Continuing my recent blog theme about being one of the first ‘home user’ computer generation, I’m moving on to the first time I had to take exams seriously – ‘O’ Levels (GCSEs as they are now called).
It’s fair to say that my school in Abu Dhabi had no experience of providing this course. So they brought in a teacher specifically to teach Computer Studies, so at the end of the year we could take our ‘O’ Level.
Well, I don’t know where the teacher came from, but everyone in the class (keeping in mind we were 15 or 16 years old) had a sense that he wasn’t qualified to be a teacher. He knew his way around 3 computer programs and that was about it. The programs were very early versions of Word Processor ans spreadsheet software. Of course they were very heavy going compared with what we expect from Microsoft today.
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There was also the ability to program in Fortran (a computer language I never really mastered) and BASIC. Now I knew BASIC pretty well from my home computer that I spent most evenings on. Unfortunately the version of BASIC on my Atari 800 was different to the version we had at school. The basics were the same (pun intended) but it meant that if I worked on a program at home, it had to be rewritten to work on the computer system at school. A nuisance but good programming experience I guess…
Anyway, back to our teacher. He was a rather tall gangly fellow, and quite ungainly in his manner. He was also ridiculously unforgiving. Keeping in mind we were trying to learn, any mistake would be ceased upon as a reason to give us detention! Not exactly a nurturing teaching environment. As a result, it’s fair to say he became rather unpopular. So much so that we nicknamed him ‘E.T.’. The movie had only juist come out, and our teacher would shuffle about in a similar manner to everyone’s favourite Alien.
He also had a bit of the Darth Vader about him. With the advent of the Empire Strikes Back, and the all-time shocking revelation of Luke’s father, we would parody him about this. After class my classmates would take turns asking ‘Tell me Sir, is Darth Vader my father’, resulting in everyone falling about laughing. (Hey – we were 15 years old, what do you expect?!)
Anyway, the upshot was that students without a home computer were at a severe disadvantage, especially when it came to the ‘O’ level exam, which bore little resemblance to what we were taught at school. Fortunately there was a practical element – we had to write a program – and since that represented 50% of the overall exam most of us managed to scrape through.
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I got a ‘C’, which in those days was the lowest score above a fail. I was gutted (Only A’s and occasional B’s for me…) but nonetheless, of all the exams I took in my life, this was the standout memory.Â
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And it’s all thanks to E.T…!Â
