
Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro - kiyanwang
https://twobithistory.org/2019/03/31/bbc-micro.html
======
pjc50
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....](https://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=2019-02-14b.1068.8#g1125.1)

~~~
growlist
> 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 that
circumstances conspired against the UK? Is there something in the culture that
led the UK to give up too easily in favour of easy money elsewhere? Was the UK
deliberately undermined by e.g. the US (Black Arrow, TSR2)?

~~~
pjc50
Several books could be written on the subject. My personal recommendation is
Francis Spufford's "Backroom Boys"
[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/aug/14/featuresreview...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/aug/14/featuresreviews.guardianreview12)

A lot of this needs to be seen in the context of post-imperial decline, and
(in the 70s at least) serious financial difficulties. We could probably have
made _some_ of TSR2, Black Arrow, Magnox, APT, Concorde, Trident/Polaris, etc
big successes with adequate funding, but we could never have done _all_ of
them. It looks like Concorde was one of the ones that was chosen to be funded
to completion, partly due to the personal intervention of Tony Benn.

(Possible counterexample: the three V-bombers)

A lot of things were funded to the first failure but not to the first success.
A common problem - NASA would never have been able to do what SpaceX did
because the funding would have been pulled on the first failed landing,
despite this being an anticipated part of the development plan.

In the private sector, any history of this would have to cover the class
system and industrial action. Also CP Snow's "Two Cultures".

I would probably also list the UK's small mindedness towards immigration; the
US was a magnet for fleeing scientists and intellectual refugees after the
war. Much of SV's success is due to immigration or internal migration:
[https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/30/us-tech-companies-founded-
by...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/30/us-tech-companies-founded-by-
immigrants-or-the-children-of-immigrants.html)

------
spzb
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 maths quizzes)

~~~
rahimnathwani
We're about the same age. My primary school also had a BBC Micro on a trolley.
We didn't get to use it much, I guess because our teacher wasn't interested in
it.

When I was ~10, my parents spent £129.99 (a lot of money for them at the time)
to buy me an Acorn Electron (a cut down version of the BBC Micro).

One thing that was frustrating for me at the time is that I had no one to
answer questions. For example, I was writing some 6502 assembly to do
something simple (I don't remember what) and the book (either the user guide
that came in the box, or the Acorn Electron Advanced User Guide) said I had to
provide some value using two's complement. I had no idea what it was or how to
find an answer. So I wrote a letter (yes, with a stamp, in the mail) to a
Teletext page where these things were discussed, and a few days/weeks later
they actually answered my question on one of the pages.

~~~
telesilla
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 me kicks teenage me).

~~~
Lio
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.

~~~
jacquesm
This one started it:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_System_1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_System_1)

And this was the breakthrough Acorn Atom:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Atom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Atom)

The lessons learned there all went into the BBC Micro.

~~~
Wildgoose
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.

------
forinti
BBC Basic was a really good Basic. Its low level routines (for floating point,
for example) were available at certain addresses so you could call them from
assembly. And since you could mix assembly into Basic also, it gave you a nice
path from simple programs to really making the most of the machine.

I find it astonishing how well thought out this machine was.

~~~
jlarcombe
Yes it really was well thought out. Another good example is the 'tube'
interface for second processors. Enthusiasts have recently put this to use to
interface with a Raspberry Pi which can emulate various processors from back
in the day at unheard-of speeds, and also provides a modern native ARM
coprocessor. The neat thing is that this all works with no changes to the BBC
and no special software; you just use the operating system routines as usual
on code running on the second processor and it all just works. Not bad for a
system designed in 1981.

[https://github.com/hoglet67/PiTubeDirect/wiki](https://github.com/hoglet67/PiTubeDirect/wiki)

------
djhworld
I'm reading "But How Do It Know" right now and programming a software version
of the computer the book is describing. It's fun and gets you to learn about
NAND gates and other things without intimidating electronic engineering
knowledge (I don't have much of a background here)

I've implemented a the memory module (256 bytes!) the ALU and am just moving
into the CPU section now. The book builds up from creating a "bit" out of a
few NAND gates, onto registers, the data bus etc

It's actually been a very rewarding little project, yes it's far removed from
x86 and modern systems but I think the principles are there to build knowledge
on.

People might say what's the point, your day job is gluing libraries together
to run websites and stuff who cares about hardware, but I think that's a shame
because from what I can tell it's not that complicated and makes what is going
on under the hood a little easier to reason about, even if you don't
understand the complexities of modern processors

I'm looking forward to getting my little computer to run toy programs :)

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joosters
If you haven't already seen it, 'Micro Men' is an excellent TV drama that
details the history of the BBC's computer project and the battle to be the
chosen computer:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM)

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Udo
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 even finding the right
setting. It would have to be a device or an environment that seems relevant
and recognizable to the kid, yet at the same time it must be approachable,
well documented, didactically meaningful, and entertaining in a way that would
motivate someone who could just play any game instead of making one.

