classiccmp-digest v1 #690

From: John Miller <jfmiller_at_nc.rr.com>
Date: Sat Oct 13 18:38:42 2001

>> CESIL (Computer Education in Schools Instructional Language),
>Ha ha, I'd forgotten about that one... I remember typing in a CESIL
>interpreter into the Speccy from some magazine or other. It
>was even slower than ZX BASIC though so I gave up on it after a couple of
weeks..
I wrote that "interpreter". It was published in ZX Computing I think. I
still have the magazine upstairs. The original program was written for my
'O'-level in Computer Studies. The magazine had already published Moon
Rescue (a rip-off of Lunar Lander) that I wrote one weekend after Swap Shop
had been cut short for some sporting event. Smelling the lure of money (15
quid was a lot for a 15-year old in 1981!), I thought I'd send of the
ZX-CESIL after converting it from my ZX-81 to my Spectrum.
I remember using the real ICL-CES CESIL at school - writing out the code on
sheets of paper, sending them off to the local poly. We had a TTY link
with an old-fashioned modem and a paper tape reader to boot. We were very
jealous of one of the other schools that had a VDU monitor!
Ah, yes. Those were the days. My friends and I used to talk about how
great it would be to have a VDU with such hi-res graphics that you could do
1024 x 1024 in full 24-bit RGB. We calculated the cost of the RAM to hold
one frame and it came to hundreds of thousands of pounds. Not in our life
time, we thought. Hee-hee.
BTW, I've seen my ZX-CESIL2 on a Russian Spectrum software repository site
that you can download and run via a Z80 emulator. Pointless but
fascinating!
John.
Received on Sat Oct 13 2001 - 18:38:42 BST