How SCHOOL COMPUTER classes looked in 1969 | Tomorrow's World | Retro Tech | BBC Archive

Computing comes easy to the boys at Forest Grammar School in Berkshire, who are lucky enough to have access to their very own school computer. Nellie - for this is what the giant mechanical machine has been dubbed - is able to play games, solve mathematical problems, and even play music from programs stored on punched tape - but only after she has been turned on, a complex routine that involves the co-ordination of several students spread throughout the school.
This clip is from Tomorrow's World, originally broadcast 5 February 1969.
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[@spacemonkey9257]

Everything always goes wrong when I don't check the oil level on my computer

[@fidelcatsro6948]

synthetic oils were very expensive back then

[@richardsawyer5428]

I put more coal in mine.

[@anonUK]

Grey Screen of Death: "Insufficient Oil Level"

[@heathertruskinger6214]

Lol....I do recall my son in the mid-2010's did have a water-cooled computer , which caused all sorts of problems when it overheated and leaked !🤣

[@froggy8030]

🤣🤣

[@UncleFeedle]

The computer is a National-Elliott ('Nellie') 405, built in 1957. In 1969 when this was filmed, it was completely obsolete and on its last legs. The machine had 3000 valves, drew 10,000 watts of power and required constant maintenance. Apparently, it was donated to the school by Nestlé. It was dismantled and scrapped two years later.

[@cdl0]

Nellie was replaced by a DEC PDP8/e.

[@wisteela]

I always wondered what happened to it. It would be nice if even part of it still exists somewhere.

[@colinluckens9591]

Now tell me do you actually understand what they were doing in the first 56 seconds??..…

[@jagmarc]

@@cdl0 that's the one I wrote my first programme noughts crosses had 8 inch FDD

[@cdl0]

@@jagmarc Offline storage was paper tape for both Nellie and the PDP8/e. Floppies were not in common use until the late seventies.

[@huddie71]

Amazed that a school could afford a computer in 1969, albeit an old one.

[@daffyduk77]

Probably a hand-me-down from higher academia or industry. Still have to afford the 3-phase supply/elec bill plus air conditioning which would be an expensive thing in those days, Perhaps the computer was delivered with its hand-me-down air con

[@lioncurlew]

The Posh Voices give it away

[@daffyduk77]

yeah, no secondary modern on a council-estate

[@ens8502]

Glad you used "albeit" and not "although"

[@icecycles859]

albeit? you mean arbeit macht frei?

[@precumming]

6:40 for those curious, that is a memory unit. Memory is not stored electronically but stored accoustically on a coil of wire

[@mikcnmvedmsfonoteka]

Ahh, good times were you could make your own RAM, almost like "downloading" ram nowadays lol :D

[@patrickswan4537]

The high school I was at in the 1980s had one computer, kept locked away in the physics lab as I think hardly anyone knew what to do with it. If my school had been even half as interesting as this one I might have done rather more there..

[@thedave7760]

The High School I was at th the mid 80's had about 6 Apple II's and no one knew what to do with them except load and play Galaxian, the teachers had no idea how to teach it to us. It was an early morning club which you could play free Galaxian and Pac man if you could convince someone to load it for you, so it wasn't all bad.

[@petevan8942]

We had to watch the maths boffins playing on the school BBC computers through the window...we were all too pudding brained to go near one ..this was early 80's...

[@carkod]

Looks like an all-boys school. I guess they didn't have any distractions...

[@ManunKanava]

This is how the best computer engineers were made from very young age!

[@PAJAMALAND]

Kid of about 15 here who's written their own programming language for use on this massive beast of an antiquated PC, I hope he went on to do something great in the field

[@kishascape]

He became Terry Davis and wrote TempleOS

[@PAJAMALAND]

​@@kishascape Well, he's definitely not a glowie so... you might be onto something here

[@precumming]

I wasn't able to find out who the kid was but the language was still being used in the early 80s in the US Navy. Just to burst the bubble a little, they didn't technically write their "own" programming language, I don't know MINIGOL or ALGOL but from what examples I have found I can't actually find a difference so it's probably polishing ALGOL and removing complexities. It could also be that MINIGOL compiles to something simpler Considering it was still used outside of that school and it was in that year I would assume they did go on to do great things. I just wish I could find their name somewhere. The only mention of the creator is a second person account of this video.

