Philip Belben wrote:
You had a teacher for O-level computer studies? Hard
luck! A friend
and I studied it on our own. This may have been why we did so well (I
got an A and he a B). Or maybe it was luck. Most candidates were about
3 generations of technology ahead of the examiners, so grades were
pretty random, I think...
Me too... Although the school I went to had a small "computer room"
full of BBC Micros, I wasn't allowed to use any of them because they
didn't have a computing teacher, or indeed any spare teacher who could
just supervise. So I did my computing O-grade studies at home with my
ZX Spectrum (careful examination of the "rules" said that it didn't
actually matter *what* you wrote the practical code on), and submitted
it as Spectrum BASIC, pseudocode and roughly transcribed by hand into
BBC Basic with "This isn't tested but might be about right, barring any
Atom-isms" caveats. The actual report I wrote up on a Sirius 1 borrowed
from the company my Dad worked for. I was more proud
of the homebrew
printer port and printing software for the Spectrum than the
coursework.
That was my first "banging hardware" code, really, and it worked quite
well. I just used the ROM routines to detokenise the code, and rattled
it out to the printer instead of the screen.
Oh, and I got a 2. Not bad considering how incredibly lazy and
disinclined to do any school work I was (still am, really).
As a sidenote, when I went up north to visit my Mum a couple of weeks
ago, most of the 1970s-built main building of the school had been
knocked down. The week before, they'd run a "last tour" before the JCBs
moved in. I kind of wish I'd gone. I know a guy rescued a bunch of Mac
Classics and Acorn Archimedeses though ;-)
Gordon