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Comment by monocasa | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, the British government didn't give a Commodore 64 to every British child for free.

If only! I could have played Granny's Garden at home then.

Not every child - every Year-7 (11-12 year old) child, whose school had a teacher interested enough to apply for them.

My child's DT teacher did, but they used it for one lesson, then were given it to bring home. It's now in a drawer somewhere.

That was last year. I haven't heard of any plans to repeat the exercise.

As I understand it, it was not the DT teacher -- the government gave one to every year 7 child for themselves to keep and use however they wish. This is nice in a way but the teachers at my school bemoaned that they couldn't really use them in the class, since the students could not really be counted on to bring them in when required. If you think that the school would benefit from them, then contact the PTA or the school governers and get them to ask parents to donate unused micro:bits to the school?

Incorrect: https://community.tes.com/threads/the-micro-bit-school-regis...

Perhaps, if they did, Silicon Valley would be in the UK.

The UK still had a hangover from the 1970s at the time, local phones calls cost money, and Americans have always been a lot richer anyway. I suspect America had the inherent advantage here.

> Americans have always been a lot richer

Not always. I do recognize the economic sacrifice the UK made for the sake of winning WWII. It's a beautiful thing - altruism on a national scale.

They did put a BBC Micro in every school though.

So that means that they distributed, what, two or three orders of magnitude more micro:bits?

Yes - there are about 160 kids per year group in my school, and I think all year 7's got one (for themselves, not the school)

The BBC Micros probably cost more.

The BBC Micro cost £400 in 1981, which was £1400 in 2016, according to the Bank of England. I don't know if this includes monitors, presumably it doesn't include any software. From the other comment, you can double the price to add disc drives etc.

So, at least £400 for every 25 children. My primary school had one in every classroom, but I don't know if that was the standard, so it could be less.

A 10-pack of Micro:Bits with basic accessories come to £11 each, £275 for 25 children.

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