[@feraudyh]

It was NOT a PC.

[@Aerojet01]

He probably ended up as an accountant.

[@Zack-mp6ys]

It looks like the boys are running a spaceship

[@endless031]

Imagine going back to 1969 and showing them a modern desktop or your smartphone.

[@jessihawkins9116]

oh wow they would poop thenselfs 😲

[@SMGJohn]

This is what everyone expects when they operate a computer at school, but in reality they get a sad half broken ThinkPad or a Dell Inspiron with half its keys knobbed on. Gone are the days when computers were operated like it was a Battlestation on a ship.

[@tedjohansen1634]

like a battlestation.. lmao!

[@kishascape]

Thinkpads are cooler than this anyways. Poor comparison.

[@TransCanadaPhil]

What smart kids. That would be way over my head when I was that age.

[@jillybe1873]

We were cleverer then

[@soundseeker63]

A lot of it is down to aptitude. Some people are "wired" for working on computers, others are great at designing things, some people are very mathematically minded. Some people are sporty, or musical, or visually creative etc. Kids can grasp surprisingly complex principles if they have the aptitude for it.

[@CavesAreIrrelevant]

@@soundseeker63 Couldn't have said it better. It's very hard to qualify an average dip in intelligence over time. What we're seeing at play is aptitude. Those children would have likely marvelled at the skill of modern youngsters in some fields. That teenagers as young as 15 could manage entire social media identities, generating interest and income on a global market.

[@malcolmpottinger5511]

I didn't really understand it. It took many years to understand them.

[@user_user1337]

It would be over the heads of A LOT of kids today...

[@robofin117]

This will probably play DOOM with tickertape.

[@donbon4204]

their computer stats up faster than mine damn it thank you ACER

[@taffy4672]

"stats up" ? Maybe someone whose spelling and punctuation is this bad shouldn't be using a computer. :P

[@iooosef6006]

might need to reformat it or change the probably damaged disk drive

[@roberto8650]

You might need an oil change.

[@miguelelgueta5830]

Joke is on you I had the same model as in the video and put an SSD on it, now boots in 1 hour instead of 3

[@wanderingfool6312]

Unfortunately the schools I went to didn’t get computers until the 80’s, calculators were treated with suspicion.

[@merlinmediagroup]

I finished primary school in 2005, by which time the school had just about two computers (bought under the Tesco Computers for Schools programme) and the first interactive whiteboard was being installed, which by the time I finished secondary school were practically in every classroom. Even 17 years ago computers were still seldom integrated into everyday learning, now they’re an integral part.

[@wanderingfool6312]

@@merlinmediagroup Well I did get the attitude from many adults of the time that computers were just for games. Ironically having to help these generations later with the basics. But, what exactly is an interactive whiteboard, is it a screen?

[@anonUK]

I think all schools in the UK got computers some time in the 80s. Unfortunately, the BBC-B Micro lasted in schools well into the 90s, in some cases until Windows 95 came put, far past the point you'd see anything like the BBC-B and its limited capabilities in the outside world.

[@wanderingfool6312]

@@anonUK The video is from the 1960’s, so obviously some schools I suspect private ones, got computers a lot earlier.

