Some time ago...

[Jim Audiomisc]

It's sensible to move with the industry standard, unless you have really good reasons not to. Would you install an Acorn Econet system when Ethernet was becoming ubiquitous?

The reality was that different "industries" had different "standards". The reality was more complex.

At one time the RISC OS machines and software dominated in UK education. The change came when Thatcher decided to introduce school boards which allowed local traders to decide what was chosen. Many of them sold Windows or Apple kit. And sold most of them to office-type businesses. So they argued that schoolkids needed 'training' in what they would use when they worked in an office. A side-benefit being they could sell more themselves and boost their income from the school.

The result was the beginning of the drift from genuine IT and computing in schools towards 'training to use Word/Excel/etc'. Most of the *educators* objected, but were over-ruled. The result was fine in terms of locking office workers into being trained to use Word/Excel but a problem for genuine *education* in computing and other areas!

It didn't help many other areas of work. For example, many of the underwater drones made for work in the North Sea were based on things like modified RiscPCs. Many other 'magic boxes' people have used, and still do, actually ran a cutdown version of RO. Everything from set-top boxes for TV to those underwater drones. As *industries* the switch to your "industry standard" (singular) didn't help them.

So please avoid the myth that there has only ever been one "industry" with any "standard". Also credit students with more sense, they were easily able to switch platform or GUi once they had been educated - as distinct from trained to use Word/Excel. Just that they often found they didn't think much of Windows!

 

[davidsrsb]

It was not obvious the Ethernet was the winner until about 1990. In 1985 I worked on RACAL Planet LAN, which inspired IBM Token Ring and FDDI.
Back in the late 80s an Ethernet card was a full size card stuffed with ECL chips.
AT&T Starlan was popular and turned out to be very similar to what Ethernet became when it dropped the coax.
Control of the IEEE committees was everything in those days.

 

[Tony L]

At one time the RISC OS machines and software dominated in UK education. The change came when Thatcher decided to introduce school boards which allowed local traders to decide what was chosen. Many of them sold Windows or Apple kit. And sold most of them to office-type businesses. So they argued that schoolkids needed 'training' in what they would use when they worked in an office. A side-benefit being they could sell more themselves and boost their income from the school.

The result was the beginning of the drift from genuine IT and computing in schools towards 'training to use Word/Excel/etc'. Most of the *educators* objected, but were over-ruled. The result was fine in terms of locking office workers into being trained to use Word/Excel but a problem for genuine *education* in computing and other areas!

The odd thing from my perspective is I have never had the later Acorn schools machines come up in conversation. Lots of folk talk to me about the BBC B, Spectrum, C64, Amiga, Atari ST, early Amstrads etc, but none of that generation of Acorn/ARM machine. I get to talk to a lot of teachers too, who’d I’d have expected to mention it. I guess it was only for a few years after the BBC B and Master were retired and before the PCs came in? If there is an Archimedes at the Powered-Up event I’ll see if they’ll let me fiddle about with it!

I agree completely that schools computing went through a real dark-ages during the ‘90s where kids were taught little beyond MS Office. A whole different world to the early days with BBC Basic or today with Scratch, Python etc. There seems to be a narrow age-range of people who went through school after the BBC B but before the Raspberry Pi who know next to nothing about programming! My impression is things are a lot better now.

PS For clarity my own computer education was non-existent as I just didn’t fit at school at all and even if I had have I don’t think anything much was on offer in secondary schools back then (I left in ‘79). My first introduction was on a friend’s highly modified BBC B back in about 1981-82 where I learnt how to do a few things in BASIC and got the concepts of variables, condition statements, loops etc nailed down. As such I know nothing about computers in education from when I left school until much later in about ‘91-92 when I had an aborted attempt at doing a computer science degree (did a year, but ran out of money and got offered another IT job elsewhere). That was a mix of PCs, DEC Alphas and remote access to a DEC VAX. An interesting time as it was the early days of the internet.

 

[Arkless Electronics]

What would be the best museum to donate some rare computer history I have to? 1964-5 UK ICT discrete component boards...

 

[Tony L]

My personal recommendation would be The National Museum Of Computing at Bletchley Park as they may actually be able to find a use for it (they try very hard for a restored and running collection there). It is a truly wonderful museum, mostly volunteer/enthusiast driven.

PS Whilst on the same basic site (actually some sheds at the back) don’t confuse it with the Bletchley Park museum as there is a real ‘People’s Front Of Judaea’ / ‘Judaean Peoples Front’ thing going on there for reasons I’ve yet to fully understand.

