Category: Member post

It was one of these three, I think probably the middle one …

… that kicked off my interest in computing. Of course these were very much analog mechanical calculating machines, and I never got the hang of how to use them however hard I tried in the Statistics Practical labs at UCW Aberystwyth in the period 1969-70, but they did revive my interest in mathematics which I’d had to drop as an ‘A’ Level subject, and soon after, multi-variate statistics became my focus for much of the next 10 years as I struggled to complete (#fail) a PhD.

However, when we went through the induction course and were told that we should sign-up for a course on programming in Wirth’s Algol 60, I didn’t delay. The die was cast, my future was sealed. I spent the next three years learning Fortran IV, then Dartmouth Basic (used on Teletypes) to submit jobs to the Elliot 4130, later a ICL 190x that the Computer Centre had. My data sets were so large I had to submit jobs to the Regional Computing Centre at Manchester which meant I had to work every evening to get the data set correct, then submit the job through a landline (modem connection) so that it ran through the night and returned the job the next day for me to print out the results and prepare my data set, or change the algorithm, for the next nights job. Oh happy days!!! Oh to be so young and energetic again!!!

Later when abandoning my lecturing role at a College of Education I did a MSc Computer Science conversion course at Bradford where I was given a Digital Equipment PDP 11/60 to play with and build my own Disk Operating System (Modos) using another of Wirth’s programming languages – Modula. He went on to develop Ada which was widely adopted in the defence and general scientific community. So that led me into Systems Programming.

I returned to Cardiff in 1981 at what was then South Glamorgan Institute of Higher Education as Systems Programmer for their brand new Prime 500 computer and had to learn a new operating system – Primos, and new programming languages – PLP (as well as using my Fortran experience).

Latterly as computing developed and fighting for time-share and batch-processing came to be a thing of the past – much as mechanical calculating machines had disappeared – I embraced the internet in the early 1990’s. I created the first website for what had become UWIC, and had learnt a fair bit about HTML, and scripting.

It all went downhill from then on as management responsibilities took over and programming became a thing of the past. Of course I do still dabble, but really – it’s way beyond me, as my eldest son tells me on more than one occasion.