back to article Coding with dad on the Dragon 32

Stuart Drabble home schools his two young daughters. He lives in Norwich. In 1983 when I was 10 years-old my father bought our family a Dragon 32 computer. These were the days when computers had ‘Made in Wales’ stamped on the bottom and became affordable enough and small enough to have in the home. Affordable is of course a …

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  1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    ‘Made in England’

    Wasn't the Dragon made in Wales?

    1. Efros

      Made in Port Talbot

      For the British and European market.

      The Dragon 32 was very like the TRS-80 in terms of the processor type and hardware etc. meant you could use quite a lot of the old TRS-80 software on the Dragon.

      1. Steve Todd

        Re: Made in Port Talbot

        Erm, no. The Dragon 32 was powered by a 6809, the conventional TRS80 had a Z80 under the hood. The TRS80 Color Computer (a TRS80 in name only) was very similar, but much less software existed for it.

        The 6809 was a nice CPU, but the Dragon was hampered by a crappy 6847 graphics chip. If they had fitted out with something less brain dead then they might have made a go of it.

        1. Efros

          Re: Made in Port Talbot

          Yep forgot the Color bit.

        2. Chemist

          Re: Made in Port Talbot

          "The Dragon 32 was powered by a 6809,"

          Got a disk drive for it and then a FORTH. Start of a very long relationship with both FORTH and 6809 assembler. Still have a home-made system around here somewhere.

        3. People's Poet

          re : The CPU

          Correction to all those on here, it wasn't the 6809 it was actually the MC6809E in both the TRS-80 CC & the Dragon 32. Still got my CC and BBC Micro. Another correction to the person who said that the Dragon wasn't a copy of the TRS-80. If you're going to be pedantic about the TRS-80 which are you referring to? The Model I, Model II (purely a business machine) or Model III which was used in both business and home, all of which used the Z80.

          If you ever used a Dragon or CC you might remember this, POKE 65495,0 or POKE 65497,0 the first of which would increase the internal clock speed of the 6809E and the latter would increase it even more, although to such an extent you lost use of the tape ports on the first and both the tape ports and display port on the latter, handy when you wanted to process something faster and didn't need video out during processing. POKE 65494,0 returned the system back to normal mode.

          1. Chemist

            Re: re : The CPU

            " it wasn't the 6809 it was actually the MC6809E in both the TRS-80 CC & the Dragon 32"

            Rather pedantic as the registers, instruction set and addressing modes of the 6809 & 6809E were identical AFAIR

        4. PhilBack

          Re: Made in Port Talbot

          Ah 6847, what a crappy chip.

          Had a TRS-80 CoCo 1 16K, got quite a mileage out of it, especially with the EDTASM cartridge.

          It was cool to have the wiring schematics, especially when I wired stuff from my 200-in-1 electronics kit.

          This was the Pi and Arduino of the day.

      2. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. Martin an gof Silver badge

      Wasn't the Dragon made in Wales?

      Yup, and several BBC Acorn computers, some Sinclair (I think), some Commodore (apparently) and, of course, the mighty Raspberry Pi. Quite possibly others I suppose.

      The museum I work in has an Electron, a Vic-20 and a Dragon 64 in its "Made in Wales" display. Quite why they've decided on those models (particularly the Dragon) I'm not sure...

      See the background image at this web page. The computers are at top right, behind the reflections of the screens and rather difficult to see.

      There isn't a Pi in that case, yet, but one has been added to the collection. I run a fleet of about 20 Pis as video players in the museum.

      M.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Boffin

        >"The computers are at top right, behind the reflections of the screens and rather difficult to see."

        Should've used a polariser :(

    3. Jim 59

      I would like to point out a couple of the errors in this article. But I can't, because, simply, Dragon 32 owners are never wrong about anything, ever. One can only congratulate the author on 33 years of utter win.

    4. Matthew Smith

      Port Talbot to be exact. And the Sinclair Spectrum was made at the Timex factory in Dundee. All the local kids had cheap Spectrums. And that is why there is a healthy games industry there, especially the GTA games.

