A while back I wrote about my experience of computer science education in the 1980s and, in particular, use of the CESIL language. You can read about that here:
Since then I have been contacted both by the daughter of the pupil that wrote the CESIL interpreter and someone that is writing a book about the ICL Computer Education in Schools programme. This led me down a rabbit hole when I was asked to look and see what my ‘O’ Level project was. This required a trip to the loft and a root through some boxes but, low and behold, there it was.
“WHAT MUST YOU ALWAYS WEAR TO DO CHEMISTRY EXPERIMENTS”
Turns out my project was a chemistry test system, complete with bank of questions. This was interesting as I am no great chemistry scholar and I have no idea why I chose this. I suspect we might have been given a list of projects to choose from to make up for our own lack of imagination.
As you can see from the images below, I worked on the project from July 1980 to February 1981. It was written in BASIC and only the final code was printed, all the rest was hand written. This included a comprehensive set of instructions to the end user and details of the machines used.
At this point, while the school had its own Research Machine 380Z we clearly weren’t using it for our projects. The heavy lifting here was done by Oxford Polytechnic where I initially used an ICL machine of some description, I assume an 1900, and then moved to a Prime. This seemed to bring the advantage of being able to “easily enter our programs and update them”.
I clearly hadn’t been paying attention in class though, as on the coding sheets included there is a note, I assume written by my teacher, saying “NB Throughout program LETTER O written Ø ZERO written O.” This is very odd as today I would always write a zero as Ø. Similarly I would normally strike through a 7 too.
Anyway, I passed with a ‘B’ grade and that set me up for a career in computing. Here’s some sample pages from my magnum opus!
