In 1983 Donna Mason walked into the computer lab at Alice Deal Junior High School in Washington, D.C., and found ten Commodore 64s “and little else”. There was no software and no guidance, and she had to build a computer literacy course for 1,000 students. “I was just told to do it,” she told COMPUTE!’s Gazette in 1988. “There wasn’t too much software available for the 64, so our program consisted of teaching BASIC programming.”
That was how BASIC got into many classrooms. It was rarely chosen after a debate about languages. It was the language built into the machine the school had bought, as the BASIC Programming entry explains, and it was ready to use the moment the computer was switched on. A teacher with a room of new computers and nothing else could start with PRINT and go on from there.
Fast facts
- Language: whichever BASIC the school’s computers had in ROM: BBC BASIC, Commodore’s BASIC V2, Applesoft, Sinclair BASIC and others.
- Britain: the BBC’s Computer Literacy Project from 1982, and government subsidies that put a computer, usually a BBC Micro, into primary and secondary schools.
- North America: Apple held 58 per cent of American public-school computers in 1987, according to figures COMPUTE!’s Gazette quoted; Commodore said it led in Canada.
- France: the Informatique pour tous plan, announced on 25 January 1985, equipped schools with Thomson and Exelvision computers.
- The rivals: Logo in primary schools, and Pascal, which the College Board required for its Advanced Placement computer science course in the 1980s.
Britain: a television course with a computer
The British approach was unusual because it began with broadcasting. The BBC’s Computer Literacy Project built The Computer Programme (1982) around a computer of its own, the BBC Micro, so that every program shown on screen would run at home and in school. In the first issue of Acorn User, in the summer of 1982, the project’s editor David Allen set out the thinking behind the second series, Making the Most of the Micro. “Controversy reigns about the value of teaching programming,” he wrote, “but there is growing evidence that, providing the nitty-gritty of ‘coding’ is seen as the last stage of a process of ‘problem solving’, the route to computer literacy is through ‘hands-on’ experience.”
The machines arrived in schools with government money. In July 1982 the Prime Minister announced a £9 million scheme to put a microcomputer into every primary school by 1984, with the Department of Industry paying half the cost of one of three approved machines. By March 1983 The Micro User reported that 87 per cent of the schools taking up the offer had chosen the BBC Micro over the two alternatives. The Educational Software entry tells the story of those schemes and of the programs written for them.
Many learners met BASIC through a printed course rather than a teacher. The National Extension College in Cambridge published 30 Hour BASIC to go with the BBC’s series, and sold it for other machines too. Its 1983 advertisement for the ZX81 edition called it “Britain’s top selling BASIC course”, with “over 100,000 users”, 8 chapters, 155 programs, 30 worked examples, 53 self-checks and 35 exercises, at £5.95.
North America: Apple, Commodore and the school lab
In the United States the school computer was usually an Apple. In October 1987 COMPUTE!’s Gazette quoted a USA Today count, drawn from several sources, that gave Apple “a whopping 58 percent” of the computers in public schools, Tandy 14 per cent, Commodore 12 per cent and IBM 6 per cent. Commodore’s machines were cheap enough to buy in quantity. Lilly Meizner Toback, whose firm supplied school systems in the Northeast, had begun selling Commodore’s PET to schools ten years earlier and had sold “thousands of 64s and hundreds of 128s” since. “Commodore’s affordability,” she said, “allows school systems to provide hands-on experience to a large number of students at a reasonable cost.” Commodore itself had no educational marketing division by then. A year later the same magazine reported that the company had “dropped out of the education market” after its early success, while in Canada it still claimed the lead: “We probably have around 21 percent of the market share, and Apple has about 19 percent,” said Ray Prachun, one of Commodore Canada’s regional education managers.
The arc of Donna Mason’s course is the arc of many. Five years after she started teaching BASIC on her ten 64s, her lab no longer taught programming as a subject. “We really moved away from pure computer literacy, where we taught its history and how a computer works,” she said, “to just using the computer as a tool.” Her students used tutorials, drill-and-practice programs and LogoWriter, a Logo package that combined drawing with a word processor, in lessons across the school.