    5. csn

      Apologies to the Welsh.

      Hi, as the OP / contributor I wish to apologise. I did in fact realise the Dragon was made in Wales. When I fired it up last week I was very pleased to see the words 'Made In Britain' on the bottom. I think it was my numb brain that translated this into 'Made In England'. I see the article has been edited though as to avoid a rebellion.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Learning.

    I bought my first computer, a Spectrum from Smiths in 1983. Learnt the BASIC, then X80 assembler (all forgotten now, alas).

    I then somehow got an Atari 400ST, and with the stuff was a demo disc for GFA basic. I loved this so much I sent way for the full version with a complete manual (which I still have!).

    Anyway, I can still use this excellent bit of kit now and then as:

    http://x11-basic.sourceforge.net/

    there is a clone that works on all systems.

    All good stuff.

    1. Richard Taylor 2

      Re: Learning.

      Z80?

    2. LucreLout
      Pint

      Re: Learning.

      I cut my teeth on GFA basic and it'll always be my favourite language for that. I'm really not sure what I would have done for a career had I not stumbled onto a copy of this sometime in '86 (for my Atari ST).

      In the unlikely event I ever bump into Frank Ostrowski I'll be more than happy to compensate him for any alleged loss of licence fee at the time (I was 11 or 12 so my pocket money would not have extended as far as ordering software from Germany) and buy him as many pints as he can sink in a night.

      1. Simon Brady

        Re: Learning.

        In the unlikely event I ever bump into Frank Ostrowski I'll be more than happy to compensate him for any alleged loss of licence fee at the time (I was 11 or 12 so my pocket money would not have extended as far as ordering software from Germany) and buy him as many pints as he can sink in a night.

        Well said, sir. A good chunk of the troubleshooting skills that keep me employed today trace right back to breaking copy protection on games I could never afford as a kid. For all it's cold comfort to the vendors of yesteryear who went out of business, it would be an honour to meet them and repay my childhood debts.

        1. Alan Bourke

          Re: Learning.

          I guarantee you all those games companies were full of people with their own comprehensive pirated libraries of games.

    3. Jim 59

      Re: Learning.

      Ah, the good old days when you could buy a computer at newsagent's, switch it on and enjoy. Without being your own systems administrator, installing AV, worrying about drivers, running out of storage (more cassette tapes always available), worrying about encryption, security, phone bills, compatibility with other systems, OS crashes, BIOS problems data backups, wireless strength etc...

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Teaching a child BASIC will have social services after your kids ;-)

      Is this "Get Atari computers muddled up day"? ;-)

      Article: "1983 was the era of the early ZX Spectrum and Atari 260. These were real computers, where you had to write programs to get them to do anything"

      The Atari 2600 (AKA VCS)? You must be thinking of something else (the Atari 400 or 800?). The 2600 console might technically have been a computer, but not in the sense that you mean- you *had* to use commercial software, since you couldn't program it in any meaningful sense. (#)

      FWIW, this might have been true of the ZX81, but the Spectrum- being the first really cheap UK computer to be capable of a vaguely-passable approximation of arcade-quality- quickly accumulated a library of games, and I'm quite sure that even in 1983 many were being bought as gaming machines.

      linicks: "I then somehow got an Atari 400ST"

      From what you say about GFA BASIC, I'm guessing you mean the 520ST? the Atari 400 was a completely different (8-bit) machine and the smaller sibling to the Atari 800.

      Also, I entirely agree with the sentiment of the story, so I don't want to give the impression that I'm at all critical of that in itself. However, at the risk of sounding like a d**k... not so much the idea of teaching a child BASIC specifically (or at least the unstructured BASICs on most 8-bit machines). I know it's a cliche to say that (at best) that these taught bad habits and (at worst) ruined many potential programmers... but speaking from personal experience, this- or at least the former- is absolutely true. :-(

      Nowdays, there are many easy-to-use choices that don't have the damaging limitations of 8-bit BASICs, and I'd much rather go with them.

