Biography: Dr Tilly Blyth is Curator of Computing and Information at the Science Museum, where she cares for one of the world's most important computing collections, including the oldest working electronic computer and the artefacts created by the 'father of computing' Charles Babbage. As well lecturing on the history of computing, Tilly is interested in how our digital artefacts and collections can enrich our social, cultural and educational landscape. At a time when every government minister exhorts us to build the knowledge economy and we are told that the economic wellbeing of the UK is increasingly dependent on our ability to create and support a Digital Britain, its fortunate the United Kingdom has several strengths in this area. We have the largest computer games industry in Europe, a thriving culture of bedroom entrepreneurs creating digital culture in everything from music and computer programming to fashion, and information and computing technologies as a core part of the educational system. How has this come about?
All these strengths are due to the historical legacy of decisions made nearly 30 years ago to create a national microcomputer, in an effort to answer the prophets of doom who predicted mass unemployment as the inevitable consequence of the age of the microchip.
Cast your mind back to the late 1970s. The BBC's Horizon programme Now the Chips are Down had predicted a large number of job losses and severe economic downturn as the result of the rise of the microprocessor. Forecasts included the death of the clock and watch industry, the rise of the repetitious job, and far fewer jobs in manufacturing, as we moved to a world of automation.
A response to this doom mongering came in the shape of the UK government's Microelectronics Education Programme (MEP), the BBC's Computer Literacy Project and a Science Museum exhibition, The Challenge of the Chip. These initiatives aimed to increase awareness, open access and create ICT literacy amongst the wider population.
The BBC's Computer Literacy Project brought together television programming, educational workshops and training for teachers, through an odd alliance of government policymakers, technological innovators and educationalists. The most unfathomably British of institutions, the BBC, collaborated with government and teachers to create a national initiative that would inspire and educate the public in the use of computing. After much deliberation, and with a vision of creating a truly open machine, the BBC Computer Literacy Project team decided they needed to sponsor the development of a leading-edge national microcomputer. This machine would use an agreed software standard that later came to be named BBC BASIC.
From the start the aim for the BBC Microcomputer (and BBC BASIC) was that it would invite the users to get inside and get their hands dirty. The plan was that the machine would be extremely transparent, enabling users to write programmes in assembly language, write programmes in BASIC, implement other languages on the system, and do Analogue to Digital conversion and robotics. This gave users an easy entry level, but also opened up their ability to control the machine and develop individual creativity which really goes to the heart of the success of the machine and the wider achievements of the Computer Literacy Project.
After a formal tendering process, the BBC Microcomputer was developed with the Cambridge based company, Acorn, and the ubiquitous dotted owl, the badge of the Micro, became a much loved symbol for a whole generation of programmers. The machine was technologically advanced with an unsurpassed range of outputs, connection to a cassette interface, state of the art graphics and sound, an ability to mix graphics with text on a colour screen and an analogue input.
The BBC Micro was a peculiarly British success story with lessons on opening up participation in ICTs for all developed nations. But it was not just the BBC Micro that changed public attitudes to computing and drove the uptake of the personal computer. With the arrival of the Sinclair ZX80, Sir Clive Sinclair had already created the first machine that was available to the British public for under £100. Sinclair's ZX81 sold more than 1.5 million units, and together the BBC Micro the Sinclair machines transformed British computing culture and opened up programming to millions of non professionals.
The key to the Computer Literacy Project's success was that it was not that it was curriculum linked or formally educational, but that it provided a series of informal and open routes for people to become enthused at all levels about the possibilities of computing technology. The project aimed to raise awareness at all levels - from television programmes on Saturday morning, the opening by MEP of 14 Regional Information Centres that would demonstrate materials to local teachers, and the creation of books, leaflets and courses for teachers and pupils alike.
Many of the outputs of the MEP, the Computer Literacy Project and the BBC Micro were intended and desirable: computers in every school; the creation of a thriving educational software industry; but also hugely ambitious projects like the creation of a contemporary Domesday Book. Other indirect consequences, including globally successful computer games such as Elite, Lara Croft and Grand Theft Auto, are perhaps even more significant for Britain's global competitiveness today but were hardly foreseen in the original initiative to increase computer literacy.
The UK's cultural, creative and economic future depends on the role we can play in the global digital environment of the 21st century. Just as we can now see the legacy of farsighted decisions taken in the economic uncertainty of the late 1970s and early 1980s, so we must realise the potential for interventions that we make in the current economic crisis to stimulate digital creativity, achieve digital inclusion and create digitally literate citizens with a high understanding of ICTs. History shows that a central part of that initiative must be to make digital resources openly accessible, provide easily accessible entry points to the heart of the technology that can build skills, support enterprise and innovation and provide assistance and advice to teachers and learners. These are the lessons that public intervention in the Microelectronics revolution of the 1980s can teach us if we want to build a Digital Britain.
Dr Tilly Blyth, Curator of Computing and Information, Science Museum