In the early hours of this morning Guy Kewney died, from cancer, at his home in London. I have written about Guy before, as a journalist he was the colossus who oversaw the birth of home computing in Britain. Everything that happened here: Sinclair, Amstrad, Eidos, Rare, ARM, and so much more, only happened because of the foundations laid by Guy.
In the mid to late ’70s at the weekly specialist newspaper, Computing, Guy wrote regular articles about the birth of microcomputers. These inspiring missives told us of an imminent and portentous revolution that would transform everything we did. Many people’s lives were changed by reading these. I was inspired to leave the safe world of accountancy to open one of the first computer stores, Microdigital, in 1978. Many other made similar life changing decisions because of Guy!
As the industry Guy had predicted emerged his influence also increased, initially at Personal Computer World, the first dedicated home computer magazine, then at senior positions in several of the top journals and with a lot of television work. The effect he had was vast and covered a period of over 30 years. He was considered the pre eminent journalist in his field and it is impossible to overstate his influence.
But Guy didn’t just write and broadcast, he did it well. He was clever with an incisive mind, he asked the difficult questions and he analysed the facts in a way that brought so much added value to his output. And of course his experience gave him an unmatched platform with which to work, such as when he predicted greatness when Google first saw the light of day.
And of course there was Guy the person. Always clever, supportive, interesting. I met him at shows and conferences, we had meals and drinks together, he invited me to his home to meet his family. And we chatted on the phone to gossip. Talking to him was always fascinating and educational, he knew far, far more than went into his articles.
Gaming is brilliant for learning because it has the task/reward cycle which comes naturally to the human brain. Additionally, as I have said in previous articles, because educational games are on computers they track the student’s progress, so there is no need for exams.
Smart.fm takes this one step further. It tracks the student’s progress and presents material at the optimum moment for the most efficient learning process according to the Ebbinghaus Curve. Their system of spaced rehearsal ensures the absolute most efficient absorption of knowledge over time. Take a look and you will see that it is individually tailored by feedback loop and that it uses computer processing power to apply the science. This whole methodology would be simply impossible in a classroom but is straightforward for a video game to achieve.
To me it is immensely frustrating that we have the means to massively improve our formal education system yet we persevere with the archaic relic that is the classroom.
Dr Henry Edward Roberts has died at the age of 68. He was truly the father of home computing, the platform on which video gaming is based. His company was Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) and in January 1975 his $395 kit computer, the Altair 8800, appeared on the front cover of Popular Electronics. And the word exploded. They could not keep up with demand, cloned imitators appeared, new magazines were published and a young man wrote a version of the programming language BASIC to run on it. His name was Bill Gates.
The main feature of the architecture of this machine was a backplane bus that cards carrying components plugged into, called the S-100 bus, this became the standard for microcomputers until Apple came along. When I opened my computer store Microdigital, in 1978, we offered an S-100 machine.
It is now well over 30 years since the revolution that we now take for granted happened. It was created by individual people and it is sad that time is now catching up on them, what was real events is now rapidly becoming history.
The Daily Mail is a British newspaper with a circulation of about two million. In terms of content the nearest American equivalent is, perhaps, Fox News. Their editorial stance is mostly shock and outrage and they pick on the easy targets, like immigration and video games.
