There was a rush of British manufactured computers at this stage, including those of the well-known Clive Sinclair. These were cheap but fiddly and unreliable. People kept a cold coke can on the Sinclair to stop overheating- yet Sinclair claimed it was powerful enough to 'run a nuclear power station'.
We had various machines, but the BBC & the Department for Education created a project which designed the 'BBC Micro' specially for educational use. I bought myself one on the proceeds of the first Summer School here. It became our workhorse machine. Up to now mostly used for experimentation, computer use as word processors became of major importance, but graphics were still rather 'pixelly' and things like scanners were very expensive. The BBC had 16k of RAM and floppy drives ( 5 1/4 inch) were an expensive upgrade. But it had a very powerful BASIC for programming, and excellent interfacing built in. The Radio Astronomers would carry on using them on projects for several years.
We were doing short courses ABOUT computers in the School, but access was limited to the few machines we had at first. It tended to be 'keyboard & computer awareness' rather than actual use for many pupils.
Physics was at first main user, as that was my subject, plus increasing use in subjects like English & Geography.
The Office still had no computers. All accounting & billing was paper based.
© Taunton School IT Dep't.