The BBC launched its Computer Literacy Project in 1982. This was one of the UK government’s initiatives to repair the country’s economic and political problems in the 1970s and 1980s. The BBC broadcast television and radio programs, published books, and distributed educational material. And, for the subject of this book, the BBC looked for a British computer company to manufacture an affordable, powerful, and expandable microcomputer. The winner was Acorn Computers, and the computer was the BBC Micro.

The book attempts to cover not just hardware and software, but the BBC Micro’s place in computing history and its influence on society. It starts with a section on the British political and economic context, the state of the art in microcomputers, and popular perceptions. For example, before the Computer Literacy Project, television documentaries negatively portrayed computers as threats to employment.

The middle section describes some of the most popular games for the Micro. These games earned their popularity from their innovative, entertaining game play. They also innovated technically and educationally. For example, to simultaneously display graphics in both high-resolution black-and-white and lower-resolution color, Elite precisely timed the switching of video modes, a feat that impressed the luminary designers at Acorn. To populate an expansive universe of galaxies and planets in just a few kilobytes of memory, Elite’s programmers pioneered procedural generation.

Innovations extended to education. A teacher, Mike Matson, developed Granny’s Garden, an adventure game. Matson successfully merged entertainment and education with the computer as the medium. At the time, many students had to share a single computer, so the puzzles and user interface in Granny’s Garden were conducive to collaboration. The game complemented regular lessons in mathematics and geography, which is knowledge that students needed to progress through the game.

The last section covers the broader influences of the BBC Micro. In the mid-1980s, the Internet was available only to a small subset of academia, industry, and the military. But the Micro allowed access to some pre-Internet choices for the general public. Like other microcomputers of the time, BBC Micro owners used dial-up modems to access bulletin board systems (BBSs). Alternatively, the Micro was built to accept an adapter for Teletext, the information retrieval service in the UK. Teletext allowed the public to view information on subjects including weather, news, and sports. With both these networks, the nascent movements of social groups and software sharing took hold in the UK.

The Domesday Project allowed people around the UK to collect local information to present it at a national scale. The project commemorated the 900th anniversary of the Domesday Book, a detailed census of medieval Britain. The last chapter covers the Micro’s lasting effects on computing and education, including the pervasive ARM processor and the popular Raspberry Pi.

While this book usually hits its targets, the text often veers in convoluted curves. The curves range from excessive verbosity and inconsistent verb tense to odd inversions of importance. For example, the author spends pages to describe the mundane mechanics of installing and uninstalling ROM chips, which buries the lead paragraph in the last paragraph: swapping out ROM chips gave nontechnical users unprecedented abilities to trade and install software independently of software distributors. Still, the book provides a well-researched and entertaining history of an important milestone in personal computing history.