When did computers arrive in schools? That should be an easy question to answer, probably in the years around 1980. Maybe your school had the Commodore Pet, the Apple II, or if you are British, the Acorn BBC Micro in that period, all 8-bit microcomputers running a BASIC interpreter. That’s certainly the case for the majority of schools, but not all of them. In early 1969 the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World visited a school with a computer, and in both technology and culture it was a world away from those schools a decade later that would have received those BBC Micros.
The school in question was The Forrest Grammar School, Winnersh, about 35 miles west of London, and the computer in question was a by-then-obsolete National Elliott 405 mainframe that had been donated four years earlier by the British arm of the food giant Nestlé. The school referred to it as “Nellie” — a concatenation of the two brand names. It seems to have been the preserve of the older pupils, but the film below still shows the concepts of its operation being taught at all levels. We get a brief look at some of their software too — no operating systems here, everything’s machine code on paper tape — as a teacher plays a reaction timer game and the computer wins at noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe). One of them has even written a high-level language interpreter on which younger children solve maths problems. Of course, a 1950s mainframe with hundreds or thousands of tubes was never a particularly reliable machine, and we see them enacting their failure routine, before finally replacing a faulty delay line.
This is a fascinating watch on so many levels, not least because of its squeaky-clean portrayal of adolescent boys. This is what teenagers were supposed to be like, but by the late 1960s they must in reality have been anything but that away from the cameras. It’s a contrast with fifteen or twenty years later, the computer is seen as an extremely important learning opportunity in sharp opposition to how 8-bit computers in the 1980s came to be seen as a corrupting influence that would rot young minds.
Of course, these youngsters are not entirely representative of British youth in 1969, because as a grammar school the Forrest was part of the top tier of the selective education system prevalent at the time. There would certainly have been no computers of any sort in the local Secondary Modern school, and probably the BBC’s portrayal of the pupils would have been completely different had there been. In 1974 the Government abolished the grammar school system to create new one-size-fits-all comprehensive schools, one of which the Forrest school duly became. Following the vagaries of educational policy it is now an Academy, and there is probably not a room within it that does not contain a computer.
So what of Nellie? Because of the film there are plenty of online references to it in 1969, but we could only find one relating to its fate. It was finally broken up in 1971, with the only surviving component being a delay line. More than one Elliott machine survives in museum collections though, and your best chance in the UK of seeing one is probably at the National Museum Of Computing, in Bletchley.
There’s also the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, whose 1960’s Elliott 903 is regularly demonstrated to visiting school groups (and occasionally to the public):
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/32480/Elliott-903/
Very true, and my apologies for forgetting their Elliot.
We love our Elliots around here, even the ones who don’t blow delay lines regularly!
We had a Wang computer delivered to my high school in the fall of 1971. Yes, Wang: http://wang3300.org/ . It ran teletypes and had a built-in basic interpreter. Core memory. The OS loaded from paper tape on teletypes. The order was submitted by one of the math teachers, but he took a sabbatical the year it arrived. Another guy and I kind of took over the machine since there was no one there with any understanding. We’d been doing GE timesharing on the teletypes the year before. It was phenomenally slow, and had hard partitioning of the memory between the three teletypes. If you had larger programs you had to reload the system from a different tape.
We were running a program that calculated the number of ways to make change or a $5 bill(98,411), and they wanted to interrupt us with a program for calculating teacher’s salary ranges that was too big to run in a 1/3 of memory configuration. We refactored the program and managed to get it to run in a 1/3 partition.
My friend later worked for Intel.
Have you tried the 3300 emulator there? (it runs only under windows)
http://wang3300.org/emu.html
My high school bought three Wang 2200s in 1975 or so, with 8KB of RAM each. A few classes used them, but entry was via punched cards. Some of us would stay after school so we could sit at the actual machines and write games.
Then in 1981 they bought 50 TRS-80 model 3s. Most of them didn’t have disk drives, but there was a network that tied all the cassette ports together. The teacher would tell all the students, “OK, type CLOAD now” and after waiting a moment, she would type CSAVE on her master computer, transferring the program from her machine to all the student’s computers.
