Clunky to Funky


Helen Watts, Unicorn Director, reflects on how technology trends have affected the e-learning world


The first desktop computer I ever used was a first-generation Amstrad PC. It was 1989 and I was working as a Computer-Based Training (CBT) developer at the Chartered Insurance Institute in Sevenoaks.


Although my primary role was writer, back then one person created a CBT course in its entirety. I was responsible for the instructional design, scriptwriting, programming and ‘graphics’ creation.


Incredibly that PC had no hard drive; all programs and data were stored and accessed from a 5.25in floppy disk with a 360k capacity. Today I write this article on a laptop with a fairly modest 500GB of hard-disk space, equivalent to about 1.5m of those floppies!


This is mirrored by an equally stunning growth in processing power. That old PC had 64K of RAM, my laptop has 4GB of RAM and a 2.5GHz processor. Apparently a singing birthday card has more processing power than that Amstrad.


But what has been the impact for e-learning?


These screenshots are from one of Unicorn’s earliest CBT courses, titled Simply Insurance.


Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be


Unicorn’s 25th anniversary has prompted us to look back at some of our earliest e-learning.


In those days you couldn’t assume the learner had a mouse, sound card or even a colour screen. Early CBT courses were in monochrome green on black and sold in large boxes to corporate clients.


Courses were produced on topics such as ‘Letters of Credit’ and ‘Finance for Non- Financial Managers’ and pricing per course and per licence was high, reflective of development cost and limited competition.


Screen resolutions were limited too. 300x200 was as good as it got in little 8x4 rectangular blocks. Your canvas comprised 80 blocks across and 24 down. As colour screens arrived, you could choose from a palette of 16 exciting colours.


One fun task was creating pictures from the blocks, like assembling two-dimensional Lego.


For animation Unicorn’s own authoring tool, Pixie, enabled developers to select any part of the screen and refresh it with a choice of


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