[@anonUK]

@@wanderingfool6312 OK, all schools that didn't already have computers. I think US schools got Apple IIs in the late 70s- early 80s, with the TRS-80 and VIC-20 the main home computers of the time. The BBC B just followed that pattern- while BBC computers were available for the home, they were far too expensive and the cut-down version, the Electron, not a real competitor to the dominant C64. The C64 also put paid to the ZX Spectrum- but there was no excuse for the Electron, as its specs were way below where they should have been in late '83. Acorn learned and brought out the BBC Master and later, the Archimedes- but they had lost their footing in all their markets by 1986. Amstrad took over the low end, including buying out the Spectrum, and diversifying into office apps with the PCW range. Commodore dominated the middle, bringing out the C64 and C128, followed by the Amiga. Archimedes, based on a 186 processor and ARM chips, lasted much better in schools, though, as a bridge between the BBC and the 32-bit PCs of the 90s, probably due to brand loyalty. When IBM and its clones started bringing out 286-based machines and up, there went the corporate Archimedes market as well, although the concept of ARM has lasted much longer and it took until Windows 95 to finally knock Archimedes out of schools.

[@wisteela]

I've seen this a number of times, and I absolutely love it.

[@kishascape]

To the very raw basics of the computes core, things which run automated and preinstalled/prebuilt on nearly everything today that we barely think about it.

[@chestercopperpot729]

Teacher: come now children there is much work to be done so people in the future can share tiktok videos and argue about politics.

[@megchisp87]

Watching that computer from an iPhone that a million time more powerful… mind blowing!!

[@ASChambers]

I was thinking exactly the same. An incredible evolution in technology.

[@kishascape]

@@ASChambers not really as it will stop working after a few years and become useless where as this would still be serviceable and useable since it isn't fad oriented. Infact plenty of people have 40s-60s era computers they still run and show off at VFC every few years.

[@dolbyprologicii]

@@kishascape it is no doubt an evolution.

[@t1000v20]

@@kishascape But what the f are still gonna do with those in practical terms? Lol

[@heresjohnny602]

These people walked so that we could run.

[@johnmiller0000]

Reminds me of my computer lessons at the local comprehensive in 1978.

[@DavidPaulMorgan]

Sept '77 for me. ICL CESIL (computer education schools instructional language), FORTRAN & BASIC - coding sheets & punch paper tape on ICL-1904, Allt-Yr-Yn CHE (I was starting lower 6th, so we did this on Wed afternoon for 4 hours).

[@ZiaRDS]

I lost three computers in the span of a year, from neglecting to check the oil 😔 be careful out there

[@spidyman8853]

Blimey, a steam machine, you had to have a team of people to start the damn thing up. Thank God for Micro Chips

[@kishascape]

That's just because of lack of power at the time, even when this footage was shot that was a very old computer. Replacing with a proper power supply room for the modern electric grid they now had would've fixed that.

[@drsyn9616]

Bloody hell!,nerds looked the same then as they do now😱😱

[@SMGJohn]

Yeah and chavs still look and act the same back then as now it seems.

[@carlyounger6262]

They're just regular kids (of the era).

[@mouseminer2978]

Now we all are standing on their shoulders.

[@ridbensdale]

SHALL WE PLAY A GAME?

[@mimikurtz2162]

I went to a highly-rated grammar school and wrote 0-levels in 1969. Around March that year the school obtained a computer which took 5 to 10 minutes to load the screen and crashed frequently. Only the four most nerdy pupils were given very basic instruction by our maths teacher (probably because that was his limit) and its use was a voluntary extra-curricular activity. Those four formed an elite clique and effectively excluded everyone else, and even when someone got to it first, they haughtily scoffed at any request for explanations. As a class, we had absolutely no lessons concerning computers.

[@markgreen2170]

"What will we do with a drunken sailor? What will we do with a drunken sailor? What will we do with a drunken sailor? Early in the morning! Way hay and up she rises Way hay and up she rises Way hay and up she rises Early in the morning! Shave his belly with a rusty razor Shave his belly with a rusty razor Shave his belly with a rusty razor Early in the morning! Way hay and up she rises Way hay and up she rises Way hay and up she rises Early in the morning! Put him in a long boat till his sober Put him in a long boat till his sober Put him in a long boat till his sober Early in the morning! Way hay and up she rises Way hay and up she rises Way hay and up she rises Early in the morning! Stick him in a barrel with a hosepipe on him Stick him in a barrel with a hosepipe on him Stick him in a barrel with a hosepipe on him Early in the morning! Way hay and up she rises Way hay and up she rises Way hay and up she rises Early in the morning! Put him in the bed with the captains daughter Put him in the bed with the captains daughter Put him in the bed with the captains daughter Early in the morning! Way hay and up she rises Way hay and up she rises Way hay and up she rises Early in the morning! Thats what we do with a drunken sailor Thats what we do with a drunken sailor Thats what we do with a drunken sailor Early in the morning! Way hay and up she rises Way hay and up she rises Way hay and up she rises Early in the morning! Way hay and up she rises Way hay and up she rises Way hay and up she rises Early in the morning! "

