley from one classroom to the next. We'd all take turns, usually in groups of three or four, to run whatever educational game was related to the work we were doing (usually…

Yes! The BBC Micro came out just before I started primary school. Initially our school (200-300 pupils) had one , on a trolley, with a concept keyboard too ( http://www.beebmaster.co.uk/8bitadd/Concept.html ). By the time I left primary school, we had three or four! In primary one, I remember some very simple `cat and mouse' game. Later on, a text adventure game, possibly something to do with a frog. And then Granny'…

Yes, Granny's Garden!

I remember there was a Part 2 for Granny's Garden, but it wasn't there when you did the default load key combo. You had to *CAT then CHAIN the second file.

I recall being 7/8 years old and a student fetching me to go to the other classroom to load it for another class!

Re: Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro

#60

Post by bennybob »

camjw1123 wrote: post #26
pjc50 wrote: post #4

The computer literacy project was basically the last UK government attempt at doing industrial policy. It was a huge success, so they gave up on it and have abandoned industrial policy to market forces and financialisation. We have gone from that to "eff business". https://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=2019-02-14b.1068....

I think this is a bit harsh, the current industrial strategy is pretty decent ( https://www.gov.uk/government/topical-events/the-uks-industr... ), whether they will deliver on this remains to be seen but it's not like they aren't thinking about industrial policy.

I'm not anti Tory, but the crap with the "internet levy" that will be required to police "harmful content" doesn't really send signals to the rest of the world that the UK is a forward thinking future tech hub.
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