Purpose-Built Educational Computers in the 1980s: The Australian Experience - History of Computing: Learning from the Past - page 101

Purpose-Built Educational Computers in the 1980s:
The Australian Experience
Arthur Tatnall 1 and Ralph Leonard 2
1 Graduate School of Business, Victoria University, Australia
[e-mail]
2 Department of Further Education, Employment,
Science and Technology - Government of South Australia
[e-mail]
Abstract. The first microcomputers were developed in the late 1970s and soon
a wide variety of these machines were available for school and home use. This
presented both a marvellous opportunity to improve school education and a sig-
nificant problem for education authorities in how to provide support for the
range of available computers. Several countries, including Australia, attempted
to solve this problem by designing and building their own educational computer
systems. This paper briefly describes how New Zealand, the UK and Canada
designed and built computers for use in schools, and looks in more detail at how
Australia started down this path and designed, but did not ultimately proceed to
build an educational computer.
Keywords: History of educational computing, purpose-built school computers,
Poly, Icon, Acorn, Microbee, Australian Commonwealth Schools Commission,
National Computer Education Program.
1 Introduction
The widespread use of computers in schools is now commonplace, but this has only
occurred in comparatively recent times, beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Before this time a few Australian schools had some access to a mini-computer or used
punch or mark-sense cards at a local university, but these schools were few in
number. In an exception to this the Angle Park Computing Centre (APCC) in South
Australia and the Elizabeth Computer Centre in Tasmania offered shared computing
facilities to all schools in their respective states. The advent of relatively low cost
microcomputers such as the Apple ][ and Tandy TRS-80 in the late 1970 marked the
beginning of the growth of computers in schools. These early computers typically
stored their software on audio cassettes as disk drives were not readily available and
quite expensive until some years later.
An early problem was the diversity of available types of microcomputer, com-
pounded by each Australian state controlling its own school education system. This
meant that co-operation between the states was not to be taken for granted. One prob-
lem with using these early microcomputers in schools was that while you could show
the students what a computer was, and even look at the electronics inside, you could