      (#) Well, Atari *did* apparently release a "Basic Programming" cartridge, but from what I've heard it was unusably limited. Not surprising; they added a keypad controller, but didn't improve the VCS's 128 *byte* RAM (no, really). (##) Given that this was also a system with one line of screen memory (no, *really*) and no built-in text generation, it's astonishing that the designers managed to get it to work at all, let alone leave an astonishing sixty-something bytes for user programs after overheads.

      (##) Remember that games came on *ROM* cartridges that could hold up to 4 KB, so under normal use the RAM would presumably only be used to hold things like scores, sprite positions, etc.

      1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Re: Teaching a child BASIC will have social services after your kids ;-)

        I was going to offer the same correction1 regarding the Atari machines. It's a minor point, but minutia like that are half the fun of 8-bitter nostalgia.

        As for the question of learning BASIC on those old machines... I'm of two minds. I think BASIC is a fairly vile programming language, whether we're talking about Dartmouth BASIC or VB.NET or anything in between. And I say that having put many hours into BASIC programs myself; I used traditional BASICs on Commodore, Atari, and Apple 8-bitters, the IBM PC, the PDP-11; I used compiled BASIC on a couple of platforms; I occasionally had to wade in the swamp of Visual BASIC (pre- and post-.NET) to create samples for customers and the like.

        But those experiences taught me a lot about programming languages and how not to design them. And whatever bad habits they may have taught I quickly unlearned when I was introduced to structured languages. (I had also done some assembly programming and had some exposure to COBOL at that point, plus some scripting and whatnot, so I didn't think BASIC was the only way things could be done.)

        Most people will be familiar with Dijkstra's "Truths that Might Hurt" pronouncement about BASIC. But while I respect the man as a computer scientist and a first-order curmudgeon, he certainly wasn't right about everything.

        1What's that you say about the "Tips and Corrections" link at the bottom of the article? When it's a web form rather than a mailto-scheme link, I'll start using it.

  3. Steve Evans

    Ah... fond memories...

    Similar self taught programmer here, except I had a BBC Micro, which gave me the option of fiddling about with hardware too...

    Fused the house lights with triacs a few times, and became immune to 240v electric shocks before I was out of my teens!

    Playing on machines with such restricted power and storage has come in useful. I don't faint when confronted with a microcontroller project that has to run in a K.

    Although with the more modern ARM MCUs I'm tempted to start talk in a Northern accent to my colleagues and mentioning how spoilt we are now, and something about residing in a cardboard box in middle of t' street.

    1. Chemist

      Re: Ah... fond memories...

      "and something about residing in a cardboard box in middle of t' street."

      My first 'serious computer, (UK101) resided both in the cardboard box it came in and indeed in the north.

      1. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

        Re: Ah... fond memories...

        > My first 'serious computer, (UK101) resided both in the cardboard box it came in and indeed in the north.

        We had it lucky - the Nascom 1 that (mostly my brother) built was in a nice aluminium cage - needed to keep the bits together!

        Before that he had a Cambridge Scientific Mk14 - but I don't think I ever programmed that. I certainly did programme the Nascom 1 (Z80 CPU). Due to the lack of an assembler (although we did get Zeap later) it was mostly had-assembled..

        Then t'was a BBC Micro (mine alone - I bought an EPROM programmer for *cough* testing ROMS on the sideways RAM/ROM card.). From thence to an Atari ST, then an Acorn Archimedes.

        Then joined the dark side and got a PC. Which ended up as my first linux box (slackware 0.99pl15). This was while I was programming IBM S/370 boxes in assembler. Then I grew up and went into support :-)

        Have I mentioned that (in IT terms) I'm old?

    2. wardster

      Re: Ah... fond memories...

      Cardboard box?

      Tshh! Luxury!

      We had t'live in hole in t'ground covered by a sheet of plastic with DELL written all over it.

      Then when we got t'work, we had t'pay mill owner permission t'just LOOK at the abacus we had t'work on, all day long, week in, week out.