[@1sonyzz]

Imagine same game played now, lifting hands 5 billion times per second...

[@user-xn8hk4je4i]

good work. thank you very much.

[@ian_b]

I like how the juniors get ALGOL because they're not quite up to Assembler yet.

[@steveosborne2297]

I remember in about 1966/67 we were programming in ALGOL or FORTRAN on punchcards

[@thelemonadeboy]

imagine bringing one of those boys today, and showing them all the wonders computers do now?

[@jillosler9353]

Computers in schools really started with the BBC Master developed by Acorn Computers. They were so robust that years later when Acorn RISC Computers were the in thing so many BBC Masters were still being used - and abused.

[@macronencer]

I used to use those a lot! They're called "BBC Micro", though.

[@Geffers58]

We had two teletypes that connected to the town hall mainframe. It ran a quite limited operating system and we mostly ran BASIC on it.

[@Bertie_Ahern]

We had a computer quite a bit like that back in the late '30s when I was at school. Took several of us at a time to get it working and was the size of a room!

[@JustinTimeForParties]

Late 30’s?

[@TheConorsmithusa]

ah bertie tis yourself

[@feraudyh]

Computers were first built in the 40's

[@comedywriter8408]

Somethings haven't changed, our keyboards on our smart phones, laptops and desktops still operate using the binary system, albeit at much faster speeds.

[@taffy4672]

"Some things". not "somethings"...

[@angelacooper2661]

This episode Tomorrow's World was broadcast the year before I was born. My first experience with computers came in 1980 at junior school. I was ten and remember the BBC Micro in the corner of my classroom, playing games on it! My brother Anthony, who is less than three years older than me, got involved with computers at senior school and is very good with technology.

[@beaudidlyno1]

Whato chaps.. I've devised a new game for Nellie It's called Grand Theft Auto... I say Carstairs isn't it awfully violent with terribly bad words like Blast and Damb... Yes it is rather, but it's jolly good fun and you get to do things with girls! Blimey you'll get us in all sorts of trouble with the Head..

[@ridcom]

Funny that. The BBC actually went on to interview DMA Design during their final leg in the production of the first Grand Theft Auto.

[@spidyman8853]

We did not have computers in our school (Comprehensive) till early 80s with the BBC micros

[@AlisonBryen]

Our primary school still had a BBC computer in the late 1980s.

[@colinluckens9591]

Oh tell me about it the BBC computers at school at that time (circa 1985 onwards) where you had to write out programs in BASIC 😃😃😃 I still remember fantasising about creating a simple role-playing Dungeons & Dragons type of game that way!!! Felt very exciting 🙂🙂🙂 (Game never actually came to fruition btw😔)

[@buxvan]

I was waiting for one of the boys to shout “contact” when the dynamo kicked in.

[@southwestshelly]

my senior school got their first computer in 1995 with fittingly windows 95.... yeah.. we were not ready for the IT age there

[@italocarvalho1030]

This seems cool ASF!

[@Channel567-7]

The first TV ‘detector’ van prototype, only this genuinely worked.

[@NeoMorphUK]

My first computer course was just theory in 1977. We also played lunar lander on computer BY MAIL. We gave the burn time and angles and then sent the info from our Grammar School to the mainframe at the university. A week later we all got our results in a printout that showed descent rates after our commands. Obviously we all crashed lol. Then I went to college and did an AO Level course and I was the only one in the class given the keys to the computer room (other than the teacher that is). The computer was a really loud Elliott 803 and the teletypes that made the punched tapes were driven by compressed air. The memory in the Elliott was a massive 1K of core memory… and when I say massive I mean physical size and not memory. But it let us run an ALGOL compiler really nicely. Those were the days… 😂

[@todayisokay4075]

"aaaaaand take off!!!! these kids, now in orbit, will not be seen again for up to three months. Godspeed kids, godspeed."

