The BBC wanted to show everyone how a computer might be used in schools. A program aired in 1979 asks, “Will Computers Revolutionise Education?” There’s vintage hardware and an appearance of PILOT, made for computer instructions.
Using PILOT looks suspiciously like working with a modern chatbot without as much AI noise. The French teacher in the video likes that schoolboys were practicing their French verb conjugation on the computer instead of playing football.
If you want a better look at hardware, around the five-minute mark, you see schoolkids making printed circuit boards, and some truly vintage oscilloscope close-ups. There are plenty of tiny monitors and large, noisy printing terminals.
You have to wonder where the eight-year-olds who learned about computers in the video are today, and what kind of computer they have. They learned binary and the Towers of Hanoi. Their teacher said the kids now knew more about computers than their parents did.
As a future prediction, [James Bellini] did pretty well. Like many forecasters, he almost didn’t go far enough, as we look back almost 50 years. Sure, Prestel didn’t work out as well as they thought, dying in 1994. But he shouldn’t feel bad. Predicting the future is tough. Unless, of course, you are [Arthur C. Clarke].
I was 8 in 1979. Didn’t see a computer in school until the BBC micro, and then only got to use it rarely. No computing lessons at all until I did a CS degree!
I was 15 in ’79. I credit my HS for getting me interested in computers. The school had a VAX where we programmed in Basic on a teletype terminal. My interest was aerospace and computers when I graduated. Ended up going to college for a CS degree.
High-school Electronics class in 1980 there was a small drum-type computer with many leaf microswitches. You programmed it by paper with holes punched out, taped on the drum. The leaf switches read hole present or not. I can’t remember what we did with it. Good for educating about sequential logic and state machine I think.
Even 10-20 years later, there was the problem of not enough teachers who knew what a computer was, let alone be able to use it beyond a simple word processor. Computer education was reduced to a bag of tricks, like “Fill in blank” language education programs, or multiple choice quizzes – not students coding their own educational software under the instruction of competent experts. The kids largely learned on their own, or at least some did, regardless of what the education system tried to teach them.
Films like these showed a Potemkin Village of computer education. What it should have been, instead of what it was. You only have to think about what all those gadgets cost back then to conclude that 99.9% of schools never had access.
Interesting. I mentioned I had (circa very early 80s) a PILOT cassette tape for my australian S-100 system on VCFed a week or two back, and my thoughts on it compared to BASIC: it was rubbish.
Odd no mention of the Research Machines 380Z which was common in schools in the UK in the late ’70s thanks to a government grant that gave schools 50% off (one!). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Machines_380Z