Everyone, we hear these days, must learn to code. Being able to program computers is the only way to be sure a computer can’t steal your job. So doctors, dancers, drivers and dieticians must all acquire programming skills, and coding needs to be at the centre of modern secondary education. Well, evidently it is in the interests of giant technology corporations to have future generations of employees educated to their precise specifications at the public expense. The message is amplified by journalists anxiously extrapolating from their own predicament. (Generating ‘content’ is an increasingly unrewarded dead end; the cool things are data and ‘sharing’.) But the all-must-become-programmers idea does imply a rather weird future culture. If everyone spends all their time programming computers, who will till the fields? Who is going to produce literature?
If you can’t code, saying such things risks a charge of Luddism. Luckily, I can after a fashion, having learned on a small black plastic box with blocky monochrome graphics and a laughable 1K of memory: the ZX81, launched in 1981 by Clive Sinclair. The next winter, in a kind of Banksy-style art raid, I snuck into a local department store after school and programmed its colour successor to draw a Christmas tree. That was the ZX Spectrum, which made home computing accessible and unthreatening to millions of Britons for the first time.
Tom Lean’s detailed history of this 1980s revolution will be a joy to anyone who also grew up in the period, but what he also shows very adeptly is just to what extent history is currently repeating itself. All the digital ideology of today, right down to the insistence that teaching everyone how to program computers is an urgent necessity, was in full bloom 30 years ago.
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