[Z-T-T]

Your personal experience is very interesting but it's misleading to claim the BBC Micro was "given to kids" or "gifted to schoolchildren", as if the BBC or its Micro inspired a generation of British computer enthusiasts or programmers.

In reality kids were largely not allowed to go anywhere near the beige Rolls Royces gathering dust in classroom cupboards, because they were so expensive and/or because nobody was trained to use them.

The massive gaming and programming ("computer literacy") explosion in the UK in the 80s was almost entirely thanks to the ZX Spectrum, ZX81 and ZX80.

[stuaxo]

They had some in my primary school and we were allowed to use them.

Mostly I'd just play with "PRINT" and "COLOUR" in BBC BASIC.

[Theodores]

I never owned a BBC Micro but my school let me borrow one every holiday. It was a comprehensive, a state school, so anecdotal.

[Z-T-T]

As in take it home? That's amazing. They had at least one BBC at my middle school in the early/mid 80s, and we once or maybe twice got to play Frak on it. That was it. :/

[Theodores]

Frak!

I totally forgot about Frak. I will have to see if someone has uploaded that being played to YouTube. Inevitably they will play better than I would and I would also avoid the risk of getting hooked into a game...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgiA10MfOu4

From the comments, the levels on stage 1 spell 'FRAK'. As per the comments, I don't think I knew that!

It was such a rich diversity of games then, it was more like listening to music in that you don't just have the one song you listen to, depending on your mood you have different things to listen to. With modern consoles you just have the one or two things in practice, you don't have the repertoire.

As well as the BBC Micro there was also the CUB monitor and disk drives. Imagine that!

This was mid eighties, I don't think I did any formal computer lessons at school, it was a lunchtime thing where things like Frak certainly got played. I know you envy my fortune - and in a regular state school.

During one holiday I made things like a pantograph arm for drawing with - bits of carefully cut perspex, potentiometers and the A/D port, then some code to do the trig and draw something on a screen. This was my first go at using a saw, a file, a soldering iron and also my first experience learning the reality does not match the dream. The noise in the A/D was ridiculous and having real time screen updates was also not exactly without lag.

This was an entirely self directed project, no competition or even idea from a magazine. Just a desire to draw at a time when ambition just worked. It was useless at what it did but there was more maths in that than what 99% of the population ever use, even if simple trig.

To think nowadays kids all have their own laptops/tablets/phones and there is zero recognition that 32K of RAM and a beige box could be special. But they actually do much better things now than anything I was ever up to.