BBC opens Computer archives
Hundreds of TV shows and BBC Micro programs can be viewed and enjoyed
In the Eighties, the BBC was so keen to promote home computing, it launched a national initiative called The Computer Literacy Project. Over the course of 146 programmes, it sought to teach people about the latest technology and highlight some of the early innovators, inspiring a whole generation of coders – many of whom grace the pages of this very magazine today.
Now, in celebration of that decadelong run, the BBC has produced a fascinating online archive packed with content from the era. As well as the aforementioned 146 shows in full, there are 121 related programmes, 2,509 searchable clips and even 166 BBC Micro programs originally used on-screen.
The latter can be run directly in an online BBC Micro emulator with a simple click of a mouse. The emulator (jsbeeb which has been coded in Javascript) also works without any software if you want to get your hands dirty with BASIC.
It’s nothing if not comprehensive, that’s for sure, but then that was the intention. “We wanted to include everything – every single programme that was produced for the original Computer Literacy Project, plus all of the software programs that were written by Steve Lowry and Ian Trackman for use on air to illustrate principles in the TV programmes,” says Jake Berger, executive product manager for BBC Archive Development.
“We also wanted to include documentation, such as the manual for the BBC Micro and various other BBC reports from the time,” Jake continues. “We actually went beyond this – adding over 100 ‘related’ BBC programmes which we felt would be of value to people interested in computing and technology.
These ‘related’ BBC TV and Radio programmes continue the story of the BBC’S mission to help Computer Literacy up to the present day.”
The concept emerged from a meeting of retired BBC staff and others involved in computing in the Seventies and Eighties at The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park where BBC Micros are still used almost daily in a classroom with school parties.
“David Allen [BBC Computer
Literacy Project series editor and producer] and Steve Lowry [the project’s technical consultant] felt that the Computer Literacy Project programmes should be gathered together and somehow made available to the public,” Jake explains. “This initial thought then turned in to three years of hard work, finding the programmes and the people who made them, and then beginning the mammoth task of creating and describing the thousands of programme sections – the clips – that you can view in the new online archive.”
The archive also includes pages explaining the contribution the project made to Britain’s computing history and this is fascinating in and of itself. There are six sections in total, with the main ones split between 19821983 and 1983-1989. It’s here where you can find a BBC Basic User Guide and a booklet called Towards Computer Literacy from 1984 which explained the project up to that point. There’s also a
wonderful timeline that shows how the BBC project fitted in with the wider history of computing. The archive really is a labour of love.
“There are several aims of the archive,” Jake says. “Firstly, it offers a snapshot of the era – an important decade in the history of computing in the UK, which has a general nostalgic attraction to people who remember the late Seventies and the Eighties. Secondly, we feel that many of the principles explained in the programmes remain relevant today, and in particular, many of the fundamental elements of how computers work – at a basic hardware and software level
– are not well understood by more recent generations of developers and engineers.
“Finally, we wanted to build a webbased archive that acts as an exemplar of what you can do with video material if you take the time to segment it and describe it to a very high level of detail, making use of the knowledge in the heads of the people who actually made the programmes. We hope that it sets a new ‘standard’ in terms of findability, and are very pleased with how the ‘Explore’ feature of the site works, with both keyword and topic search and filtering. This was only possible because of the work that Steve Lowry undertook, spending years describing every section of the each of the
267 programmes.”
So far, the social media response to the archive has shown there are many people who remember these programmes with great fondness, and Berger says scores of visitors have revealed they owed their interest in computing – and often their careers – to watching these programmes in their youth. “We feel that the archive fits in well with the resurgence in interest in coding, and with devices like the Raspberry Pi and the micro:bit being used in schools and coding clubs,” Berger continues, referring to the barebones computers that have become popular in recent years (the micro:bit was handed to a million schoolchildren across the UK in 2016).
But what of the future for the Computer Literacy Project? Will more archived content be added and, indeed, is anything missing? “Some programmes were harder to find than others but, in the end, we have managed to offer a copy of every programme,” says Jake. “As you’ll see on the site, some are better quality than others. We intend to try to find better quality versions of some of the low quality ones and add them to the site over time.”
We wanted to include everything – every single programme that was produced for the original CLP Jake Berger