Links

Context: Computing in Schools in the 1970s

Studying Computer Studies during the late 1960s and 70s might have meant never actually seeing a real computer. Machines made by the likes of IBM and ICL were big (taking up a whole room), expensive and power hungry. The time devoted to processing secondary school student programs would be low, mostly when the computer wasn't in demand (e.g. in the evenings). Most programs would have been written on paper and then taken to the nearest computer centre partnering with the school. An operator would read the pieces of paper and produce your program as a set of punched cards or a roll of paper tape (depending on the input device that the computer used). These could then be input, with any output to a line printer. This printout could then be returned to the school, along with the cards or roll of paper tape so that pupils could see if their program had successfully executed.

If you were really lucky, you might have had a Teletype in your school that connected to the 'mainframe' via modem for interactive processing.

Computing in schools in the 1970s, exam papers and paper tape (BBC)

• BBC schools ran a series of programmes in the late 1970s-early 80s, which give a fantastic period insight into computing at the time.

Archives

• There is a large collection of ICL paperwork kept at the University of Manchester, including some ICL-CES items. Details here.
• The Science Museum at Warton have a small amount of ICL-CES material (part of a larger ICL archive). They have some textbooks and some of the newsletters. Link updated to the archive.org copy.
• The University of London library has first edition pupil book 1,2 & 3, as well as a Book 1 Teachers Guide (second revised edition), as well first printing book 1 and book 3 teachers guide. They also have the IRIS pupil's book (in hardback), as well as an A4 IRIS teacher's guide supplement, which consists of 24 loose sheets.
• The Institute of Education at the University of London holds some public records of the Hoskyns development of CES, and there is also the Gabriel Goldstein archives which includes several ICL-CES newletters and associated paperwork, as well as many other computing education documents from the 70s and 80s that make reference to ICL-CES.

CESIL / Software

• CESIL.org — Ian Dunmore's site, with links at the bottom to his GitHub repo with his Python implementations of CESIL and CESIL "Plus".
• Visual CESIL for Windows — Runs on Windows 11 (Windows may prompt you to download the appropriate .NET runtime, but it should do this automatically).
• CESILPy — A CESIL interpreter written in Python.
• CESIL interpreter for RTB — Works on Linux, Raspberry Pi etc.