I'm Counting On You…

Last night it dawned on me that, not only had I celebrated my 38th wedding anniversary just a few days ago and that I would be 61 years old in just a few days time, but that I had started working with computers over 40 years ago. That's a long time!

When I left school in 1967, I'd had more than enough of organised academia, but for some reason chose to go into the "safe" career of banking. It didn't take me long with bowler-hatted nine-to-fivers for me to realise that I had made a big mistake and so I started thinking about something I had already examined during my time at school: computing. I figured it was something with a future, though was warned by the manager of the National Westminster branch for which I worked (Grosvenor Gardens, I think it was — it overlooked the gardens of Buckingham Palace and was not far from the National Coal Board) that I would become a robot, a machine, and would end up nowhere. Such discouraging words only served to spur me on and soon I became a trainee programmer for what was then Elders and Fyffes and would soon become the Fyffes Group. This was in about September 1968.

Fyffes had an IBM 360 Model 20 computer, housed in a special room, with false floor, air-conditioning and a sort of air-lock entrance. The machine itself had a CPU with 16K central storage (core storage I think it was called, and, yes, you read that correctly — a tad more than 16,000 bytes), three removable hard disks, each of a massive 2.5 megabytes, two magnetic tape decks, a punched-tape reader, an 80-column card-reader, and a stunning 1200 lines-per-minute chain printer (did you get that? 1200 LPM, with each line containing 128 characters). Doing a core-dump really made the paper spew out of that machine!

Fyffes also had some legacy equipment, made up of IBM collators, tabulators, and other -ors I'm sure, which were programmed through plugboards or "control panels" that consisted of a matrix of connectors: using wires, one set up circuits between these connectors in order to achieve the desired result. A sort of hard programming, I suppose. You can see machines of this sort if you got to this page. I made a few programs on these machines whilst learning how to operate the Model 20, but soon moved to the programming department proper, where I learned RPG and Basic Assembler.

The legacy equipment was hardly used, but the Model 20 served to provide all of the sales statistics for the UK, as well as the personnel management and accounting.

Soon Fyffes decided to replace the Model 20 with a Model 30, so a big conversion was required and I also had to learn PL/1, which was a new general-purpose language being touted at the time by IBM (presumably as an alternative, in Fyffes's case, to COBOL). I wrote a few programs in the language, but soon moved, along with several other members of Fyffes DP section, to (take a deep breath) Futcher, Head, Smith and Tucker, a group of accountants in a rather run-down part of London, near Liverpool Street station. It was back to RPG there, working again on an IBM 360 Model 30.

In August 1971 I moved to Belgium. But that's for later.