 

[Jim Audiomisc]

The odd thing from my perspective is I have never had the later Acorn schools machines come up in conversation. Lots of folk talk to me about the BBC B, Spectrum, C64, Amiga, Atari ST, early Amstrads etc, but none of that generation of Acorn/ARM machine. I get to talk to a lot of teachers too, who’d I’d have expected to mention it. I guess it was only for a few years after the BBC B and Master were retired and before the PCs came in? If there is an Archimedes at the Powered-Up event I’ll see if they’ll let me fiddle about with it!

If there is an Arc, the 'experience' will depend on the OS installed. The first releases used "Arthur" - known to others as "An operating system by Thursday" because it was hacked to get it onto the hardware which was waiting, and soon replaced by RO. 8-]

The situation in schools, I think depended on where they were on the evolutionary route at the time Thatcher changed who chose the kit. Schools that still had B's, masters, etc, either stayed with them for lack of cash or had moved on to the Arcs, etc.Thus what B's, etc, there were have a longer time period for people's memories.

I went to Uni in 1969, so was beyond graduate by the time relevant. So I saw and talked to the teachers and their arriving students rather than the schools directly. The effect of the move from even BBC B to Windows was quite stark. Before Windows, incoming physics students tended to be far more familiar with how computers worked, how to interface them to the real world, etc. Later ones looked blank or panicked at the idea that they might write a program! They used excel to do even the simplest calculations or processing. "Compiler" wot's that? "Assembler" is that the teacher who gets us into the hall to sing hymns? 8-/

For people in industry (old sense of the term) the interface cards for the Arc, RiscPC, etc, let you do much the same as you could wrt equipment control and data taking as with a B or Master, only faster, etc. Close-to-the-metal programming was quite easy.

The main end result, of course, was ARM. Which now roots the developed processors for heaven knows how many devices around the world, whilst the users have no idea that the 'A' originally stood for 'Acorn'! That the UK Goverment *boasted* about how great it was when ARM was bought up by new owners outside the UK is, frankly, a scandle. Cluessless madness.

 

[Paul R]

I think it is a real stretch to blame Thatcher for the eventual failure of the Archimedes. Windows for example didn't become even a bit usable until after she'd gone. I think it's more likely to be poor software support and lack of hardware support. I remember doing a telephony application on Windows, because the approved hardware was available and affordable and we could handle four lines on a single basic PC. Ended up writing effectively a 1200 baud software modem. I don't think that was practical on an Archimedes.

And there was and is no excuse for not programming on a PC, Zorland/Zortech for C, Borland for Turbo Pascal and C, all very affordable in the 80s/90s, even Microsoft weren't off the charts. The Minix book was published in 1987, then BSD386 arrived in about 1995, along with a rather less refined early Linux. So I think we can blame the educational establishment for taking the easy option of teaching word processing and basic spread sheets rather than how to handle interrupts.

 

[Tony L]

I used to teach people to program in COBOL on a room full of twin-floppy Amstrad 1640s. One 5 1/4” floppy for DOS and the COBOL compiler, the other for the student’s work! Even worse than that I taught them PC networking on the same system hooked up with the dreaded peer to peer thin Ethernet!

I know nothing about how schools work as an entity as I’ve never set foot in one since I was 16, but I agree with Paul that it must have been a strategic decision as there are so many ways to teach programming on even the most basic PCs. I do however know that a generation in the fairly recent past (early-90s) left knowing next to nothing beyond MS Office, I’ve spoken with many of them!

 

[suzywong]

Did COBOL in the 2nd year of Uni (‘73-74). Still used punched cards in them there olden days, running on a ICL1906A-CDC 7600 pair.

And my BBC Master (inc. 186 co-processor, floppy drive and and Hybrid 5000 Music System) is in the loft, and as far as I know fully functional. One day, when I’ve retired, I’ll get it down and fire it up

 

[Tony L]

And my BBC Master (inc. 186 co-processor, floppy drive and and Hybrid Technologies Synthesiser) is in the loft, and as far as I know fully functional. One day, when I’ve retired, I’ll get it down and fire it up

I’d replace the PSU caps before firing it up, they have a reputation of being well past it now in both Bs and Masters and its not worth risking frying the rest of it!

PS I’d rather like a restored BBC B, but realistically I've nowhere to put it or monitor to use it with!

 

[Hook]

I enjoy reading about the computer experiences of others, having been in IT since 1979, and as an employee of Control Data, Sun Microsystems, HP and IBM. Worked as an app developer in COBOL, Vector Fortran and APL, and as a UNIX systems developer in C. Got out of the technical side of things around the time JAVA was introduced in 1995. I recall fondly working on everything from mini computers to mainframes to supercomputers to an original IBM PC.

David is right - networking was a mess of different topologies and gateways throughout much of the 1980s. The standardization on Ethernet enabled the rapid growth of network computing, as every company raced to figure out how to transfer their business models to the Internet. Thinking back, those were pretty amazing times, and probably explains why I got such a kick out of watching “Halt and Catch Fire”!

