This post is my contribution to Ada Lovelace day
When I started secondary school, in 1988, I went to Stuart Bathurst in Wednesbury (Right next to Ikea, can't miss it, though there was no Ikea back then). At my junior school there had been a couple of BBC Micros floating around, but at Stuart Bathurst, they had an entire lab of BBC Micros in a room at the top of the four-storey block.
I was amazed. An entire room of computers. I had a couple of friends who had Spectrums plugged into TVs, but I don't think I knew anyone who had a computer with a proper monitor, let alone a roomfull, and I'd certainly never spent much time in front of one.
The teacher in charge of the computer room was a formidable and elderly Irish Nun named Sister Celsus. She was one of those teachers who was slightly terrifying, and could turn it up to boot-quaking if she thought you were messing around. I pretty soon realised that computers were much more fun than just about anything else I could do, and I hung out in the computer room whenever I could learning the rudiments of BBC Basic, and pretty much anything else I could out about the Beebs we had.
Sister Celsus, for her part, actively encouraged those of us who wanted to learn and allowed us special access. Things I recall doing with Sister Celsus and others in that room include dialling up BBSes (I can't remember much except that they were a lot like Ceefax), attempting to programme text adventures, learning about databases (Enform, I think, which not even Google can identify for me). In 1989 my parents bought a second-hand BBC 'B' from my friend Mark, which opened up a whole new world of possibilities. Albeit, mostly Elite, Repton and more footling about. (Mark also attempted to teach me more programming. He mostly managed to fry my brain, but something took. He, on the other hand, wrote a hybrid Machine-code / Basic WIMP-based gui on his BBC. End of digression)
Perhaps most remarkably, Sister Celsus let me help with installing and connecting up a bunch of new computers when they were delivered. There were micro-powerstrips, which took a custom tiny plug (I guess they were similar in size to US plugs), instead of conventional sockets throughout the room. This made plugging in a new computer a process of cutting the old plug off and wiring on one of these tiny plugs. I was allowed to do this. The school had Econet hooking up all the Beebs to a machine with a Winchester disk. Econet's a pretty delicate thing. When I wired the brown cable to Earth (seemed logical to 12-year-old me, I didn't know it was really the Live), the computer I wired wrongly was fine, but a large number of econet chips were blown by the resulting short circuit. I have no idea how much money that mistake of mine cost the school. There was a loud bang, and I knew whatever it was was my fault, I was mortified, but Sister Celsus didn't get angry with me (she got angry with plenty of other people). She seemed to regard it as another learning experience, but I didn't wire any more plugs that day.
When I joined the school there was a single Acorn Archimedes. I don't remember much about that, but it must have been running Arthur, because I never found anything that looked like it on later models I used. Sometime in 1989 more Archimedes were bought, including an A440 (big and powerful for the time) (and later an A540, which seemed absurdly powerful at the time), a PostScript laser printer, and a copy of Acorn Desktop Publisher.
Acorn DTP was, predictably enough, not exactly competitive with PageMaker or Quark. It was my window into design though. Sister Celsus' policy was 'Only the smart ones can use the Archimedes', and I was the lucky recipient of pretty much all the time I wanted. I was doing DTP, with access to a PostScript printer, in 1989 or 1990. With hindsight, that was pretty remarkable: to have had regular access to thousands of pounds worth of equipment, and able to do pretty much what I wanted. It wasn't until the mid nineties that I really realised that there was such a thing as Graphic Design, and that I'd been playing at it for nearly ten years.
I'm incredibly lucky to have had that kind of privileged access. At university, I wound up doing a year of Cybernetics, before switching to do Typography. Without the start Sister Celsus provided me (and those other kids in the late-80s Black Country) I never would have made it there, or been able to make that significant a switch. After she left, the school began to switch away from Acorn computers to Windows PCs, and computing at school became less and less about actually wrangling the machines for their own sake: programming went away, to be replaced by word processing and the other kinds of useful activities which I'm sure helped a lot of pupils gain the kind of computer literacy they needed for the real world, but it wasn't the kind of computer literacy I needed. I needed the more abstract, joyful, engagement with computers that Sister Celsus provided, and which could only have been provided at the end of the 80s.
In short, I think that without the intervention of Sister Celsus, I probably wouldn't be here, doing this. I'm profoundly grateful to have been in the right place at the right time to have that kind of a computing experience, under the watchful eye of a remarkable woman.