Further to our telephone conversation, I now write to send you the enrolment fee for EUG. As you seemed interested, I shall also indulge in some personal reminiscences.
Computers always seemed to me too remote and expensive, until I went to teach for a short time at Uppington. There, the Head of Physics had a computer network to help with administration. More of an influence with me was the sight of a young boy playing with his NASCOM 2 using a hex dump on the screen to find a bug in his program.
Soon afterwards, Clive Sinclair reached down to my financial level with his ZX80, then the ZX81. At last Acorn tempted me with their Atom and I persuaded the school where I was teaching to buy me the kit so I could make their first computer.
As I still did not possess a 6502-based machine, I bought myself a UK101 which I thought an excellent system except for the inferior "Microsoft Basic". When the splendid Jupiter Ace was becoming cheap, I had to return to the Z80 but with the excellent Forth language. Eventually I acquired a lot of Ace bits and even made up a new machine for a member of the Forth User Group, but I felt I could not charge him quite the cost of the extra parts I had to buy!
Again because it was cheap I bought a Dragon and became acquainted with the 6809. I then visited the school for which I had bought the Atom and which now had a lot of new computers and bought back "my" Atom. I now still have it but on the rare occasions when I use it I supply regulated 5 volts to it, the internal heatsink being inadequate. I still
think it was a truly excellent design: intelligent, flexible and well-documented.
I bought an Electron a few years ago for £60 from Currys. In my opinion it is a national disgrace that the Electron did not sell better, but the fault was partly Acorn's in that the original price was a little too high. Also we were wrong as a nation to lose the initiative in the Eighties when we could have built up a techincally competent young
population. Instead it went to games machines and the money makers with the help of Arts' graduates who kept insisting that computers should not be regarded as fascinating examples of applied mathematics but as yet another tool to help them waste reams of paper!
1st June 1996