This brought back some memories. We had a 6502-based BBC micro at school. I remember the first time I was so hooked trying to understand how comparisons really worked, the caretaker didn’t realise I was still there and locked the doors for the night. I was 10. Caused a bit of a panic when they found out.
That started me down the long road of learning to code. Despite getting a CompSci degree later I still have plenty of bad self-learned habits from those days. But I remember them fondly.
Sounds like compared to Becky I was very fortunate in my childhood. Kudos to her to for her amazing achievements.
(I read the transcript rather than listening to the podcast and it was still great).
The BBC has always had a public education mandate in some form. My memory is hazy but I feel like it’s faded somewhat in the last couple of decades.
Specifically here the BBC Computer Literacy Project ended up creating a line of home computers, and direct government funding put them in (I think literally) every school.
The BBC (computer) is interesting because due to whole project this machine was ubiquitous in UK schools, but at the same time it was a machine that almost nobody owned personally.
I have fond memories of playing "Granny's Garden", and other games during school hours, and some kind of political simulation where you had to manipulate taxes and get voted into power for a second term to win - I can't remember the name of that game though.
At the time children in the UK would be significantly more likely to own the C64, or the ZX Spectrum - the latter of which was by far the most popular computer at that time.
I never knew anybody who owned their own BBC, but numerous friends had the other computers (even weird machines like the Jupiter Ace).
Like many people at that time I learned to program in BASIC, by reading the instruction book(s) that came with the Spectrum, then graduating to Z80 assembly language - used mostly to remove anti-copying protection, and gain infinite lives on games - before moving on to PCs a good while later.
That started me down the long road of learning to code. Despite getting a CompSci degree later I still have plenty of bad self-learned habits from those days. But I remember them fondly.
Sounds like compared to Becky I was very fortunate in my childhood. Kudos to her to for her amazing achievements.
(I read the transcript rather than listening to the podcast and it was still great).