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‘cyclostyled’ resources. In a sense, I had been to the top of the mountain, looked over and seenthe future.Where?The school to which I was applying was located, and remains, in a town which operateseducational apartheid at the age of 11+. As the only Roman Catholic secondary school, itprovided (with its feeder primaries) education throughput 4-18 for Roman Catholic families, andwas very successful in persuading the parents of children in the upper ability quartile (i.e. the top25% according to intelligent quotients (i.q.-style testing) to not opt into the grammar schoolsystem. One of the ways in which it did this was to keep the curriculum new, fresh and relevant.The head had been convinced of the utility of information technology along with a number of‘early adopters’ 76 among the staff. The school possessed what I now know to be a ‘thin wire’network and had provided all key personnel with PCs. There was a thriving department ofComputer Studies.Why?The reason why I answered affirmatively is clearly open to interpretation 77 , but the fact that I didso provoked an immediate chain of events. First, I set about learning how to use a computerproperly. In keeping with my own learning preference, I undertook this by asking for a machinefrom the school, arguing that I needed it to re-write the schemes of work for years one to three(now Years 7 to 9), and then playing with what it did. As a symbol of how far technology hasdeveloped, and how fast, it is worth noting that that machine was supplied with no hard diskdrive, the programs were installed on one floppy disk drive and the outputs had to be stored onanother. The program disk I was given contained five pieces of software including MS-Word (!)in DOS format. In practical terms, I had to learn very quickly how to install, load, uninstall and339Simon Hughes Ph.D. Thesis (October 2012)