      And when we got home, our Father would smack us over t'head with a broken router till we were dead.

      And tell t'kids that these days?

      1. Chemist

        Re: Ah... fond memories...

        "And tell t'kids that these days?"

        AND I had to solder it together AND when it didn't work debug it with a xtal earpiece AND replace the 7400 that was faulty - we used to do that sort of thing in those days.

        (and the bloody MS BASIC had a bug in the garbage collector !)

        A broken router ! - we used to dream about a broken router ... etc. etc..

    3. Bloakey1

      Re: Ah... fond memories...

      <snip>

      "Fused the house lights with triacs a few times, and became immune to 240v electric shocks before I was out of my teens!"

      <snip>

      Been there and done that. I used to buy knackered TVs and radios from jumble sales and I used to fix them. This of course resulted in many's a night listening to radio Tirana etc. with an up ended steel mesh type bed base being used as a makeshift directional antenna. My parents often saw me shoot across the room after having received a nasty shock. They thought it was normal from the weird kid and left me to get on with it. Try that nowadays and you would be up in front of the social services before you could say spare the rod and spoil the child.

      I started my I.T. career and attained a couple of degrees off the back of that and some Amstrad kit. Those were indeed the days.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Ah... fond memories...

        +1 for late night radio memories. Radio Moscow World Service at one end of the shortwave spectrum and Radio Liberty (courtesy of the US State Department) at the other. And some truly wonderful but impossible-to-trace random radio in the middle. If you've ever made your own radio and stumbled upon a foreign radio station playing melancholy samba in the middle of the night you know what I mean.

    4. John Styles

      Re: Ah... fond memories...

      I woke up with a jump in the middle of the night as though I had had an electric shock. I went to the GP (young) and said it felt like an electric shock as in a proper mains one. She said 'I hope you haven't experienced one of them'. I thought of saying but forebore 'this was the 70s, we all gave ourselves mains electric shocks and were abused by Radio 1 DJs'.

      1. Steve Evans

        Re: Ah... fond memories...

        I love how we've all picked up a single (at time of posting) down vote for our little trips down memory lane...

        Guess that's the guy who played with the 3 phase, and can't remember anything...

        ... Or stop twitching.

  4. Mark 85

    I had the Radio Shack Color Computer here in the States.

    Happy times... trying to stuff as much as possible and be efficient about it into the memory. Waiting forever while the tape loaded or saving to the tapes. Learned Basic and assembly which carried over when I learned (self-taught) C and x86 assembly. Those old dinosaurs were great for teaching how not to write bloatware.

    It's really a shame that these types of machines aren't around much except as curiousity pieces. I think any kid wanting to learn computing and programming would benefit immensely as the one thing you learned was how to write fast code, especially if you learned to write games. Debugging was half the fun and much of the satisfaction. A magical time for me.

  5. Chika

    Colour? Hah!

    Although I started my various courses on a Hewlett Packard 21MXE and an Apple II, the very first system I ever owned was a Sinclair ZX81 complete with wobbly RAM pack. It lasted for 6 months before I got sick of it and sold it to some guy in Ilford and used the money as part of a pre-order for a BBC Model A (I got in there before Acorn slapped the extra £50 on all machines).

    Although this system is still in my flat in its original box, I haven't started it in a very long time, mostly because it has an original toroidal transformer PSU so before I ever get to put power into it I want to be damn sure that everything is free of leakage first! However it does bring plenty of memories back, not least because it meant that I no longer had to use that so-called "touch" keyboard that the ZX81 was known for!

    1. P. Lee
      Coat

      Re: Colour? Hah!

      >Although I started my various courses on a Hewlett Packard 21MXE and an Apple II,

      Young people today and their fancy lower case!

      I see everything old is new again, with the flat keyboards and small devices...

    2. DJV Silver badge

      Re: Colour? Hah!

