> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of > John Sessoms > > The part that mattered and y'all kind of missed was the "and don't > touch anything else kid". > > I really was a kid, not yet old enough to drive. It was very unusual > someone my age would even be allowed inside the computer room. Not only > was I allowed in, I was allowed to do something, a very VERY minor > something, with the computer. > > I wasn't even particularly interested in computers. If you can't take > it apart to see how it works, what good is it? I already understood > enough about the grown-up world to know "THEY" were never going to let > me do that. > > It was just the least boring place for me to wait around until my dad > decided to quit work and I could catch a ride home. I don't remember > what they used the computer for, although I'm sure I was told at some > time or another. It was an insurance company, so it must have had > something to do with keeping track of the money. >
My first job in computing was working for a small company which sold cigarettes and tobacco (with names like "Bob's Black Bogey") from railway station kiosks. They took on raw trainees because they didn't have to pay very much, and in fact they paid me so little that I received a state pension book which topped up my pay to dole levels. They took me on because I lived close enough to the office to be able to walk there, and not spend money on fares. Anyway, they'd had the same computer since the 1970s, an ICL 1901T with 24-bit words. It didn't have an operating system, just an 'Exec' which loaded programs from paper tape, and wrote messages to a teleprinter <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICT_1900_series#Executive>. I had to support a purchase ledger system written in PLAN (the assembler for the machine), which had been developed in the early 60s. Part of the difficulty of the job was that there was no documentation (is there ever?) and that the lady who used to operate it all had retired and gone to live in Australia, so unavailable to help. I couldn't, in my youthful naivety, believe that someone of retirement age could have grasped computing of such complexity. They explained that in fact she'd started working there as the cleaner, and that after she'd finished she used to read the operating manual for the computer. She eventually persuaded them that she could operate the machine, so they promoted her from cleaner to operator. From there she taught herself to program and eventually to look after the system. When I say there was no documentation, actually there was a flowchart. Hand drawn, as they all were back then, it extended over many, many sheets of paper which when unfolded covered 4 desks placed next to each other. The rectangles were about half the size of the normal ones from flowchart templates, and they were packed together very, very tightly indeed. I never succeeded in grasping the full structure (I use the term loosely) of the system because luckily a year after I joined the company was taken over by a multinational brewer and I went to work in a modern IT department, with computer screens and an operating system and stuff like that. That early training has been invaluable though. I work with another guy now who has been around even longer than I have, and you can see sometimes that the younger people think we're dinosaurs who can't possibly fathom the complexities of their crappy little SQL statements, but it's a pleasure to see their astonishment when we show that we're not entirely a waste of oxygen. B -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
