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I first became aware of computers in 1964 in the sixth from.  As well as A level studies my school insisted that all sixth formers did a selection of other subjects according to their interests, abilities and possible usefulness for further studies or work.  Those subjects, each two periods a week, were non specialist and usually an introduction to topics that one not otherwise cover. 

One of my chosen subjects was ‘Maths for Sixth Form’ – don’t ask why.  Amongst other things, now forgotten, we did Venn diagrams, unheard of until then but now I believe staples of school maths, and touched on Boolean Algebra (not much idea then and none now!) and the binary system.  As part of all this it was decided we should go on a ‘trip’ to the County Council Treasurer’s department in County Hall just down the road to view the computer.  This was a main frame machine handling all the financial transactions, payroll etc.  As I remember, there was not much to look at, just a big apparatus in a large room.  We were given an explanation, pretty meaningless and long forgotten, and also a basic introduction to very simple Fortran, the machine’s programming language.  We were each given a print out card to keep and I think I did hang on to mine for some time as a souvenir of seeing something very exciting and which would never concern me as it was clearly only for very clever, and probably male, boffins.  More than the computer my clearest memory of the day is having a rather good free lunch in the staff canteen whilst my Father, an employee in a different department in County Hall looked across with his more staple paid for fare.

My university geography degree required passing a compulsory statistics course in which computing played no part.  All calculations were done with books of log tables and working out formulae by paper and pen.  I then became aware of computers in use when working as a local authority planner but in the 1970s they were not for us and a closed book being the concern of the highways engineers with whom we worked closely in the same building.  My passive brush with computing continued, awareness but no involvement. 

In the late 1980s it was decided that a home computer would be an asset for our secondary age children to assist with schoolwork and my husband selected and bought an Acorn BBC computer.  I had no interest in it or knowledge, it was just something that sat in the spare bedroom on a special little computer table bought from Argos.  I didn’t even know how to switch it on.  It used discs, square hard things that lived in a special plastic box.  I don’t think it was much more than a word processor – my husband typed out a Master’s degree thesis on it.  I am informed that it may still be in our loft! (why?!).    

It was then time in the 1990s for me to learn how to use computers as they would be playing a more significant role in planning work.  We were all sent on Council courses, at first for word processing only.  I returned from my first stressed, vowing that I would never use one again as I couldn’t get the hang of it all and this thing called a mouse seemed to shoot out of control all over the place.  Personal computers on desks were being rolled out gradually and you were given one when you were deemed able and responsible enough and your line of work merited it.  Until then you had to go to the computer person in your department and ask them to do what you needed.  Eventually computer use was second nature to us all for report and evidence writing, bypassing the typing pool into which work would disappear for days, statistical projections, site histories, e mails (internal only!), databases on numerous matters, and GIS (geographic information systems) and mapping applications.

I have now retired but enjoy using several computer devices for administration, social contact, photo processing etc.  I have travelled a long way in 50 years from visiting my father’s work location to simply view a computer to seeing my children’s focus on computer and IT ability and use in their careers whilst my own ability and interest in computer use has developed.       

Margaret Lewis, June 2020

I used SPSS a statistics package at university but all that involved was writing coding sheets and receiving back printouts of analyses so not what I’d call real computing at all.

That came later in 1978 when I was working as a research assistant at Sheffield Poly as was. I was developing a reading test for school leavers and not only had data to analyse but also wanted to see if I could set up a computerised question banking system from which different tests could be extracted.

The Computer Services dept were very helpful, listened carefully and then told me to go to the library, get out McCraken’s book on Fortran and do it myself. I taught myself Fortran and got on with it.

I’m still programming – the calendars that appear on the U3A website for each group are derived from Beacon and added into Google Calendar using the Python programming language.

Owen Parry, June 2020

As an undergraduate I’d never encountered computers so a new world opened up when I went to America as a postgrad in 1965. In my first term in the Geography Department at Northwestern University – in a northern suburb of Chicago – my supervisor decided that I should do a computing course in the Civil Engineering Department. He obviously didn’t realise that it was intended for postgrads who already had a ‘hard science’ degree.  The course concentrated on teaching postgrads to write programmes in machine language – Compass – for a CDC 3400 mainframe computer (not an IBM machine in sight). I’d never heard of Fortran before so didn’t know that I was writing something that Fortran compiled into a form – in this case Compass – which the computer could use.

My first test: writing a program to find the maximum value of a set of numbers.  However, reading in the numbers and printing out the results had to be done using Fortran, so I learned things ‘in the right order’ – the computer would ‘understand’ me straightaway. Although the other postgrads had already learned to use Fortran  they then had ‘to progress’ to Compass.