      If you had ever attempted to upgrade it to a "B" with 32K of memory, it probably wouldn't have worked anyway as the PSU wasn't good enough to handle the B's extra power requirements. Which is what I discovered when I tried a full A to B upgrade - had to send it back to Acorn who then replaced the PSU free of charge with one of the later beefier versions.

      1. Chika

        Re: Colour? Hah!

        If you had ever attempted to upgrade it to a "B" with 32K of memory, it probably wouldn't have worked anyway as the PSU wasn't good enough to handle the B's extra power requirements. Which is what I discovered when I tried a full A to B upgrade - had to send it back to Acorn who then replaced the PSU free of charge with one of the later beefier versions.

        I did manage to put most of the upgrades needed for Model B working but I had an external PSU to power the 5.25" Opus disc unit I used. I really wished I had taken on the PSU upgrade - I forget why I didn't. It wasn't as if it hadn't had upgrade work before considering that it had the OS 0.10 EPROMs fitted from the factory. There used to be a dealer on the North Street roundabout in Romford that did that job.

  6. stucs201

    I think your memory is a little fuzzy.

    32K RAM, not 16K. Turn it on and type ?MEM if you don't believe me, my recollection is it'll report 27000 and something available. More if you poke the relevant location to turn off the reservation of some for graphics (sorry, can't remember that one - someone remind me,...)

    I also seem to recall a price of £175, the Dragon 64 was obviously more, but can't remember how much.

    1. Christine Munro Silver badge

      Re: I think your memory is a little fuzzy.

      I think the confusion stemmed from the "16K Basic" message that appeared on boot: I recall thinking I'd been swindled out of half my memory first time I turned mine on! But I think MS decided it was a selling point over the standard 8K Basic (the 16K version had all the handy but slow graphical stuff in it, IIRC).

      The price was £200 (or maybe £199, as was the fashion). £175 would've bought to a 48K Spectrum with its infamously mushy keyboard.

      1. Kath

        Re: I think your memory is a little fuzzy.

        That was a lot of money for many parents in those days, but encouraging their child's interests and investing in their future made them struggle to find it somehow.

  7. Chris King

    FUZE Basic

    If you don't have the good fortune of having working old-school kit to play with, there's always FUZE BASIC on the Pi:

    http://www.fuze.co.uk/getfuzebasic/

    Check out their "Special Edition" cases in BBC Micro colour scheme:

    http://www.fuze.co.uk/products/

    They also did a version that used the Colour Maximite PIC32 board instead of a PI, with a minimal OS and BASIC for faster boot time. The Maximite also had additional Arduino-compatible I/O.

    Buying one of the cases or kits is more like an 80's computing experience - you even get wire-bound manuals in the box, none of this "documentation on CD" nonsense.

    You can put the more advanced kits together a little more cheaply by purchasing a Pi separately, and Maplin have the USB robot arm from the Model R kits on special offer right now - A37JN at £29.99.

    I cut my teeth on the ZX81 and Spectrum, moving from BASIC to Z80 assembler, and on to Forth (anyone else remeber White Lightning/Machine Lightning ?). After getting a +3, I bought CP/M, Locomotive Basic and HiSoft C. Then I was away to Uni, and tinkering with VAX/VMS and Ultrix-32.

    1. Uncle Slacky Silver badge
      Go

      Re: FUZE Basic

      If you'd rather use BBC Basic on the Pi, there's a cut-down RISC OS install with only what's needed for the Beeb experience: https://www.riscosopen.org/content/sales/risc-os-pico

  8. stucs201

    You can still get a new one

    US version though: http://www.cadigital.com/computer.htm

    I'd be seriously tempted if it wouldn't cost twice as much to ship it as to buy it. I'd also need to sort something out for the power supply :(

  9. spr97ajm

    Loved my Dragon.

    Pretty much the same story here. My Dad bought me one when they came out and I was hooked. Managed to convince my mum I was hacking into a local bank via the TV aerial. She nearly had a heart attack. Spent hours typing in code from 'Input' magazine. Loading games from cassette was definitely a dark art. Spent dozens of hours fiddling with volume, bass and treble controls, plugging and unplugging the cable, cleaning tape heads, turning off surrounding electrical equipment. "I/O ERROR". I sold it just last year. The bloke came back to me and said "You do know there was a break in the cassette tape lead?"

