1971, East Oxford Junior School, Doctor Johnston ( not that one ) and the Christmas Computer
I have just been bimbling about on the Internet and I found the website for my old Junior school: it was asking for contributions of memories for a putative book on the history of the school if you went there before 1990.
Having predated 1990 by a good 19 years I sent them the following. It's odd that the more I think about it, the more I realise just how good that school was.
( In other news I have been away and am still madder than a bag of badgers. )
I went to East Oxford Junior School, as it was then known, in the September term of 1971. My strongest memories really concern some of the teachers, and a very odd school / class play:
My first form teacher was Mrs Brown who was completely lovely: She was very encouraging, helpful and at the appropriate times, sympathetic. ( the poor woman had to show us a sex education film, Frankly, I think she wasn't completely committed to the idea.) Then came Ms Jackson - I had never heard a South African accent before and I was convinced that she was Australian. She was sharp, and a great teacher and it was she who got my class to write a play, which I appeared in, about the then impossibly futuristic and exciting world of Computer Shopping ( way before it's time I might add. ) Of course the Shopping Computer ( A brilliantly realised contraption of cardboard boxes, cooking foil and Dairylea packets ) behaved as though half of it's circuits had gone on holiday, resulting in the kind of farce you get when drunk ordering from Amazon in a terrified panic the day before Christmas Eve. I like to think we were prescient, and were in our eight year old way sending the world a warning of a future beyond our control. Sadly however I fear that those of us writing it were a bit obsessed by Doctor who and the use of a computer as a plot device had more to do with John Pertwee than Orwellian predictions of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs et al.
Which brings me to the mighty Doctor Johnson.
I sometimes feel myself thinking that this incredible character is a figment of my imagination, except that no amount of Ms Jackson's encouragement of same could have bred such a remarkable vision in my head: he was about ...well he was getting on a bit and tall and wiry. He always wore a white lab coat, and my memory tells me he looked like Peter Snow but for all I know it's lying. Anyway, he was one of very few teachers we got to see other than our regular form teachers: we went to his room on a Friday and it was, for a sciencey sort like me, a wonderful place. It had a HUGE papier mache dinosaur near the back of the room, and posters all around the walls of the layout of the Solar System and other astronomical marvels calculated to tickle the brains of small children with the promise of universal knowledge, presumably working on the principle that to an eight year old, the universe is full of possibilities.
Dr J was a genius in my eyes: there was nothing he didn't know. He told us about space, the planets and stars, and that everything was made up of small things you couldn't see, but were so powerful that if you banged them together hard enough, they would blow up a city. God I loved that man.
I was lucky, he liked me ( Possibly because I hung on his every word like a puppy watching an open tin of Pal, so desperate was I to learn everything he was willing to teach me) The reason I was lucky to have him like me was that if you were the sort who was more interested in Oxford United or, say, Arsenal ( let's face it, even in our school no one supported Oxford) than the distance from Earth to the Sun and were demonstrating this educational shortfall by talking in class, you got a 1 yard ruler across your wrist.
I inferred from the screams that this hurt quite a lot.
Doctor Johnston's crowning achievement was DICTER, which stood for Digital Integrated Circuit...something something something. (It was 43 years ago, for all I know this whole recollection is a drug fueled ramble bought on by too much Venos ) DICTER was a computer, that he had built. Himself. At home.
I am just going to repeat that because I think it bears repeating: Dr J built a computer at home, in his spare time in 1972.
I was fairly convinced the man was a personal friend of Doctor Who.
DICTER was a luggage trunk sized plywood box with a perspex lid, through which you could see the internals. No modern chips, processors, cards or drives: everything was hand wired and soldered. It's (I always thought of it as He, actually ) display was a simple binary readout of four light bulbs.
I didn't truly understand it but what I did know was this: if you could build a computer you were a demigod.
In a remarkably far sighted scheme, Dr J decided to demonstrate how computers work by turning the second year into a computer. ( No, he didn't have us all brainwashed and plugged in to DICTER like Cybermen ) he divided each class into different sections of the computer, each pupil being a switch. Each of us had a piece of paper with either a 1 or a 0 on it. Thus I was an AJ Flip Flop. I wish I could remember more about this brilliant experiment, - perhaps someone else was there?
At the time it clarified things in my head, and I have to say that he was the best, and most inspirational science teacher I ever had. Sadly I drifted away from the sciences, but if he looked at his life's achievements ( I have to assume he passed away some years ago, but bearing in mind who he was I wouldn't be a bit surprised if he's either made himself a new body or regenerated into Peter Capaldi ) then I hope he was aware of how much of a difference he made to so many children who he infected with his enthusiasm and lust for knowledge.