That’s a known technique? I thought I was all clever doing it between a pair of TI/99’s!
We had a Wang at Tekniska Läroverket in Helsingfors, Finland in 1974.
This was during my technical College education.
Lunarlander program was a favourite as a introduction, one challenge was to add a “graphical” representation of the landing procedure with a logging of the height over the lunar surface.
I suspect that the first computer in most schools was the 380Z
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Machines_380Z
Though our chemistry lab technician built up a ZX80 kit within a year of the 380Z appearing, which was much more accessible to spotty yoofs like myself.
Certainly was for me, I did my O-Level Computer Studies on one. You had to boot into CPM first, then run BASIC from a second floppy. I was very pleased to see that the NMOC that Jenny refers to above had a 380Z when I visited, but I’m sure to most people the nondescript black lump wouldn’t have meant much.
My first computer was a zx81 kit. Still have it.
The first one I owned was also a ZX81. But this was about school computers.
The school got a ZX81 too, which was what prompted me to get one.
If you still have yours, you can play a game that I wrote back then :-)
http://www.zx81stuff.org.uk/zx81/tape/Privateer
At my high school (Maryland, USA) ca. 1972, there was actually a Computer Club. It was sponsored by a math teacher who did side work with a local time sharing company. The company let him keep an ASR-33 teletype in his office, which connected to the computer via a 300bps modem. They also agreed to let the club use the machine for free at our meetings and after school. I think the machine was a Honeywell, but I’m not sure. We programmed in BASIC. I still have some of the old yellow roll paper with my first programs on it in a folder somewhere. This includes a BASIC version of Tic-Tac-Toe that was so pathetic it could lose. Embarrassing.
“The school referred to it as “Nellie” — a CONCATENATION of the two brand names.” (Capitalization mine)
This is why I really enjoy reading Jenny’s articles…she has such a great command and understanding of the English language which is, sad to say, somewhat rare these days.
Bill
Why thank you!
I guess my former employer https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/ should take some of the credit.
I wasn’t going to say anything, but since you brought it up, isn’t this a portmanteau and not a concatenation?
in the olden days, ‘Nestle’ was pronounced ‘nessel’ (like the verb: nestle) in the UK. At some point (not sure exactly when, probably in the 90s) it changed to the current, more continental, ‘nest-lay’.
I assume it changed to the correct pronunciation of the Swiss company’s name. There’s an acute e on the end, which makes the ‘-ay’ sound you’ve referenced.
I saw a large coil in the delay line…
would it be a mercury type?
Probably magnetostrictive delay lines
An example here, and an explanation of how they work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BIx2x-Q2fE
In 1968, my high school had an APL class taught by Ken Iverson, who wrote the language. IBM TJ Watson Research Center was nearby, and our computer class had a dialup connection to (one of) the IBM360 at TJ Watson. Fully interactive via an I/O Selectric terminal, probably 110 baud through a “Dataphone”. Was I ever disappointed when I got to Cornell University in 1969 and discover that nearly all computer use was via punch cards.
Great film! 50 years ago at my Grammar school in Cheadle, Cheshire, one of the Maths masters had a friend in the computer department at Manchester University. He arranged for some of the senior pupils to have time on one of the mainframes, so we learned FORTRAN, and I wrote a programme that calculated and printed out a section of Naperian log Tables! We had to write the code out on squared paper and debug it by hand before sending them in to be converted to punched cards. Once the cards were verified we got to go and watch our programmes run, Great fun.
Wen I got my first BBC Micro, I would write out routines on squared paper, before typing them into the computer. And when I first started writing HTML, about 20 years ago I would write it down on paper first, and check it the big red HTML reference book before typing it into Notepad!