[@macronencer]

This is astonishing! When I started at my secondary school in 1976 we had no computers, but a few years later we did get four Commodore PETs. I remember getting a complete hex printout of the Space Invaders game and reverse engineering how it worked, then adding a "boss key" so we could suddenly look as if we were working on a serious project a second after the teacher entered the room! I can still remember a couple of those 6502 instructions in hex form :)

[@colinluckens9591]

Woww fair play!!!😅😅😅😅

[@charliev906]

Next time someone talks about having computer problems I'll tell them to double check it's oil level

[@garryferrington811]

Not only is the computer rather cumbersome, all of the splices in the 16mm film are clearly visible. Watch for a white horizontal line every time the shot changes. That's where the film was cemented together by hand. Ah, the good old days.

[@ftumschk]

Ah, the 1960s, when men were men and boys looked middle-aged.

[@dronespace]

😂😂😂😂😂😂

[@roberto8650]

Exactly what I was thinking.

[@BJack1983]

How things have changed. In 2022 middle-aged men want to look like teenage boys 😆

[@Brimenting]

The commentator was Raymond Baxter, I think. Looking at those 1969 schoolboys, and as computing has advanced since those days, do we think that the structure of society has advanced or declined in tandem? Has the current generation of "computers in your pocket", enabling instant mass commentary on any and every subject, strengthened or fractured the cohesion of society? "When everybody is somebody, nobody is anybody".

[@banditalley9592]

"Have you tried turning it off and back on again?"

[@ChrisPollitt]

WOW!

[@Mayo501]

Literally how the computer technicians make it out to do their job at high school.

[@jagmarc]

Wow I remember in 70s I actually wrote programme and typed it all in noughts & crosses on a computer with a teleprinter. To play each move of game print out

[@museonfilm8919]

Back when computers, like this one, were of absolutely no practical real-world use.

[@OudeisEimi]

That computer came from a factory, where it controlled other machines and processes, before it became obsolete and got donated to the school. I’d say that qualifies as “practical real-world use” for pretty much any *practical* meaning of the term.

[@colinluckens9591]

​​@@OudeisEimi Wow you have a point!!👍👍👍 (didn't know that background info)

[@vinwhyte6549]

Directed by Wes Anderson.

[@OzzysRadioHalfHour]

Looks like we've come a long way..👀

[@michaelturner4457]

"Check the oil level." I've never done that with a computer.

[@j.d.4697]

I still start my computer this way.

[@maverickhistorian6488]

I 've got a little bloke in the back of mine, who stokes the boiler. His name is Gerald and he's well paid and looked after.

[@PlanetImo]

Wowee!

[@urinater]

You needed 6 people to play Tetris

[@Foebane72]

There's 1980s Computer Science in school, and then there's this HARDCORE Computer Science!

[@colinluckens9591]

😂😂😂😂

[@matturban9103]

I graduated high school in 1982. We had 6 Commodore Pet computers. 1 had 48k of memory,the other 5 had 16k of memory each. The phone you are using has more capabilities than those 6 computers combined.

[@JudeTheYoutubePoopersubscribe]

My phone has 12gb of ram

[@sterlingtimes]

We used to write programs in 1969 in the classroom at school. Periodically, the whole class would be driven to the technical college on a coach to visit the computer. We would type our programs onto punch tape and run them on the computer. The computer would print the results onto punch tape. The punch tape was run on a teleprinter, which would print out the answer.

[@colinluckens9591]

My word!!.....

[@cometochristtoday]

Makes you wonder how Apollo flights worked so flawlessly to the moon and back

[@eedobee]

Back when I was in school, Prince George was quarreling with Pitt the Elder

[@yalezhang8831]

How can the human adder calculating the most significant bit produce their result almost at the same time as the person calculating the least significant bit? There should be a large propagation delay.