 

[Tony L]

Halt And Catch Fire was great!

PS Ethernet? Pah! What was wrong with token ring and Twinax? I used to have an IBM 8228 hub knocking around that I’d liberated rather than throwing in a skip (how I got my Model M keyboard too!). No idea what happened to it as I’m pretty sure I’ve no longer got it.

 

[Tony L]

It appears Acorn made a RISC laptop, one that’s quite collectable judging by this listing!

 

[Hook]

Halt And Catch Fire was great!

PS Ethernet? Pah! What was wrong with token ring and Twinax? I used to have an IBM 8228 hub knocking around that I’d liberated rather than throwing in a skip (how I got my Model M keyboard too!). No idea what happened to it as I’m pretty sure I’ve no longer got it.

Back in 1985, I had two job offers - from Sun and Apollo Computer. Both were young, growing companies. Apollo touted its proprietary token ring network, an interesting design that allowed direct memory access page faulting from any hard drive on the network. You didn't log into a computer, you logged into a network! Sun, on other hand, was big into open standards, including Ethernet. At the time, I decided it was white hats versus black hats, and went to work for Sun (even though Apollo had cooler tech).

 

[davidsrsb]

And there was and is no excuse for not programming on a PC, Zorland/Zortech for C, Borland for Turbo Pascal and C, all very affordable in the 80s/90s, even Microsoft weren't off the charts. The Minix book was published in 1987, then BSD386 arrived in about 1995, along with a rather less refined early Linux. So I think we can blame the educational establishment for taking the easy option of teaching word processing and basic spread sheets rather than how to handle interrupts.

To this day I have never managed anything more complex than an Arduino on Windows. It is much easier to just get going with C or Python on Linux

 

[Tony L]

Back in 1985, I had two job offers - from Sun and Apollo Computer. Both were young, growing companies. Apollo touted its proprietary token ring network, an interesting design that allowed direct memory access page faulting from any hard drive on the network. You didn't log into a computer, you logged into a network! Sun, on other hand, was big into open standards, including Ethernet. At the time, I decided it was white hats versus black hats, and went to work for Sun (even though Apollo had cooler tech).

Sun would have been a very interesting place back then I would have thought. In some ways I wish I’d dived into IT rather earlier as I spent the ‘80s in the music and arts counterculture, which was great fun admittedly, but I missed a lot if interesting developments and was late getting any form of IT career off the ground.

To this day I have never managed anything more complex than an Arduino on Windows. It is much easier to just get going with C or Python on Linux

As someone used to a BBC, DOS or UNIX command-line environment I never made the break into Windows programming. It all happened at the time OOP came in too, which again was too much of a stretch for me. I just never got my head round it. I was fine programming in COBOL, and when I could remember what specific syntax belonged to which language, I could deal with other procedural languages like Basic, dBase, Pascal, PL1 and C, even a tiny bit of assembler. I just never made the break over to dealing with OOP, Windows calls and all that API stuff etc!

 

[Jim Audiomisc]

I think it is a real stretch to blame Thatcher for the eventual failure of the Archimedes. Windows for example didn't become even a bit usable until after she'd gone. I think it's more likely to be poor software support and lack of hardware support. I remember doing a telephony application on Windows, because the approved hardware was available and affordable and we could handle four lines on a single basic PC. Ended up writing effectively a 1200 baud software modem. I don't think that was practical on an Archimedes.

And there was and is no excuse for not programming on a PC, Zorland/Zortech for C, Borland for Turbo Pascal and C, all very affordable in the 80s/90s, even Microsoft weren't off the charts. The Minix book was published in 1987, then BSD386 arrived in about 1995, along with a rather less refined early Linux. So I think we can blame the educational establishment for taking the easy option of teaching word processing and basic spread sheets rather than how to handle interrupts.

I've just pointed to what happened as conveyed to my by teachers and students from the time, etc. I doubt Thatcher *intended* the outcome. But it stemmed from allowing local business people to control the school boards and thus decide what kind of 'computing' would be taught. They tended to want kinds trained to use Word/Excel and had no interest in them learning more about IT/computers more generally. The teachers resisted but didn't run the school.

What you say about the Arc rather shows that you didn't know enough about them. Ask why many in uni research - who were *not* directly affected by the schools problem - preferred them *for running experiments, control systems, etc*.

And, yes, there were good FORTRAN, C, etc, compilers and so on for the RO systems. Still are. if you know how to use them, code has been portable as well.

 

[Jim Audiomisc]

It appears Acorn made a RISC laptop, one that’s quite collectable judging by this listing!

One of my research students -> postdocs had one. Although I suspect the really rarities are the Acorn *nix systems running on an ARM system.