And now the secret to better less bloated code revealed. ;-)
In 1974, my Junior High School had a Recomp III that a math teacher bought as scrap and repaired. We wrote programs in machine language and punched them on to paper tape in octal. Most other schools in the area that taught programming used “punch” cards that were filled in with a #2 pencil (yes, manually bubbling in the Hollerith codes), sent to the computer center via school mail, and print outs returned a couple of days later.
In about 1975, our little school in Vancouver BC accessed the one computer in the district (an HP 3000F). Over the phone of course, through a TI Silent 700 terminal – of which I still have a working example! Acoustic coupler and all. Ahhh… 75bps. :)
My small high school had TRS-80 (Radio Shack) computers by 1982.
My High School was fortunate: it had a pair of logic breadboards with pin-plug wires, consisting of 8 or so JK flip flops, assorted gates, and input switches and indicator lights on the flip flops and an output display. In my senior year,[’68] I learned programming [in theory] for an IBM 1620, and was more than slightly astonished that the college I attended had an actual IBM 1620.
In the mid ’70’s, the Philadelphia School District had (or had access to) a mainframe somewhere, and my school had a Teletype 33.
In my high school in Massachusetts, a parent of a student was a big mahoff at Prime Computers (remember them?) and they donated a mini and several terminals. They were then able to move the TRS-80 mod I to the library.
I took a graduate course in Production Management in 1976. We shared a mainframe and solved weekly problems using “canned” programs.
In my school we had computers with Intel 4040, programmed in machine code with switches and LEDs. That was around 1980. Later they bought ABC80, a Swedish BASIC computer with a Z80. It was more fun to use them…
My first exposure to computers in school would have been mid-late 80s. Not entirely sure what model but I do seem to remember playing Granny’s Garden on the thing. IIRC that school also ended up with some of the early Macs (with the screen inside the case). In high school it was a mix of Macs and PCs (I got busted trying to pirate Visual Basic 4.0 from the computer labs :)
My school had a large bank of abacus. Programmed it with Roman math. Speed somewhere in the negative hertz, but we’re still not sure, as “hello world” hasn’t finished yet.
I’ll top that one. My high school never had machines present until after I graduated. And sadly they remained badly confused by the technology. I am aware of the Elliot family of machines, they were mentioned in a website regarding the wonders of the DIY TTL based processor technology.
The idea that a significant portion of British gradeschoolers in the 1960s were raging hippies in their off hours is just ludicrous. Even today many have to wear uniforms.
My school was one of 5 in the area that HP2000’s in 1975 or 6. We had the “E” model.
In January, 1965, San Juan High School, in the Sacramento area of CA was given a Bendix G15. At the time we were told it was the first computer in the nation specifically for student use. It was located in a side room of a classroom, and computer programming classes were available to Seniors at first, but successive years allowed lower class students from the entire school district.
I went to that school, unfortunately the computer was gone when I got there mid-70’s. Btw – there’s only one “r” in Forest.
For a miniute there I thought they were going to ask the computer where the last remaining winning Wonka bar could be found. :-) ……would be cheating
I was one of the students at the Forest Grammar School during the time of Nellie. I had, unfortunately left the the school to pursue a degree in Computer Science at Hatfield Polytechnic the year before the Tomorrow’s World show was filmed. But some of my friends from the day are featured in it. I worked on Nellie for my last two years at the school and was one of the two “Freds” that authored an article on Nellie that can be found at: http://www.vintage-icl-computers.com/icl40. I’m really grateful for my time working on the system. To this day, I’m still engaged in the IT business as a result of that experience, having my own IT consulting business. I have fond memories of keeping the system running through hardware failures, power problems and the like. Hatfield Poly had a pair of National Elliott 803B systems similar to the one at the National Museum of Computing.
Hi Fred! I remember you teaching about the 405 at school.
Hi all. I was also in this film. After Nellie was decommissioned, the local education authority purchased a DEC PDP-8e which was shared between four schools. Forest school had it for 1 week each month. It was also my springboard into IT. After uni. I spent 31 years at IBM.
I was at Forest 1963-1965 and the computer was there before I left so 1964/65. Took up an entire Science Lab and basically did long division.