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qatsiBook Review: Electronic Dreams - How 1980s Britain Learned to Love the Computer, by Tom Lean
A friend recently commented that it's interesting to read about history you actually experienced, and it's certainly the case for this book. In fact, Lean starts rather before my time, in 1948, with the Manchester Baby, with a summary of developments through to the introduction of the microprocessor in the early 1970s. (For bonus points, Lean goes into Dominic Sandbrook feel-good history mode, in a diversion into Doctor Who with a mention of WOTAN taking over in the Post Office Tower of the 1960s.)
For some years, "home computers" had been available as kits for electronic hobbyists, though the input was likely a row of switches and the output a row of flashing lights. US manufacturers were starting to sell pre-assembled computers, but for the most part they were very expensive in the UK.
The prospect of industrial computers driving electronic automation, with dramatic changes to the labour market, sparked the government into action, as much as a government ever does, with awareness campaigns for industry. Meanwhile, in Cambridge, innovations were taking place on a budget. Sinclair produced the ZX80, then the ZX81; for a more polished product at a premium, Acorn produced the Atom. The BBC wanted a reliable machine it could use in a TV series on home computing; Acorn got the deal with the successor to the Atom and a more rigorous dialect of BASIC. The floodgates opened. Whilst not cheap, home computers became more available for those interested. (I had a Dragon 32; who needed lower case?) The government made some funding available for schools, with the BBC Micro being the common choice. (Where I lived, the alternative Research Machines 380Z, later 480Z, had been chosen, perhaps an odd choice, but as RM started to produce the IBM PC compatible Nimbus from the mid-1980s, a prescient one.)
Lean describes the boom - where people were waiting for months because of limited supply, and flaky quality control meant faults were not uncommon - and bust. With hindsight, the fact that all these machines had different, incompatible, dialects of BASIC (with the Jupiter Ace offering an even less-compatible FORTH) seems an obvious precursor to balkanization, and the use of standard domestic cassette tapes and recorders meant robust or cross-platform storage was impossible. Although the nominal intent was to offer general purpose machines, for learning and exploring technology, in practice commercial success was driven by available games software. The winners kept going into the 1990s. Another sector emerged as some manufacturers went up-market, taking on the IBM PC in the market for business applications. For a time, Britain led the way, though it all looks rather parochial now.
Lean also writes about other related technologies that didn't make it - Prestel, something of a walled garden pre-Internet experience plagued by Post Office bureaucracy (this was in the days of the acoustic coupler, surely the dial-up equivalent of dial-up) and monopolistic charging structures, and the Domesday Project, which picked what turned out to be an expensive technological dead-end and didn't consider the consequences of hardware obsolescence. But coming full circle, he notes the Raspberry Pi as something of a return to the original idea of a home computer for learning.
A friend recently commented that it's interesting to read about history you actually experienced, and it's certainly the case for this book. In fact, Lean starts rather before my time, in 1948, with the Manchester Baby, with a summary of developments through to the introduction of the microprocessor in the early 1970s. (For bonus points, Lean goes into Dominic Sandbrook feel-good history mode, in a diversion into Doctor Who with a mention of WOTAN taking over in the Post Office Tower of the 1960s.)
For some years, "home computers" had been available as kits for electronic hobbyists, though the input was likely a row of switches and the output a row of flashing lights. US manufacturers were starting to sell pre-assembled computers, but for the most part they were very expensive in the UK.
The prospect of industrial computers driving electronic automation, with dramatic changes to the labour market, sparked the government into action, as much as a government ever does, with awareness campaigns for industry. Meanwhile, in Cambridge, innovations were taking place on a budget. Sinclair produced the ZX80, then the ZX81; for a more polished product at a premium, Acorn produced the Atom. The BBC wanted a reliable machine it could use in a TV series on home computing; Acorn got the deal with the successor to the Atom and a more rigorous dialect of BASIC. The floodgates opened. Whilst not cheap, home computers became more available for those interested. (I had a Dragon 32; who needed lower case?) The government made some funding available for schools, with the BBC Micro being the common choice. (Where I lived, the alternative Research Machines 380Z, later 480Z, had been chosen, perhaps an odd choice, but as RM started to produce the IBM PC compatible Nimbus from the mid-1980s, a prescient one.)
Lean describes the boom - where people were waiting for months because of limited supply, and flaky quality control meant faults were not uncommon - and bust. With hindsight, the fact that all these machines had different, incompatible, dialects of BASIC (with the Jupiter Ace offering an even less-compatible FORTH) seems an obvious precursor to balkanization, and the use of standard domestic cassette tapes and recorders meant robust or cross-platform storage was impossible. Although the nominal intent was to offer general purpose machines, for learning and exploring technology, in practice commercial success was driven by available games software. The winners kept going into the 1990s. Another sector emerged as some manufacturers went up-market, taking on the IBM PC in the market for business applications. For a time, Britain led the way, though it all looks rather parochial now.
Lean also writes about other related technologies that didn't make it - Prestel, something of a walled garden pre-Internet experience plagued by Post Office bureaucracy (this was in the days of the acoustic coupler, surely the dial-up equivalent of dial-up) and monopolistic charging structures, and the Domesday Project, which picked what turned out to be an expensive technological dead-end and didn't consider the consequences of hardware obsolescence. But coming full circle, he notes the Raspberry Pi as something of a return to the original idea of a home computer for learning.