It is 1982 and a class of primary school children are huddled around a television screen attached to a small beige box. Like a typewriter, it has a keyboard, but there is no paper. The screen flickers to life and the children are in raptures as they type and see letters appear on the screen for the first time.
This box was the BBC Micro, one of the first personal computers the world had ever seen. For those children, it was to mark their first experience of an object which was to provide the entire foundation of how they worked and lived.
Before long, millions of homes in Britain would have a personal computer of some sort – by the mid-1980s Britain's ownership of computers was higher than any other country in the world, even the US. Major industries sprang up around its development, from games makers to magazine publishers. The bosses of the computer makers Sinclair, Amstrad and Acorn - which had built the BBC Micro as the successful winner of the tender for the BBC sponsored Computer Literacy project - became household names, and found themselves courted by politicians including Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who opined that “Those now at school will need to adapt to each new technological advance if we are to remain an industrial power”. For a brief moment it looked like Britain's computer manufacturers would rule the world.