Biography: New media pioneer Bill Thompson has been working in, on and around the Internet since 1984. Formerly head of new media at Guardian newspapers, he writes a weekly column, the BillBlog, for the BBC News website and a monthly feature for Focus magazine. He makes occasional contributions to other publications both on and off-line including The Register, The New Statesman and The Guardian. He appears weekly on 'Digital Planet' on the BBC World Service and occasionally on other radio and television programmes. Bill is a Visiting Fellow in the journalism department at London's City University.I'm old enough to have made it to my third year at university before I got to touch a computer, and although it was many years ago now I still try to remember what it was like to sit at a keyboard with absolutely no understanding of what was going on behind the scenes as I typed.
The first computer I used was an Atom, made by Acorn just before they launched the hugely successful BBC Micro, and I was using it to control the apparatus for an experiment in learning in pigeons as part of my psychology degree.
My introduction to computers involved programming in a real-time language called ONLI-BASIC, writing code to determine the stimulus-reward patterns that provided birdseed in return for one or more pecks on a button.
Because nobody told me that programming was hard or that network-based computers were unusual I just got on with it, hacking my code to make it work and copying files around what I later learned was the very first experimental installation of an Acorn Econet network.
And I had easy access to other programs written by staff and students to act as a model for my own rudimentary code, helping me to learn and establishing a firm belief that computers are there to do what we tell them.
It is a belief that has stuck with me ever since.
Unfortunately it is not one that many of today's school students are likely to have, because although the computers they use may let them write documents, manage figures, look at websites and edit videos but they rarely, if ever, get to dig beneath the interface and tell the computer what to do.
What control they have is exercised by choosing options from menus, selecting files from folders or dragging icons from one place to another, but that just involves asking another program - Windows or the Finder - to do the work for you.
Yet the educational value of taking the lid off a computer program and seeing how it works is invaluable, even for those students who will not want to be professional programmers themselves.
Since commercial software publishers like Microsoft and Apple have teams of eager lawyers waiting to pounce on anyone who takes their programs apart, schools must look elsewhere for code to work with.
And that is where free and open source software comes in.
FLOSS, to give it the most common abbreviation - the L comes from the French 'software libre'- offers student usable code that can be tinkered with by anyone who has an interest, asking only that if they do something useful with it they share it with everyone else.
It is grounded in belief that one of the goals of education is to give students a sense of control, to help them feel that the things they know and the things they have learned how to do will give them more power over the shape of their lives.
Now that computers are as important as cars in the modern world, understanding how they work is as important as studying the internal combustion engine, but fortunately those who like to tinker with open source software don't need a handy supply of Swarfega to clean oily fingers after class.