BBC Computer Literacy Project | Code Like It's 198x

In 1981 a BBC producer called Paul Kriwaczek was sitting up until dawn with his Nascom computer, trying to make its music compiler play. His family, he admitted, were “not very keen on the micro”. He was making a ten-part television series that would, in his words, “put computing power into the hands of the people”, and he had found out for himself how hard that was. Most television about computers in 1981 asked what they would do to people’s jobs. The BBC’s Computer Literacy Project set out to show viewers how to use one, and to make sure they could buy one that matched the programmes. The machine it chose, Acorn’s BBC Micro, became the computer many British children learned to program on.

Fast facts

Run by: the BBC, with John Radcliffe as executive producer and David Allen and Paul Kriwaczek as producers.
First series: The Computer Programme, ten programmes, from 11 January 1982 on BBC2.
Presenters: Chris Serle and Ian McNaught-Davis, with Gill Neville as reporter.
The computer: the BBC Micro, built by Acorn Computers under licence from BBC Enterprises.
Around the series: The Computer Book, the National Extension College’s 30-Hour BASIC course, a referral service for viewers, BBC software, and programs broadcast over Ceefax.
Later series: Making the Most of the Micro (1983), two live specials (October 1983 and June 1984), Micro Live (1984–1987).

From The Silicon Factor to a ten-part series

The project grew out of an earlier series about what microchips would do to industry. David Allen produced The Silicon Factor, three programmes shown in the spring of 1980, and, as Radcliffe later wrote, “people started to ask us other things, basic questions about the technology”. The BBC’s broadcasting research department then asked 4,000 people about computing. Radcliffe said interest “did not just extend to enthusiasts”, and that people “seemed to have a greater propensity to learn about this than any other subject we had researched”, though they were anxious about whether they could manage it. The BBC decided to build the project around a ten-part series explaining the principles of computing.

Your Computer followed the plans in its June/July 1981 issue, when the series still had a working title, Hands-on Micros. Five hundred people from education had turned up to hear the producers’ ideas. Kriwaczek had made a pilot called First Byte, which he said many people liked, “but I’m very dissatisfied with it”. His ambitions were practical. “In principle, the idea of programming is of trivial simplicity,” he said. “It can be used by any plumber, bus driver, hairdresser or engineering draughtsman.” His favourite example was a program that turned a pattern drawn on the screen into knitting instructions. A test group of beginners was each given a micro and course notes, and asked to keep a diary of how they felt as they learned.

Choosing a computer

The BBC wanted every program shown on screen to run on the viewer’s own machine. Its adviser John Coll, of the Microelectronics Users in Secondary Education group, had proposed a standard BASIC for the series; that idea was dropped when manufacturers said they could not build it in the time. The first plan for the hardware was the NewBrain, a computer that had begun at Sinclair’s old company and passed to Newbury Laboratories. David Allen later recalled that Newbury “tried to produce a machine and effectively they failed”. Over Christmas 1980 Coll and Allen wrote their own specification: colour, graphics, sound, a proper keyboard, and a picture that would work on a domestic television and in a studio.

Acorn’s co-founder Chris Curry told Your Computer in October 1981 how his company got into the running. He read a report that the BBC was to market its own computer and went to see Clive Sinclair, who “had not heard of it”. “We were all very cross and both of us wrote letters complaining about the choice, at not having heard about it and at not even being given the chance to tender for it.” Curry then showed the executive producer, John Radcliffe, Acorn’s Atom, which would not do the job, and told him about the Proton, the machine Acorn was developing. Later accounts describe a shortlist of seven British makers drawn up with the Department of Industry, and the wire-wrapped Proton prototype that Acorn got running in a week for the BBC’s visit; the Acorn Computers entry tells that story. “I think that the main thing which went against Newbury,” Curry said, “was that it had spent nearly two years developing its computer and it still had not got off the ground.”

The row

The choice was controversial before the series was even made. Your Computer’s editorial in June/July 1981 reported that Sinclair Research was “so upset at not being chosen by the BBC that it has offered to produce a rival machine for less than half the price”, that “other companies seem just as unhappy”, and that Sinclair maintained “he never had a proper opportunity to see the specifications”. Tangerine followed, promising a machine to beat the BBC’s specification. The magazine also questioned the principle. Lord Reith, it recalled, had said the BBC’s job was “to inform, educate and entertain. He never added ‘and manufacture’.”

