This article is more than 1 year old

Coding with dad on the Dragon 32

Back to BASIC for home-schooled daughter

Readers' corner Stuart Drabble home schools his two young daughters. He lives in Norwich.

In 1983 when I was 10 years-old my father bought our family a Dragon 32 computer. These were the days when computers had ‘Made in Wales’ stamped on the bottom and became affordable enough and small enough to have in the home. Affordable is of course a relative concept - my parents were by no means well-off. I recall the computer cost £300 or so, which based on averages wages is an equivalent spend of maybe £1200 today.

I packed away my Dragon 32 (32k RAM, 16k ROM) in 1988 and it has been in various lofts, cupboards and offices, unloved, since that time. But this week I fired it up to teach my daughter proper coding, as opposed to messing about with HTML. The boot-time was about 0.5 seconds.

1983 was the era of the early ZX Spectrum and Atari 260. These were real computers, where you had to write programs to get them to do anything, or at least buy a cassette tape that might have had a program or two on it.

This computer was my companion throughout much of my childhood and is the foundation of and trigger for my career in IT. Today I own and operate a small IT support business and I often write software for customers and my own business.

With my home school hat on, I want to make the point that I learned about computers in spite of the state school system and not as a result of it. Now we are home-schooling our children I find it telling that the foundation of my career is based upon an investment made by my parents for our home.

Until I attended college I was completely self-taught in using and programming computers. Schools had neither the time, expertise or equipment necessary to teach me the skills I would need to have a career in IT. This is an observation rather than a criticism, but what has changed in 30 years?

And so I fired up that 30 year-old computer this week and started teaching my eldest girl Elsa to program BASIC on the Dragon 32. She loved it and so did I! ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like