标签: cesil

Note: This "How it used to be" s tory is told by my old chum Chris Lewis. We both worked at a company called Cirrus Designs in the 1980s in Manchester, England. Chris saw my recent article How it used to be: Meeting my first microcomputer and immediately emailed me to say "I have some stories of my own." The tale below is brilliant; hopefully this will be the first of many... I was one of those kids who took everything apart to see how it worked, much to the annoyance of my parents. When I started playing with electronics my mother told me to be careful. The only computers she had seen were on Star Trek , and they blew up in showers of sparks every week throwing some unknown crewman across the bridge. When I got to Leigh Grammar School in Lancashire, England in 1973 aged 11, (the school had been going since at least 1655), there was no IT training on the curriculum, but we had an enthusiastic teacher, Mr Sagar, who ran the Computer Club after school. I don't know what we'd have done without teachers like that, who gave up their free time to share their enthusiasm with us kids.   Chris in a high school photo (back row, 4th from the right!) The first thing we learnt was a programming language called Computer Education In Schools Instructional Language ( CESIL ) which was like a simplified form of assembly code. Our coding consisted of filling in "lozenges", using a 2B pencil, on punched cards which were pre-printed with CESIL commands. We'd then put an elastic band round the cards and they would be posted off to the council for running on the Wigan Council Rates computer. With luck you'd get the results a week later, and if you were lucky your program would have been read correctly (if you pressed too hard the depression stopped the reader working) and if you were very, very lucky you had no bugs and might have actually been able to add some integers together and print out the result. This was VERY exciting; you have to remember that pocket calculators were still a couple of years away then.   Chris "Then" (left) and "Now" (right) Once we had grasped the basics of input and output and learned a little about the Turing Machine, we moved onto learning BASIC with its line numbers and REM statements. At first, our efforts were captured on coding sheets with a pre-printed (on the school office duplicating machine) grid with space for the line numbers, keywords and operands. These would be posted off to the council again, where typists would type it all in, exactly what we had written, mistakes and all. By this time Mr Sagar had been joined by Mrs Johnson the maths teacher, the only female teacher in an all-male school. We learned about random number generation and a popular program was the "Poem Program" she taught us. This took strings of words and would randomly jumble them into poems, being teenage school kids we tried to make it say rude things, often about Mrs Johnson. She took it all in good humour though. Now we had our own club-room, well actually it was the "Medical Officer's room" but as there wasn't a Medical Officer despite what it said on the door, and it was only ever used for the "cough" test once a year. There was also a cupboard where Mr Langley kept all his wigs from The Mikado, but that is another story. We also had a couple of innovations, a hand card punch which was an ancient thing but if you could learn your ASCII alphabet and you had the fingers of a pianist, you could actually punch your cards yourself, rather than writing coding sheets. And we also had the height of modernity, a teletype, with its paper tape punch. I remember someone once tipping the waste container over my head, with its tiny circles of paper, I shook them out of my hair and then was most annoyed at how unfair it was that I had to stay behind after school to vacuum out the keyboard. We still weren't "on-line" though. We wrote our programs, typed then into the Teletype and punched our paper tapes which we left rolled up with an elastic band. Mr Sagar would then laboriously join them all into one long paper tape using the Teletype copy facility and upload them to the council computer in the evening, using a 300 baud acoustic coupler with the phone handset fitted into its rubber cups. The results came back in the post a week later. I do remember Mrs Johnson coming in once, with the results of our programming efforts, with a stack of green music ruled paper. We were supposed to have written a program to generate 10 random numbers. She handed the club members their results, tearing off a couple of pages each, and then she got to mine. There was about an inch high stack of paper, all covered in random numbers. My loop test had been wrong, and the program had gone into an infinite loop, churning out pages and pages of random numbers until someone noticed and turned it off. At age 16 in 1978 we went off to the local Tertiary College and there was rumour that they had an actual computer on the premises. I had seen two actual computers before, on school trips. Once we went to Preston Polytechnic to see their computer, and they printed out posters of The Flintstones for us, in ASCII characters on the ubiquitous green music ruled paper. Another time we went to see the Daresbury Nuclear Physics Laboratory in Cheshire, England and amongst other things we were shown the computer room. There was a vast room full of disc drives, tape drives, card readers and such, and at one end was some rather comfortable looking seating arranged in a circle, so we sat down. This seating turned out to be a multi-million dollar Cray-1 Supercomputer which they had on-loan, and which out-performed the entire room of computers they told us. They weren't too happy to have school kids sitting on it as I remember. Apart from the school trips the only real computers I had seen before were on TV, and usually consisted of banks of rotating tapes and panels with lots of flashing lights. Near my desk in the maths classroom was a tall grey metal cupboard with steel doors. I assumed this was the college computer and I imagined I could hear clicks and noises coming from inside. It turned out that it was just a cupboard, and the Computer was a brand new RM 380Z , an early Z80 based 8bit educational computer running CP/M mounted into a rack at the back of the room. By now computing was part of our maths classes as well as an after school hobby. With a few dozen maths students and one computer, you still had to share it, but the magic of typing in a program, and seeing the results on the screen, in real time, was always a joy. I feel I should say something about "The kids today" and things like "Xbox 360s" and how young people can all download the latest games but know nothing about programming, but I feel so old already, so I won't (but I have! :-)