Information Systems

Let’s have another boring computing post.  

Writing in November about how careful we once had to be in saving and backing up our computer files, I remembered something else that was difficult: just getting information in or out of a computer. It happens now as if by magic: writing and reading stuff on smart phones, social media, Blogger, ... it is  all so easy. We don’t have to think about what goes on behind the scenes. Most of us have no interest. 

But, until the nineteen-nineties, computers were for nerds. As one of those nerds, I feel fortunate to have seen how things developed. I could still write programs to accept typed-in text, or to send a screen to a printer, but thankfully I no longer have to.

My desk at work in 1990

Back in 1970, computers were near-fantasies. Few had seen one except on television or in futuristic films: ‘Tomorrow’s World’ and ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ come to mind. At work in accountancy, we had one client who used ledger cards with magnetic stripes, and there were golf-ball typewriters with primitive memory, but they were thought of as business machines rather than computers.

My friend, Neville, was the first I knew to latch on to the potential. He undertook a project as part of his business studies course, and that led to a job in the computer division of a Hull supermarket. This is the kind of thing he worked on: a system to help supermarket managers replenish stocks. They drew lines on forms that could be read by machine. It used forests of paper. The used forms (blank on the back) kept Neville and friends in rough notepaper for years; me throughout my university studies. They were great for lecture notes.

1970s Supermarket Stock System

Around this time, I took a job with a Leeds clothing manufacturer where account entries were made through yet more football-coupon forms. The forms went to a data centre to be coded on to punched cards and fed into “the computer”, which we were never allowed near. The data was printed on huge concertinaed sheets bound into weighty folders. Later, we all had to go on a course to be taught how to write numbers properly, in readiness for Optical Character Recognition which cut out the card punching part of the process. The weighty folders remained long after I’d left.  

1970s Nominal Ledger System

Later, on a computing course, I learnt programming on teletypewriter terminals connected to a mainframe computer. They printed all your input and output on wide rolls of paper, and reprinted it all repeatedly. 

These step-by-step exchanges continued after screens came in. Everything was typed in as text and printed on to a scrolling screen. It even happened with games. I remember playing a version of ‘Star Trek’ in which you moved the ship by typing a location you wanted to fly to, such as G27, and it dislayed and re-displayed your new position and those of all the objects around after every move. The ease of Windows, icons, mice, pointers, and colour graphics were still a long time away, and touch-sensitive screens even further. Voice and gesture input were not even dreamed of.

Not until around 1985 did we see the kind of systems we might recognise today, with on-screen forms and menus. The first I worked with was written in DIBOL and looked like this:

 

You could get quite excited about it. But, although it looked a bit like a modern windows system, it wasn’t. Every part of that screen is made up of text-like characters. It had to be planned out very carefully. Fortunately, not by me.

This system can be seen on the right-hand screen in the photograph of my desk at the top of this post. It was on a ‘dumb’ terminal connected to the DEC computer system. The screen on the left is an IBM business PC of that time, similarly unsophisticated. It was really something to be allowed two screens! 

Just a few more of the things I kept. Like the old disks and tapes on the earlier post, they were used as teaching examples. They won’t be needed again.

For Northsider

Note with it: Ticket (£1.10) and promotional beer mat. Barclay James Harvest. Spring Tour 74. I went with Bob S- to see them at Leeds Town Hall on Tuesday 25th June as he had a spare ticket. We were fairly near the front and I was pretty deaf for a day or two. The ticket has the top corner torn off on admission.

The drummer was very exuberant: arms all over the place.

See Northsider's post: http://northsiderdave.blogspot.com/2023/05/an-old-bjh-song-relevant-for-our-times.html 

Airmyn Clock

This delightful folly is Airmyn Clock. It was erected in 1865 by the tenants of the Airmyn Estates to honour their beneficent landlord, George Percy, the second Earl of Beverley, who had funded  the village school some years earlier.

It greeted me regularly throughout childhood: on the way to Grandma’s on Saturday mornings, visiting friends by bicycle, on cross-country runs from school, learning to drive round its awkward bend, walking to sixth-form parties and under-age drinking in the Percy Arms. I never took much notice of it in those days. What I could not then have imagined is its connection to my wife, despite her being from the South of England.

Airmyn Clock was designed by Henry Francis Lockwood, an architect best-known for his grand buildings around Bradford, such as the City Hall, St. George’s Hall, Salts Mill and the whole of the associated town of Saltaire where a Lockwood Street is named after him. The clock bears a strong resemblance to his larger Italianate designs, Bradford Wool Exchange in particular. He may have been known in the Airmyn area because of his earlier practice in Hull.

Henry had around ten children, which makes for a complicated genealogy. One line, by way of Ireland and Devon, found its way to the Home Counties where my wife was born. She is a direct descendant of Henry Francis Lockwood.

My wife therefore claims strong Yorkshire antecedents. When we moved (back in my case) to Yorkshire, she took to pronouncing the short Northern As like a local. It would not have gone down at all too well to be asking her Bradford service users whether they were managing all right in the “baarthrum”. 

Image from Geograph. Creative Commons Licence. Copyright Neil Theasby.