Second, being a tech-illiterate kid today is not a pain point anymore.
Devices, apps, and entertainment media are easy enough for anybody to use.
Kids are, somewhat reasonably, asking why they should spend any energy on
this, to what end?

At first I thought this was a problem. One of my friend's kids quit before the
effort started essentially saying "this seems boring, why do I need this?" and
the other quit after the first introduction with "nah, I'd rather do something
else". I think this is actually fine. It has always been the case that being
interested in computers came easier to social outcasts, and kids who had a
genuine internal motivation towards technology. The web start up bubble may
have skewed this perception for a time, because suddenly there was a lot of
money accessible even for people with at best a passing interest in
programming. But those days are petering out.

Computing never had a broad appeal, except during short fads. I don't think we
need more people in computing and programming. If anything, we need less,
because the job market for programmers is likely not going to get better.

Finally, I question whether there is an upside to teaching computing to kids
who don't feel a connection to it. I actually agree with my friend's kids
here: for what? Using software is as easy and productive as never before. Yes,
being a programmer, I see the glaring issues in today's software, but if we're
honest we have gained a lot more than we lost in terms of what the "unskilled"
user can do.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
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 it for granted.

But there's also no point in trying to relive the past. 70s/80s computer
culture was partly driven by the fact that computers seemed to be expensive,
room-filling, and mysterious. Now computers are ubiquitous, tiny, and
absolutely mundane. So the mystery and inaccessibility have disappeared, and
kids need a more direct motivation.

Saying "You'll be able to get a good job" is not a valid approach, because for
all anyone knows in 10-15 years AI will have automated away all those well-
paying jobs.

But someone who has some curiosity about how things work, and some experience
of making them work, will always be able to ride the future better than
someone who has never tried and never understood why they might need to care.

~~~
Udo
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.

------
mcv
The computer I grew up with was the BBC's little brother, the Acorn Electron.
Lovely little thing. Only 32 kB of RAM, but it had a special port at the back
where basically the motherboard itself could be extended, so there were
official and unofficial extensions that let you extend this little computer-
in-a-keyboard to a massive desk-filling beast with a whopping 224 kB of ROM
(though still only 32 kB of RAM). It had no power switch, so you had to use
the wall plug to turn it on or off, and with all this stuff added it had
become so unstable you often had to try a couple of times before it would boot
without hanging.

Fun times.

------
yoted
Interesting comparison.

Learning computing back then did involve getting right down to bits and bytes
and assembly language if you wanted to push yourself. It resulted in an
underlying understanding of computing which may be missing this days.

------
mxcrossb
The article seems very concerned about what is the right level of abstraction
to teach. I understand the appeal of starting with Jacob’s loom, especially
when you’re going to follow up with something low level like basic. But maybe
code academy disagrees. Maybe young people these days don’t need convincing
that computers just follow language commands, and with a high level language
that’s maybe a safe lie to teach.

We might further wonder about what to teach for futures non von Neumann
architectures. What is the Jacob’s loom if a multi core machine? The organ of
a quantum computer?

~~~
el_cujo
I guess I've never seen the BBC series, but from the description I don't think
it really has the same target audience or goals as Codeacademy. Codeacademy is
(mostly) targeted to giving people practical skills to get a job with, while
the BBC series sounds like it's more about general education on computers for
people who might casually encounter them in real life, not those who are
interested in computers as a career. Sort of like in college when everyone
might have to take a general biology class, I imagine this would not be
structured the same as a biology class targeted to medical school students or
those majoring in biology.

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russfink
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.

~~~
martincmartin
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...](https://www.gwern.net/docs/rl/1991-gardner-
ch8amatchboxgamelearningmachine.pdf)

~~~
mrguyorama
That matchbox "computer" in action, courtesy of Standupmaths

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9c-_neaxeU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9c-_neaxeU)

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CmdrKrool
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](http://bbc.nvg.org/doc/BBCUserGuide-1.00.pdf)

~~~
jlarcombe
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.

~~~
stevekemp
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.

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timthorn
The programmes in question are available online: [https://computer-literacy-
project.pilots.bbcconnectedstudio....](https://computer-literacy-
project.pilots.bbcconnectedstudio.co.uk/)

~~~
royjacobs
I recently went through most of these old shows, it's amazing that the BBC has
taken the time to preserve them in this manner.

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zerodollar30
as a 46 year old professional software developer I can honestly say I owe my
entire career to the BBC literacy project. Thank you BBC!