One in a billion.
Having predated 1990 by a good 19 years I sent them the following. It's odd that the more I think about it, the more I realise just how good that school was.
( In other news I have been away and am still madder than a bag of badgers. )
I went to East Oxford Junior School, as it was then known, in the September term of 1971. My strongest memories really concern some of the teachers, and a very odd school / class play:
My first form teacher was Mrs Brown who was completely lovely: She was very encouraging, helpful and at the appropriate times, sympathetic. ( the poor woman had to show us a sex education film, Frankly, I think she wasn't completely committed to the idea.) Then came Ms Jackson - I had never heard a South African accent before and I was convinced that she was Australian. She was sharp, and a great teacher and it was she who got my class to write a play, which I appeared in, about the then impossibly futuristic and exciting world of Computer Shopping ( way before it's time I might add. ) Of course the Shopping Computer ( A brilliantly realised contraption of cardboard boxes, cooking foil and Dairylea packets ) behaved as though half of it's circuits had gone on holiday, resulting in the kind of farce you get when drunk ordering from Amazon in a terrified panic the day before Christmas Eve. I like to think we were prescient, and were in our eight year old way sending the world a warning of a future beyond our control. Sadly however I fear that those of us writing it were a bit obsessed by Doctor who and the use of a computer as a plot device had more to do with John Pertwee than Orwellian predictions of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs et al.
Which brings me to the mighty Doctor Johnson.
I sometimes feel myself thinking that this incredible character is a figment of my imagination, except that no amount of Ms Jackson's encouragement of same could have bred such a remarkable vision in my head: he was about ...well he was getting on a bit and tall and wiry. He always wore a white lab coat, and my memory tells me he looked like Peter Snow but for all I know it's lying. Anyway, he was one of very few teachers we got to see other than our regular form teachers: we went to his room on a Friday and it was, for a sciencey sort like me, a wonderful place. It had a HUGE papier mache dinosaur near the back of the room, and posters all around the walls of the layout of the Solar System and other astronomical marvels calculated to tickle the brains of small children with the promise of universal knowledge, presumably working on the principle that to an eight year old, the universe is full of possibilities.
Dr J was a genius in my eyes: there was nothing he didn't know. He told us about space, the planets and stars, and that everything was made up of small things you couldn't see, but were so powerful that if you banged them together hard enough, they would blow up a city. God I loved that man.
I was lucky, he liked me ( Possibly because I hung on his every word like a puppy watching an open tin of Pal, so desperate was I to learn everything he was willing to teach me) The reason I was lucky to have him like me was that if you were the sort who was more interested in Oxford United or, say, Arsenal ( let's face it, even in our school no one supported Oxford) than the distance from Earth to the Sun and were demonstrating this educational shortfall by talking in class, you got a 1 yard ruler across your wrist.
I inferred from the screams that this hurt quite a lot.
Doctor Johnston's crowning achievement was DICTER, which stood for Digital Integrated Circuit...something something something. (It was 43 years ago, for all I know this whole recollection is a drug fueled ramble bought on by too much Venos ) DICTER was a computer, that he had built. Himself. At home.
I am just going to repeat that because I think it bears repeating: Dr J built a computer at home, in his spare time in 1972.
I was fairly convinced the man was a personal friend of Doctor Who.
DICTER was a luggage trunk sized plywood box with a perspex lid, through which you could see the internals. No modern chips, processors, cards or drives: everything was hand wired and soldered. It's (I always thought of it as He, actually ) display was a simple binary readout of four light bulbs.
I didn't truly understand it but what I did know was this: if you could build a computer you were a demigod.
In a remarkably far sighted scheme, Dr J decided to demonstrate how computers work by turning the second year into a computer. ( No, he didn't have us all brainwashed and plugged in to DICTER like Cybermen ) he divided each class into different sections of the computer, each pupil being a switch. Each of us had a piece of paper with either a 1 or a 0 on it. Thus I was an AJ Flip Flop. I wish I could remember more about this brilliant experiment, - perhaps someone else was there?
At the time it clarified things in my head, and I have to say that he was the best, and most inspirational science teacher I ever had. Sadly I drifted away from the sciences, but if he looked at his life's achievements ( I have to assume he passed away some years ago, but bearing in mind who he was I wouldn't be a bit surprised if he's either made himself a new body or regenerated into Peter Capaldi ) then I hope he was aware of how much of a difference he made to so many children who he infected with his enthusiasm and lust for knowledge.
One in a billion.