Curry answered that “the BBC is being pilloried about it but really it’s a kind of philanthropic gesture on its part; all it wants to do is give computer knowledge to the people.” Clive Sinclair did not soften. In a 1982 interview with Practical Computing, as quoted by the historian Tim Danton, he said the BBC were “marvellous at making programmes and so on, but by God they should not be making computers, any more than they should be making BBC cars or BBC toothpaste.” The BBC kept its side of the bargain strictly: Curry later complained that Acorn’s name was never mentioned in the programmes, while rival machines were named.

The Department of Industry put £60,000 into the project, and Your Computer reported in 1981 that this meant the computer had to be assembled in Britain. The first advertisements told buyers the computer was “designed and made under licence from BBC Enterprises Ltd by Acorn Computers Ltd of Cambridge”, and that it came with a ten-part series, a book, “a 30-hour course in programming in BASIC and a range of applications software”.

The Computer Programme

Kriwaczek wanted three presenters: a computer expert, a reporter and a representative layman. Chris Serle, known from That’s Life, was the layman, the viewer’s stand-in who asked the obvious questions. The expert was found by chance: the botanist David Bellamy, who had worked with Kriwaczek before, suggested Ian McNaught-Davis, European head of the computer services firm Comshare. “He instantly sold himself to us because he was just so obviously very good,” Kriwaczek said. Gill Neville was the reporter.

The computer was barely ready. The BBC had planned to open on BBC1 on Sunday 10 January 1982, and later accounts say it moved the first programme to BBC2 on Monday 11 January, in a school-friendly afternoon slot. David Allen admitted afterwards how much of the first series was stagecraft. The programmes were made with bare circuit boards and “the most amazing ‘lash up’”, with programs fed in from one of Acorn’s System 3 computers; the BBC computer in a publicity photograph of Serle “was made of wood”; and the disc drive on the studio set was a fake, with a member of the team operating its red light on cue.

It worked. In February 1983 Radcliffe reported that The Computer Programme had been shown three times in the first half of 1982 and twice more that autumn, and that “as many as seven million people saw one or more of the programmes”. The audience was not the young men the BBC had expected: over half were over 35, a quarter over 45, “and nearly half were women”. Everything around the series outsold its forecasts:

	Expected	Actual, by early 1983
The Computer Book	15,000–20,000 copies	over 60,000
30-Hour BASIC course	10,000–15,000	100,000 copies since January 1982
BBC Micro	up to 12,000 machines by mid-1982	that many ordered before the series began

The referral service was answering 200 letters a week, and Acorn User reported in 1982 that the BBC had received 80,000 postal enquiries.

Making the Most of the Micro

The second series, Making the Most of the Micro, went out from January 1983 and was aimed at people who already owned a machine. Its programmes covered graphics and sound, data processing, control and communications, and the second showed good programming structure through a class of ten-year-olds being tested on their maths.

One of its stars was the BBC Buggy, a small three-wheeled robot driven from a BBC Micro, which could follow lines and lights, feel for collisions and draw with a pen. It came out of a collaboration between the project and the government’s Microelectronics Education Programme: after talking to Allen, the programme’s technology manager, Mike Bostock, built the first prototype from Lego. “Everyone wants to build a robot,” he told Your Computer, “and at the age of 33 I finally built one.” Economatics sold it as a kit; Your Computer put the price at around £120.

Programs through the television

The BBC Micro had been specified from the start with a teletext adaptor for “direct telesoftware down-loading”: programs broadcast inside the Ceefax teletext signal and loaded straight into the computer’s memory. After months of trials, Acorn User reported that the BBC’s telesoftware service was due to launch on 20 September 1983. Its head, Lawson Brown, said programs would go out in a cycle, many of them for schools, from the Microelectronics Education Programme and Brighton Polytechnic. The telesoftware filing system checked each program with a cyclic redundancy check, because “the odd error in ordinary Ceefax transmissions merely results in a spelling mistake”, while a corrupted character in a program would stop it loading. Acorn’s teletext adaptor cost £225.

Going live

Less than two weeks later, on Sunday morning, 2 October 1983, the BBC broadcast a live programme in front of a studio audience (two hours long in Danton’s account; Personal Computer News called it “a four hour programme” that winter), with phone-ins and demonstrations, and launched a schools software competition with £25,000 in prizes. It also produced an incident nobody had planned. When John Coll and Ian McNaught-Davis tried to demonstrate electronic mail on air, someone had cracked the production team’s two-letter password and left a hacker’s song waiting to appear on screen. “I can’t remember anything like it having happened on television before,” Allen wrote. “What I can remember is furiously scanning the screen for obscenities.”

A second live programme followed on 24 June 1984, and from October 1984 Micro Live became a regular BBC2 series, presented by Ian McNaught-Davis, Lesley Judd and Fred Harris. By later counts it ran to 46 programmes over three series, ending in March 1987.

