By 1990 I was in a London classroom on a BBC Micro, a machine the whole country had agreed children should learn on.
The BBC Micro, built by Acorn for the BBC's Computer Literacy Project, was the default computer in British schools through the 1980s and into the 1990s. In April, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched and deployed above Earth's atmosphere.
By 1990 I was at school in London, and the computer in front of me was a BBC Micro. It was not an accident that it was there. Britain had made a national decision in the early eighties that children should grow up literate in computers, and it built a machine, a television series, and a whole curriculum around it. The BBC Micro was the result: sturdy, beige, everywhere.
I think about that bet often. A country deciding, on purpose, that the next generation would not be afraid of the machine. Most of what a place becomes is downstream of quiet choices like that, made a decade before anyone can see the payoff.
I had already had my own computer at home for years by then. School just confirmed what the Spectrum had taught me: this was not a phase. Between a machine at home and a machine at school, the shape of my whole life was set. Five years later the internet reached India, and I was ready.