My first encounter with computers was in 1975. I was then working as a highways engineer for Mid Glamorgan County Council. My team had an ICL mainframe computer which was housed in a very large room in County Hall, some 10 minutes’ walk away from our offices in Greyfriars Road. Our terminals in the office had no screens, so we had to send someone to fetch our print-outs from County Hall twice a day. This created a mountain of paper, and much of it was wasted because of simple errors. In those days we had no bespoke computer packages, we had to write our own software, and if we had a comma in the wrong place or a digit in the wrong column we had to start all over again. The first programming language I learnt was Fortran.
One of our routine tasks was to collect traffic flow data from the entire highways network in the County. This was done by sensors on the road, such as pneumatic road tubes, or piezoelectric sensors or magnetic loops embedded in the road which transmitted the data to roadside cabinets. Every few weeks one of our team had to go and collect the punched tapes from the cabinets and bring them to the office to be analysed. The data obtained included traffic flows by hour, day, direction of flow, type of vehicle etc. This enabled us to design new roads using traffic flow projections some 30 years into the future.
This is just one example of programming developed in those early days of computing in the field of highways and transportation.
Renée Martin, June 2020