Computer Education in Schools in the 1980s (Revisited)

May 13, 2026 | Comment

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:

Computer Education in Schools in the 1980s

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 … Read the rest

Computer Education in Schools in the 1980s

July 17, 2024 | 2 comments

Not long after I’d published my previous post on the Computer Education in Schools Instruction Language I found a wad of paper that turned out to be my notes from the first year of my O-Level Computer Science course. I thought it might be interesting to see what was there and how computing was taught in the UK in the 80s.

Starting with CESIL

The earliest page is dated 12th September 1979 when I would have just turned 14. At this point our introduction to programming was via the CESIL language. I said in the previous post that this interpreter … Read the rest

Computer Education in Schools Instruction Language (CESIL)

July 12, 2024 | 1 comment

When I first learned programming in about 1978 the school I attended was lucky to have a Research Machines 380Z on which there was the BASIC language. Using this one of the pupils then wrote a CESIL interpreter for their (I guess) O Level project. Other pupils then used this to learn the fundamentals of programming.

Skip forward a few years and I now owned a Sinclair ZX Spectrum having also previously had a ZX81 too. I decided that I would also write a CESIL interpreter this time using Sinclair’s variant of BASIC. Remarkably I still own the sheets of … Read the rest