    Oh how we laughed.

    1. stucs201

      Re: Loved my Dragon.

      Mine seemed to only need 3 specific volume levels: Basic needed quite loud (Dad marked this with a small blob of paint on the volume control), legit machine code (and copies made with CSAVEM) needed a little quieter (happened to correspond to the paint blob just disappearing out of sight), tape to tape copies needed absolute minimum volume (and it wouldn't accept a copy of a copy).

      I didn't have tone/bass controls as such, but some games did need the tiny adjustment screw on the tape heads tweaked (generally the Dragon seemed to like it as screetchy as possible).

      Also useful was to leave the remote plug out of the cassette player, mine would put a kink in the tape when the motor stopped, meaning one IO error would cause more at the same point due to the kink.

  10. DainB Bronze badge

    Bought ? Pfft

    In the early 90s in what left from Soviet Union Z80 CPUs were fairly accessible, as well as RAM and ROM chips, but PLC that was responsible for everything else not so much. That's why to have clone of ZX Spectrum you had to buy PCB and bunch of resistors, capacitors and around 50 TTL discrete logic chips, solder it all together and troubleshoot all with logic analyzer trying to understand why it does not work, find solder bridge or faulty chip. After that you needed build your own case using plastic and acetone to bend it, assemble your own transformer power supply using infamous LM7805, pop open back cover of your TV set and find points to connect RGB signal from computer trying not to fry both TV set and yourself in process, and finally connect cassette player and load a game form a tape. One of the best additions you could imagine was Yamaha AY-3-8910 sound processor which allowed you actually produce some kind of horrible but bearable sound, and of course you had to solder it all yourself and second most desirable addition was 5 inch 720KB floppy drive.

    Mind you, in few years this homegrown ZX Spectrum evolved into quite an advanced beast with 2MB RAM and dual boot CP/M in ROM with decent word processing and spreadsheet capabilities and line printer support, but it was too late as around that time imported 386SX33 based computers became a bit more accessible.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    C64

    Started on a ZX80 at school, aged 10. Moved onto the ZX81 and then Speccy. Spent a lot of time with 8x8 sized areas of graph paper. Some of my rather naff efforts at space invaders clones did not set the world alight (or even the school to be honest).

    Later Dad bought a C64 from the NAAFI in Rheindahlen (I'm an Army brat). Me and my brother come home from school in the UK. Dad proudly shows us the new computer and sticks the power lead into the video out port. Four weeks or so later we got to play with it.

    ... 30 odd years pass ...

    Nowadays, I compile my desktop and laptop OS from source and have nine VLANs at home. Two of them are for the summer house at the bottom of the garden.

    Cheers Dad.

  12. Efros

    AIM 65

    First taste of programming was on the AIM 65, a 6502 development system which had an assembler and a BASIC interpreter. This was followed swiftly by the purchase of a Spectrum 16k and hours spent entering BASIC programs from various sources, generating a few of my own and hacking Z80 routines nicked from the software that came with it. My work at that time gave me a lot of exposure to a lot of different machines, Osbornes, TRS-80s, TRS-80 Color, BBC-B, Olivetti Word Processing systems, a Z80 based multi user CP/M system along with a few CBM Pets both with proper keyboards and horrible membrane type ones. My next job was hardware based and involved building interfaces for Apple IIe's to hook up with various laboratory equipment both through conventional means and by hacked electronics (intercepting the display signals on a photon counter springs to mind). The advent of the Apple IIc and its closed architecture put an end to that and I got my first taste of IBM PC based programming and hardware hacking. Our first IBM was an AT with 512K of Memory, a 80287 coprocessor, a Hercules graphics card and a monochrome monitor, total cost was close to £4000. My next home machine was an Amstrad CPC6128 which was the last off the shelf machine (apart from laptops) I bought.