Beyond Britain

The project was sold abroad with its computer. Acorn User reported in April 1983 that New Zealand had announced the scheme in December 1982 and was showing The Computer Programme on national television from March, with about 600 BBC Micros already in the country. Australia launched it on 14 February 1983, with the series starting in some states that May.

How many, and where they went

The series created a queue for the computer, and Acorn could not keep up at first (the BBC Micro entry covers the delays). By June 1983 Acorn had handed over its 100,000th machine; the BBC’s breakfast presenter Selina Scott presented it to Charing Cross Hospital. Later accounts, drawing on interviews with Acorn’s founders, put total sales at about 1.5 million.

Schools were a large part of that. Government schemes paid half the cost of approved computers, first for secondary and then for primary schools, and most schools chose the BBC Micro; the Educational Software entry gives the figures and the classroom programs, among them Granny’s Garden. The BBC Micro was also the machine Elite was written for.

What followed

In 1992 a one-off BBC programme, The Trojan Mouse, looked back on ten years of the project. In 2012 the Raspberry Pi was launched by people who explicitly wanted to recreate what the BBC Micro had done for children who learned to program on it. In 2018 the BBC put the project’s programmes and many of the programs written for them online as a searchable archive, with the programs running in a web browser.

Sources

Your Computer, June/July 1981: editorial (Sinclair’s offer of a rival machine, the Reith remark); news, “Government backs micros in education” (Sinclair and Tangerine, the specifications); Martin Hayman, “BBC’s Proton project”, pp. 36–39 (Kriwaczek and Allen, Hands-on Micros, First Byte, the 500-strong presentation, the test group, the knitting program, John Radcliffe, the £60,000 from the Department of Industry, the teletext adaptor for telesoftware).
Your Computer, August/September 1981, p. 4: BBC Microcomputer System advertisement (the ten-part series, the book and the 30-hour course; made under licence from BBC Enterprises by Acorn).
Your Computer, October 1981, p. 21: Chris Curry interview (the letters of complaint, the meeting with Radcliffe, Newbury, “philanthropic gesture”).
Your Computer, March 1982, pp. 24–25: Paul Kriwaczek on making The Computer Programme (choosing Chris Serle, Ian McNaught-Davis and Gill Neville).
Acorn User issue 1, July/August 1982: David Allen on the Computer Literacy Project (80,000 postal enquiries).
Acorn User issue 3, October 1982: David Allen, “Confessions of a TV producer” (the prototype, the wooden computer, the fake disc drive) and the plans for Making the Most of the Micro.
Acorn User issue 7, February 1983: John Radcliffe, “Computer Literacy One Year On” (the research, repeats, audience figures, book and course sales, machine orders, the referral service).
Acorn User issue 5, December 1982: David Allen on the second programme of Making the Most of the Micro. Acorn User issue 6, January 1983, “BBC Update”: the series’ programme topics.
Acorn User issue 8, March 1983: David Allen on the software for Making the Most of the Micro.
Acorn User issue 9, April 1983, p. 7: the launches in New Zealand and Australia.
Your Computer, April 1983, pp. 51–53: review of the BBC Buggy (Mike Bostock, the Lego prototype, the price).
The Micro User vol. 1 no. 4, June 1983, p. 9: Acorn’s 100,000th BBC Micro. Laserbug issue 13, June 1983: Selina Scott presents the 100,000th machine to Charing Cross Hospital.
Acorn User issue 15, October 1983: news (the telesoftware service launch on 20 September, Lawson Brown, the adaptor price; the live programme of 2 October and the £25,000 competition).
Acorn User issue 28, November 1984, pp. 28–29: David Allen on the live programmes (the hacked password, the second programme on 24 June 1984); “Noticeboard” (Micro Live on BBC2, with Lesley Judd).
Tim Danton, The Computers That Made Britain (Raspberry Pi Press, 2021), chapter “BBC Micro”: The Silicon Factor; ABC BASIC and the NewBrain; the Coll–Allen specification; the shortlist; the broadcast date change; Sinclair’s remark, quoting Martin Hayman’s interview with Clive Sinclair in Practical Computing, July 1982; Curry on Acorn going unnamed; the list of later series; sales of about 1.5 million; The Trojan Mouse; the online archive and its runnable software.
Adafruit blog, “The BBC Computer Literacy Project 1980-1989 @BBC”, 28 June 2018 (web, secondary): the BBC’s online archive. https://blog.adafruit.com/2018/06/28/the-bbc-computer-literacy-project-1980-1989-bbc/
Personal Computer News issue 42, 22 December 1983 – 4 January 1984: the hacked Telecom Gold demonstration on “a four hour programme about micro computers”.