Journal.
Electric Revolution
Photography credit: Matt and Kim Rudge
Electric Dreams and Micro Men have been making me feel very nostalgic recently. But lucky too. The two programmes form part of BBC4’s Electric Revolution series charting the technological changes in our lives over the past forty years.
During the early 1980’s, my father was part of TVEI, the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative. A Thatcher-era initiative to make schools more industry-friendly and up to date, TVEI aimed to promote computer skills, entrepeneurship and improve the employment chances of the school children involved. In Scotland, it was happily extended well beyond the narrow confines of the few pilot schools intended by the government, and all schools got a much needed equipment upgrade and brought computers into the mainstream. At that time it was a big risk for my dad to take, and a real step into the unknown, but I’m incredibly lucky that he did.
The side benefit of this journey into the future was that I was able to spend the weekends playing the range of computers being taken into schools, getting my (little) hands the ZX81, BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum and even an early Apple or two. They sowed the seeds of an long-standing interest in what computers could do, but more than this, the possibility they opened up to create.
Acorn and Sinclair, the protagonists in Micro Men, fell almost as quickly as they rose, but they left behind them a generation who’d been given a glimpse of ‘the future’ that fired their imaginations. And it’s to that that early inspiration that I owe my own career.