France: computers for everyone
France went further than any other country in this entry. On 25 January 1985 the Prime Minister, Laurent Fabius, presented the Informatique pour tous plan (“Computing for all”). It aimed to introduce every pupil in France to computers, open the equipment to the public, and train 110,000 teachers in a year. According to Jacques Baudé, who led the French association for computers in education, the EPI, at the time, about 12,000 schools and colleges received a nanoréseau, a small network of home computers run from a professional machine, and the 33,000 schools without a network got a basic set: a home computer, a television, a program recorder and a printer. The home computers came from two French makers, Thomson (the MO5 and TO7) and Exelvision. The plan had its critics, among them, Baudé recalled, educational psychologists who claimed that making children program in BASIC was “massacring young minds”. It was interrupted after the change of government in March 1986.
The case against BASIC
BASIC’s critics were as old as the classroom micro. In 1975 the Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra wrote, in a memo titled “How do we tell truths that might hurt?”: “It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.” BASIC’s own inventors, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, complained that home computers had frozen their language at its 1964 level, and wrote True BASIC to replace it; the BASIC Programming entry tells that story, and the American educator Arthur Luehrmann’s warning about “street BASIC”.
The commercial alternative was Pascal. In 1986 Kyan Software advertised its Pascal for the Commodore 64 and 128 under the headline “BASIC IS FOR WIMPS!”, promising programs that ran “30 times faster” and making a pitch to students: “pascal is required by the College Entrance Exam Board for advanced placement in computer science.” Directly below it in COMPUTE!’s Gazette that June, a teacher’s 13-lesson BASIC course for Commodore machines, over 220 pages for $19.95, advertised that it was “currently used in both High School and Adult Evening Education classes”.
In primary schools the alternative was Logo, Seymour Papert’s language, in which children steered a turtle around the screen or the classroom floor. Both Logo and BASIC ran on the same subsidised BBC Micros, and on Donna Mason’s Commodores.
Sources
- Tom Netsel, “Commodore Goes Back to School”, COMPUTE!’s Gazette issue 64, October 1988, pp. 14–18: Donna Mason and Alice Deal Junior High School; Commodore leaving the education market; the sidebar on Canada and Ray Prachun.
- Keith Ferrell, “Commodore Computers: An Overlooked Educational Opportunity?”, COMPUTE!’s Gazette issue 52, October 1987, pp. 16–18: the USA Today figures; Lilly Meizner Toback and Meizner Business Machines; Commodore without an educational marketing division.
- David Allen, “The Computer Literacy Project marches on”, Acorn User issue 1, July/August 1982, pp. 9–10.
- Acorn User issue 2, September 1982, news: the £9 million primary school subsidy and the Department of Industry’s matching payment.
- The Micro User vol. 1 no. 1, March 1983, news: 87 per cent of primary schools choosing the BBC Micro.
- Sinclair User issue 11, February 1983: National Extension College advertisement for 30 Hour BASIC (ZX81 edition).
- Jacques Baudé, “Le plan « Informatique pour tous »”, 1024 – Bulletin de la Société informatique de France no. 5, March 2015, pp. 95–108 (web, secondary): the presentation of 25 January 1985 and its aims; the nanoréseaux and basic configurations; Thomson and Exelvision; the critics; the interruption in 1986. https://1024.socinfo.fr/2015/03/1024_5_2015_95.pdf
- Edsger W. Dijkstra, “How do we tell truths that might hurt?” (EWD498), 18 June 1975, transcription at the E. W. Dijkstra Archive, University of Texas (web). https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EWD498.html
- Kyan Software, “BASIC IS FOR WIMPS!” advertisement for Kyan Pascal, and the self-tutoring BASIC course advertisement below it, COMPUTE!’s Gazette issue 36, June 1986; the Kyan advertisement also in RUN, January 1986.
- Kemeny and Kurtz, Luehrmann, Logo and the British school schemes: see the reviewed BASIC Programming, BBC Computer Literacy Project and Educational Software entries and their sources.