I bought an excellent teach yourself book on Fortran and was introduced to the world of ‘READ’, ‘DIMENSION’, ‘DO’ loop  and ‘GO TO’ statements! Just as important, Margaret, the wife of one of the other Geography postgrads from Grimsby, was a computer whizz kid.

Like most postgrads at the time I had to prepare my own punched cards, a tedious process as you could enter up to 80 characters per card. And one typing error meant redoing the whole card. The Campus Computing Centre was a 10-minute walk away. I’d hand the deck of cards in and hope they were all in the right order and that there wasn’t a single typing error. Otherwise, when collecting results several hours later or the next day I just found a terse message – ‘input error 23 ’ or pure gobbledegook because I’d got the order of symbols wrong – as Margaret put it – the machine is trying ‘to obey your data’. Still, it was very satisfying to find that my programme (eventually) worked and gave the right answer. It seems amazing to me now what results you got from a mainframe machine with a memory capacity of just 196 kilobytes – about 20% of a Megabyte.

After that, I never looked back, progressing to working with two American postgrads to write a programme simulating average queue lengths of traffic at a busy crossroads. It particularly makes me nostalgic to remember working with these two other guys – incredibly friendly from the outset, almost as if they’d known you all their lives, full of ‘get up and go’, not worried about seeming over-enthusiastic. Not at all like the much more reserved British – not better, but very different.

Sinclair ZX81

My children were introduced to computing before I was. My daughter now 56 reminded me that she had one of these in 1982.

I don’t believe I was ever aware of it.!

Amstrad PCW8256

My introduction to computers occurred in 1983 when I was sent to Bahrain to open an office for a project which I thought was for two weeks, but lasted for nearly five years.

I ran a small two person office, just myself and a secretary, with occasional short visits by support staff from our Cardiff office.

One of the engineers I worked with asked if I could look after his pc while he returned to the UK, for a month. The A/C in his villa would be turned off while he was away, and as my office had A/C he would like me to look after it until he returned. Bahrain temperatures in the summer are well over 100C

I had no knowledge of computing, and was using traditional drawing board, tee square, set square scale rulers, typewriter, tracing paper, paper fax machine and telephone to run our office.

So it sat on my desk for a month with only the occasional prod from me. The engineer colleague left no instructions how to use it !

Like the first station running AutoCAD

In 1985 I was designing and building a headquarters for the Bahrain Oil Company, and when visiting their offices became aware of CAD (computer aided drafting) for the first time. 

The organization being partly American had put individual pc’s on each engineers desk and were running the earliest versions of AutoCAD.

I could see that this was going to be the future and the end of traditional hand drafting.

So for the next year I used the opportunity in my spare time to work with one of their engineers to learn how to use a pc and AutoCAD.

First Home Workstation

In 1988 I was back in Cardiff, and given the task of spreading the gospel of computers and CAD into our UK offices.

This gradually led me away from designing buildings, and instead developing systems, training architects and technicians in CAD, quality control and teaching my reluctant partners and staff to use computers and related software from CAD, word-processing, spreadsheets, and  project financial management systems

To keep ahead of those I was teaching, I realised I needed a workstation at home. It was built by our then IT equipment supplier.

And cost me in 1988 over £5K, much to my wife’s horror.

In later years, I persuaded my office to fund the inevitable upgrades in software and hardware.

At the time I hung up my boots in 2016, we were running seven UK offices all linked to a central network with my former computer technician now a full time computer manager.

2D CAD has now become 3D. BIM. REVIT and all sorts of clever software to create architecture.

But enthusing one day about the advantages of computers and CAD over hand drafting, a friend and fellow consulting engineer reminded me that he always admired my skill as an architect to pick up a 2B pencil and make a quick sketch of an idea, or detail.

Don’t give up drawing was his message, and I confess that the architects I admire most are those that can draw well.  It is too easy to use a computer to create technically correct architectural dross!

David Hughes, June 2020

My first encounter, in the very early 70s at U.C.Swansea, Applied Science / Mechanical Engineering,  was an ICL (maybe 1900E ? or was that a Car ?).

It would run  FORTRAN and SORFOR (Southampton Fortran) using Punch cards. I also vaguely remember there being ALGOL and POP2.

I wrote my programs,  punched the cards and then submitted them to the Computer Department twice weekly, before waiting excitedly and often disappointedly for the results – very often a syntax error… try again.

You needed to get the Program correct so it would run properly, before you could actually submit the Data for your Calculations.
The output came on a large wide roll of paper that you had to tear the holed edges off, and fold correctly.

In my final year we could use a MOP (Multi Online Programming Terminal) that eliminated the cards, and you could book time to sit in a small room with the MOP and enter your own data, a very noisy experience I seem to remember. I did a programme for Stress analysis of a live Back axle for a car/ light van.

Paul de Gues, June 2020

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