As I sat watching my elder son’s latest piece of interactive digital art my mind went back forty years. Back then I, too, had chosen to write a program displaying a hexagon shape filled with coloured triangles.
Schools had been given clunky 32KB machines that downloaded programs from a tape cassette player. Keen to learn more, I had signed up for a computer course. Our tutor wrote on the blackboard
10 A= 1
20 A= A + 1
No-o-o!! That does NOT work. If a=1 then no way in a month of Sundays can a be equal to a +1. I had a splitting headache. I had absolutely no idea what the tutor was going on about. I excused myself from the class and went into town to buy some Aspirin for my throbbing head. It was some weeks before i finally grasped that the expression had nothing to do with algebra but was the start of BBC BASIC coding which instructed the computer to execute a repeat loop.
For our final assignment we had to write a program in BBC Basic. I decided to design a program that would change the colours of the triangles in the Leapfrogs poster “The Great Dodecahedron”. Sadly, my simple program in BBC Basic is lost but son’s amazing interactive digital art may be viewed here:CLIO

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