The history of computers in English Primary schools

Computers first appeared in schools in about 1983 when the government offered to pay half the cost of initial equipment as a pump priming exercise. Primary schools could buy one computer and only have to pay half of the cost; secondary schools had to raise the whole price but received two machines.

There was a choice - Acorn's BBC model B, RM's 380Z and the Sinclair Spectrum were all available under the scheme (all British made). Local Education Authorities chose their preferred machine and the stage was set for the next ten years. Cambridgeshire decided on BBC machines since they were made by Acorn who were based in Cambridge. For a similar reason, Oxfordshire chose RM. A few counties chose the Sinclair machine because it was cheaper but the rest went for one or other of the more robust offerings. The Sinclair counties quickly moved over because the Spectrum, although a superb machine for its day and for home use, really wasn't up to the challenge of busy classrooms.

The Acorn and RM computers had no external speakers and no mouse. They could display chunky graphics in eight colours (two of which were black and white!) They did have internal speakers which made a variety of simple sounds and some music programs were written for them.

Software:
Initially the computers came with a tape recorder and several boxes full of cassette tapes. This approach, although it seemed good at the time, did education a great disservice. It led people to believe a number of falsehoods:

• that computers were fiddly, awkward things that were very hard to get going
• that software was free or very cheap
• that software only existed to perform rote learning activities which could be better done at a fraction of the cost using conventional technologies

Even though disc drives appeared very soon afterwards, it took several years before the idea of using computers as an open ended tool in other curriculum work became embedded in our thinking and many people still think that software is, or should be, free.

Curriculum use:
As early as 1985 I attended a lecture entitled 'Learning environments of the future' in which the speaker showed Logo and described how it was completely content free and gave children an environment in which they could experiment with mathematical ideas and achieve success. But the breakthrough came with word processing. Many people complained, asking why on earth we should use a computer for writing, but the benefits quickly became established although sharing printers between classes went on for a long time. Interestingly, many people still ask why computers should be used for art so perhaps we haven't moved that far yet. It was the National Curriculum which really moved IT forward with its descriptions of the use of generic software across five 'strands' of activity. This is described fully in these pages.

Hardware:
In about 1986 RM brought out the Nimbus computer. It was based on the Intel 80186 processor and had a mouse driven windows environment. It was an excellent machine and many Acorn counties (notably the Inner London Authorities) switched to RM and bought these machines. In 1987 Acorn launched the Archimedes computer which had 256 colours, fine graphics and a windows, icons, mouse and pointer (WIMP) operating system, so the exodus halted. The Archimedes computer was followed by the A3000 (basically an Archimedes in one case) which was quickly adopted by primary schools. With the 286 generation of processors RM decided to go 'industry standard'. Acorn remained with its proprietary operating system. The Sinclair computer had become a strong home machine but was superceded by other manufacturers who produced games machines. One other platform existed and was adopted in a number of Scottish authorities. The Apple Macintosh computer was very strong in American schools and had small pockets of use in British schools.

The future:
The platform war is just about won. All three platforms developed into stunning machines, operating at high speeds and capable of high definition colour graphics, CD-quality digital sound and WYSYWIG (what you see is what you get) desktop publishing. But the market place is dominated by the PC platform and although Apple remains in contention in many US states, throughout the rest of the world schools are now purchasing multimedia PCs as their standard ICT equipment. The ubiquitous PC now dominates most ICT provision in UK schools, and indeed most schools worldwide.