A school computer, circa 1969:

[sl8]

Impressive startup sequence.

7:26 min.

Tomorrow's World: Nellie the School Computer 15 February 1969 - BBC

BBC
2010 Jan 7

[...]

'Tomorrow's World' collection: http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/tom...
Meet Nellie, a computer set to revolutionise the classroom.

While many pupils might wish they could hand their schoolwork over to a computer, the boys of Forest Grammar School have turned a computer into schoolwork. Dubbed Nellie, the machine can be programmed to solve mathematical equations or even play music. Lessons also include computer maintenance something of a necessity, considering the likelihood of Nellie crashing...

[lapfog_1]

1. "Nellie" has to be at least 10 years old by 1969

speaking as someone about the age of those boys ( what, no girls? ) in 1969 and already writing Fortran on punch cards for an IBM 360/40 in 1970 plus a GE635 in 1968 in Algol.

Now I ask AI to write code for me in python. But it really hasn't changed much. Smaller, faster, solid state...

[sl8]

3. A bit more information:

https://hackaday.com/2019/03/22/retrotechtacular-nellie-the-school-computer/

Retrotechtacular: Nellie The School Computer

by: Jenny List
March 22, 2019

When did computers arrive in schools? That should be an easy question to answer, probably in the years around 1980. Maybe your school had the Commodore Pet, the Apple II, or if you are British, the Acorn BBC Micro in that period, all 8-bit microcomputers running a BASIC interpreter. That’s certainly the case for the majority of schools, but not all of them. In early 1969 the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World visited a school with a computer, and in both technology and culture it was a world away from those schools a decade later that would have received those BBC Micros.

The school in question was The Forrest Grammar School, Winnersh, about 35 miles west of London, and the computer in question was a by-then-obsolete National Elliott 405 mainframe that had been donated four years earlier by the British arm of the food giant Nestlé. The school referred to it as “Nellie” — a concatenation of the two brand names. It seems to have been the preserve of the older pupils, but the film below still shows the concepts of its operation being taught at all levels. We get a brief look at some of their software too — no operating systems here, everything’s machine code on paper tape — as a teacher plays a reaction timer game and the computer wins at noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe). One of them has even written a high-level language interpreter on which younger children solve maths problems. Of course, a 1950s mainframe with hundreds or thousands of tubes was never a particularly reliable machine, and we see them enacting their failure routine, before finally replacing a faulty delay line.

This is a fascinating watch on so many levels, not least because of its squeaky-clean portrayal of adolescent boys. This is what teenagers were supposed to be like, but by the late 1960s they must in reality have been anything but that away from the cameras. It’s a contrast with fifteen or twenty years later, the computer is seen as an extremely important learning opportunity in sharp opposition to how 8-bit computers in the 1980s came to be seen as a corrupting influence that would rot young minds.

Of course, these youngsters are not entirely representative of British youth in 1969, because as a grammar school the Forrest was part of the top tier of the selective education system prevalent at the time. There would certainly have been no computers of any sort in the local Secondary Modern school, and probably the BBC’s portrayal of the pupils would have been completely different had there been. In 1974 the Government abolished the grammar school system to create new one-size-fits-all comprehensive schools, one of which the Forrest school duly became. Following the vagaries of educational policy it is now an Academy, and there is probably not a room within it that does not contain a computer.

[...]

Emphasis added.

[lapfog_1]

4. 1950s vacuum tube based computer.

and I was in the 6th grade when I attended a university course to learn Algol in 1968... yeah, I was a "prodigy" so I got special permission to attend with college students 10 years older than me.

But my high school had access to an IBM 360 a couple of years later when I started doing much bigger software projects.

[AllaN01Bear]

7. i was in elem school in 1968. gah . where did the time go?

the only time i heard about computers was on science fiction stuff. tv shows and movies . the first computer i trained on was an ibm system 32 and 3741 data station.

[FadedMullet]

2. I'd love to know where those kids are now and how the last 56 years have been.

[George McGovern]

5. Wow. Watching on my iMac, Progress.

[hunter]

6. Here's a comparison of an Elliot 405 computer to a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero...

https://www.framboise314.fr/il-y-a-59-ans-elliott-405/

The article is in French. (You know what to do.)

The raspberry pi zero has a zillion times the computing capacity and doesn't require a 10 kilowatt motor-generator to power it.

[sl8]

8. Very cool, thanks.

From that article