Purpose-Built Educational Computers in the 1980s: The Australian Experience

Abstract : The first microcomputers were developed in the late 1970s and soon a wide variety of these machines were available for school and home use. This presented both a marvellous opportunity to improve school education and a significant problem for education authorities in how to provide support for the range of available computers. Several countries, including Australia, attempted to solve this problem by designing and building their own educational computer systems. This paper briefly describes how New Zealand, the UK and Canada designed and built computers for use in schools, and looks in more detail at how Australia started down this path and designed, but did not ultimately proceed to build an educational computer.