[@psycoticbastard]

After switching the computer on, the computer says "The answer to Life the Universe and everything is 42."

[@____0____]

0:50 I wonder if it was 720p or 1080p lol

[@nathancox6249]

Would you like some toast

[@jaymac7203]

Lol

[@H76Pro]

LOL check the oil! this was like a car!

[@stevezpj]

Playing Chuckie Egg on this was a nightmare

[@richardtwyning]

Wow, it's amazing they encouraged anyone to be interested in a career in computing after all that 😂 Luckily I was born in 1970 and my first computer was a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. I never once had to check the thermostat 🤣

[@lucapook2]

But can it run crysis?

[@danielm5838]

The nerdiest rendition of "drunken sailor", perhaps ever.

[@aaronberns8485]

These old computer classes seemed very complicated at the time. It was more like a mathematics class than anything else. Just goes to show we came a long ways. Computers and computer classes today couldn't get any more simpler.

[@3D4Ureel]

Someone should come up with a simulator of this. Including random failures and such 🤪🤪

[@SIXXVS]

Ok now I wanna see how all of that is built

[@NathanChisholm041]

Now insert key and turn together! Ok chaps well done...

[@Nightweaver1]

Ah, back when computers were indistinguishable from the power plants that it took to run them.

[@Caolan114]

What planet Is this?

[@jillybe1873]

I did this at school

[@dean6816]

6:03 "Air Attack Warning!!"

[@miguelelgueta5830]

I wish my math teacher and school had been half this fun and interesting

[@cdl0]

He was my maths teacher! His name was Mr A T Pomeroy. All the boys called him "Spud".

[@tamizhvanank5264]

It looks like they preparing main engine for voyage

[@wobblybobengland]

You must have had some wild times in the sixties Grandad.

[@alexbanzeeland2944]

They have probably upgraded since then I would hope

[@museonfilm8919]

Yes, they use floppy drives now!

[@nothereforit.605]

This was probably one of the most expensive private schools around. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the kids shown grew up to be in places of power.

[@bryonybates897]

It was actually a grammar school, so it was and remains state-funded. The computer was a donation from Nestle.

[@nothereforit.605]

@@bryonybates897 could have figured that one out by reading the description.

[@Michael_Smith-Red_No.5]

I have never appreciated The Oregon Trail game as much as I do right now. I have died of dysentery.

[@johnas2004]

So what model of computer was Nellie, and where is she now? Hopefully in a museum, but I doubt health and safety would ever let kids anywhere near!

[@georgeh-w5041]

The computer was a National Elliot 405 and no longer exists. But there are some surviving versions in museums

[@blissy1]

Those boys must be close to or already retired

[@lazychemistry]

That's gotta be the first game for good graphics 🤪

[@Question3verything]

The first 60 seconds is the 60’s equivalent of the spinning wheel on startup today

[@edmondcasenas9827]

This is really funny hahaha i cant imagine the startup of a mamoth computer is like starting an engine of airbus plane or a shipping container hahaha lots of buttons whatsoever

[@ucheucheuche]

How much did it cost? Was this 1 computer, or more?

[@carlyounger6262]

That's one computer. Each component (disk, cpu, IO etc) takes up its own room.

[@GPWfiles]

where is te mouse?

[@chrisellis1232]

And thus Ye Skye Nette was born 😲😊

[@sama-el]

Watching this on the finest version of the thing that is shown in this video😁

[@garryferrington811]

Actually, this was shot on film. Look up "film" on Wikipedia if you don't know what that was. Video wasn't very portable at this point.

[@deltahalo241]

Why does the teacher who was knocking on the desk look so much like Geoff Marshall?

[@leepshin]

Exactly which school was this? In 1984 my school still didn't have any computers at all so WTF?

[@kakhak]

Amazing

[@oliveryt7168]

- Peetah, check the thermostat - Okay, Lois.