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The warning signs were there for anyone to see. Any chance I got, I was to be found in the computer lab at school, alternating my gaze from that Bakelite-style BBC Micro keyboard to the phosphorescent green-on-black screen. Basic ruled my dreams for several weeks (10 Close eyes, 20 Think of sheep, 30 Try to go to sleep, 40 Go to 10) as I bashed out my masterpiece: Tank Quest.

Now, I'm not claiming Tank Quest was going to win any awards for originality. You, an ordinary private, were parachuted in behind enemy lines during the middle of the Second World War. Your mission: to find the blueprints for the secret tank the Germans were building. If you succeeded, the Allies won the war. If you failed, farewell old Blighty.

This dates me with unnerving accuracy. The early 1980s was the era of quests, of being offered choice A or choice B, of playing Dungeons & Dragons for hours on end, and the time when every child of a certain age was trying their hand at Basic. And the UK was at the heart of it all. I remember meeting a teenager who'd programmed his own version of Frogger (admittedly, not using Basic); it was just the type of thing people used to do.

And that's how we all thought. These were the days before computers had really become personal, when people were still getting over the excitement of having their own calculator. Computers were there to be programmed, not to be used as a tool.

Few would argue we should go back to those days - take away the internet now and you've got a riot on your hands - but one thing did get lost in the personal computer revolution, and that was the desire to program. The curriculum setters

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looked at the new generation of computer-based tools (word processors, spreadsheets, databases) and, understandably, decided the way forward was for kids to master those tools, not to create inferior versions themselves.

But that way of thinking has also led to something close to a crisis. In the early 1980s, Britain had numerous industries to be proud of: steel, coal, car, shipping. Since then, world forces have come into play, and those old industries have shrunk or disappeared. We're left with the creativity that being a wealthy country allows - and we have the great advantage of speaking English.

So our music industry is thriving, as is TV and, um, film. But don't forget our software industry. According to a joint report from the British Computer Society, Microsoft and Lancaster University Management School, more than a million British people work in the software industry. It's worth £20 billion a year, more than shipping, car manufacturing and steel combined.

And that industry is built upon the skills learnt by children tapping away at Bakelite-style BBC Micro keyboards, by kids who dreamed in Basic. It's a scary thought, but compare the proportion of children out there in 1982 and 2007 who understand even the basic principles of programming, let alone created any meaningful code themselves. A tenth? A hundredth?

Even if it's the greater of those two, it isn't hard to see that the standard of developer entering our universities' computer science courses is going to drop: the reason New Zealand is so good at rugby isn't a natural predisposition to throwing a strangely shaped ball, it's that every Kiwi child will play it at some point in their life. The good ones will be spotted and developed.

Right now, there's a generation of potential programmers who'll never be spotted, because all they're asked to do when sitting down in front of a computer is select some text and make it bold. It isn't the teachers' fault - they're following the curriculum. And even if they want to stretch the kids, they've got so much paperwork to fill in that an after-school programming class is hardly an attractive prospect. Not, I suspect, that many children would choose that over a session on the Wii.