    1. Neil Barnes Silver badge

      Re: AIM 65

      I used to lust after an AIM 65.

      My first was a Sinclair MK14 (still here, but the PROMs have bitrot now) which had a no-longer-extant homebrew video display: took me a week to design and three months to debug a stupid level converter error.

      Then came the wonderful Tangerine 65... things in plastic cases were for wimps. This came on 160*100 Eurocards, with a proper backplane, and fitted in a 3U 19" rack with space for heaps of expansion cards. All of which you could make yourself! Whee!

  13. Martin an gof Silver badge

    "In 1983 when I was 10 years old"

    Schools had neither the time, expertise or equipment necessary to teach me the skills I would need to have a career in IT.

    That may have been true of primary schools (but let's face it, few even attempt to teach that these days) but I don't think it applied to secondaries. In 1983 I was in my third year of secondary school and taking "Computers" as a subject(*). We were taught computer history, BBC BASIC, flow charts, logic, even binary maths. The school's complement of computers was 12 BBC Micros with cassettes and a single printer, but I know that other schools were more well-endowed with Econet networks providing file stores and printer sharing around about that time.

    About half my year took O-level Computer Studies which provided more of the same, though the teacher wasn't brilliant and from memory only three or four of us passed and only two of us went on to do A-level Computer Science.

    The year I did A-levels was the last year that binary maths was part of the Computer Science syllabus (WJEC) and by then the school had enough BBC Micros and Masters for children to work individually and have some left over for other departments. They were generally connected to shared disc drives by some oddly clever bit of kit not unlike a printer sharer. We had one 1200/75 modem but the nearest phone extension was in the medical room 20 yards up the corridor and if we wanted to connect to TTNS (oh yes, we did) we had to physically cart a computer, monitor and modem up there, plonk it on the bed, warn the school secretary that we were about to make an external call and hope some child wasn't having his knee patched.

    By the time I left school in 1988 it wasn't obvious whether they would upgrade to Archimedes or to Atari ST (the teacher preferred the latter and was also an avid Sinclair QL owner) and when I arrived at Polytechnic the vast majority of computing was done on VT-220 terminals talking to a network of Vax machines. Even then the "PC" was by no means guaranteed to be the future of computing. The Poly must have had three or four hundred VT-220s while from memory apart from those computers in lecturers' offices, there were a couple of dozen XT machines and about half that number of '286es.

    Oh, and a room full of Archimedes too, though nobody seemed to know why.

    I'm trying to encourage my own children to understand my early interest in computers and it's the youngest (7) who is actually enjoying the after-school coding club where they teach some kind of cut-down Scratch. Astounded to see her construct a rudimentary eat-all-the-apples game, not by slavishly remembering what they had done in club, but by logical thinking. She's got the hang of "if... then..." in the space of a couple of weeks and knows how to break a problem down into easy steps.

    My devious plan is that when we do our massive rebuilding project, each bedroom will have its own thermostat which I will build from an Arduino and programme very simply. "If you want a more comfortable room, here's the source code".

    M.

    (*)actually, thinking about it, perhaps I misremember that - it might only have been in 1984 when I started O-levels that the computers arrived.

    It might also be worth pointing out here that it was a new school and I was the first intake so not only had computers never been taught there as a subject before, but nothing had, and we had more than one young fresh-out-of-college teacher for whom it was all a bit much. But I enjoyed it and I'm glad I went. I'm not much of a fan of home-schooling and am strongly of the opinion that my children have learned so much more by being at school with <n>hundred others than they would have done be being at home, even if I (or my wife) would be more than competent academically (we're both trained teachers, though only she is practising)

    1. J.G.Harston Silver badge

      Re: "In 1983 when I was 10 years old"

      Yes, I went to university in 1987 and used VT220s connected to VAXen. My first thought when I got there was: when are we going to use some *real* computers?

      In the last semester of my last year there we did use real computers, almost, in a microprocessors module where, ironically, we used a suite of reboxed Dragons connected to, yes, VT220 terminals.

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