When I look back to my very first childhood memories from the 1960s rural farming communities in Cambridgeshire and then Gloucestershire, they seem a million miles away from the hi-tech digital world of the 2000s.
for we were born only yesterday and know nothing, and our days on earth are but a shadow.
Job 8:9 (NIV)
If you stand outside the hillside farmhouse overlooking the small town of Winchcombe today, then visually, nothing much has changed over the last 60 years, but those early years seem like they were from a different universe.
At the small primary school that I attended in the village of Gretton, the curriculum was of this different age but physically, the school hasn’t changed much (at least on the outside).
The school itself was small, having just two classrooms: infants and juniors. The larger juniors room also doubled as a dining room and head mistress’s office. The teacher would drill our knowledge of arithmetic by working through sums on the blackboard as we took notes on pieces of scrap paper. Our “technology” teaching involved making various models out of pieces of balsa wood, where the older kids were given the first choice of what to use out of the box and the younger ones would need to work with whatever was left.
However, my friends and I were living in the “Space Age” consuming a TV diet of Dr Who, Thunderbirds and Star Trek, all of which were then, brand new, cutting edge and represented the future of mankind, our future! This was the era when the United States was planning its moon landing programme, and this was very exciting. We all wondered when we would all be able to go because surely this would be in our lifetime.
But a thing happened in that little village school which might have set off a real spark in me. Computers in the Sci-Fi shows I watched on TV had rooms full of machines with magnetic tape spools spinning around and lots of flashing lights. They looked fantastic and seemed to be very good at doing complex maths and even thinking for themselves! I was therefore excited when someone came to the school with a piece of a real computer for us to take a look at, a small board around 6 inches by 12, not impressive on its own, but was a small part of something much larger. We were told that the computer this board came from would occupy a whole room.
While this was the first bit of a real computer I had ever seen, it didn’t help explain anything about what a computer really did and how it worked. I don’t think I saw the relevance of this thing back then but it must have kindled an interest in the subject which I would take up in the next chapter of my life.
Around two years before I was scheduled to leave the primary school, my dad found a new career which would take the family back to the county of my birth, Cambridgeshire. This was a few miles from the market town of Royston in Hertfordshire, where the next chapter of my schooling would begin.
Richard Mann 