The first view of ‘the school computer’, there was only one in the early 1980s at Rutherford School, was the massively unimpressive Commodore PET.

Where are intarwebz, dammit?

This thing was so cumbersome that it had to be wheeled in on a trolley. Our lanky Maths teacher, Mr. Parker unveiled it as if he were uncovering the ancient treasures of El Dorado, while we stood unimpressed. It didn’t seem to do very much at all and after he had spent about 10 minutes trying to get it to work out the area of a square, I think Michael Piggott corrected him and fixed it. Oh dear.

I remember not being at all impressed by the thing and it wasn’t until I saw a ZX Spectrum and that you could also play games on a computer, that I really wanted one.

We did get to see an early version of a instant messaging thing at Longbenton School (I forget why we were there in about 1984 or so – never seen so many pictures of Peter Beardlsey in my life), where they had an intranet (well two computers linked together) and a person at each was merrily typing away and magically those very messages were appearing across the room instantly. If only I’d seen the potential back then I could have bought shares in Yahoo or Apple or something.

Eventually the school did get some BBC Model B computers but I never touched them in spite of taking O-Level Computer Studies, which was a peculiar subject in that we learned about computers but seldom actually touched one. No wonder we all failed.

By that point though, a lot of us had our own computers at home and I do recall a bunch of us sitting in the school library trying to think of some way to write a game on the Spectrum. I think it was a little ambitious given that most of us could barely program in BASIC and we never got past the first meeting.