Agents Of Maths Destruction

New Month Old Post: First posted 18th February, 2018. 

Who needs brains any more except to ponder how computers and calculators have changed the way we do everyday calculations?

At one time we needed brains for long multiplication and long division, drummed into us at primary school from time immemorial. It is so long since I tried I’m not sure I can remember. Let’s try on the back of a proverbial envelope.

Long multiplication and long division with numbers and with pre-decimal currency

To do it you had to be able to add up, ‘take away’ and know your times tables – eight eights are sixty four, and so on – but just about everyone born before 1980 could do these things without having to think. 

Those of us still older, born before say 1960, could multiply and divide pre-decimal currency – remember, twelve pence to the shilling, twenty shillings to the pound. You had to have grown up with this arcane system to understand it. Perhaps we should have kept it. It might have put foreigners off from wanting to come here and there would have been no need for Brexit. As the example reveals, even I struggle with the division.

Logarithms and Antilogarithms

Then, there were logarithms and antilogarithms, as thrown at us in secondary school. To multiply or divide two numbers, you looked up their logs in a little book, added them to multiply, or subtracted to divide, and then converted the result back into the answer by looking it up in a table of antilogs. For example, using my dinky little Science Data Book, bought for 12p in 1973: 

To multiply 2468 x 3579:
log 2468 = 3.3923; log 3579 = 3.5538; sum = 6.9461; antilog  = 8,833,000

To divide 3579 by 24:
log 3579 = 3.5538; log 24 = 1.3802; subtraction  =  2.1736; antilog  149.1

It’s absolute magic, although the real magicians were individuals like Napier and Briggs who invented it. How ever did they come up with the idea? It was not perfect. Log tables gave only approximate rounded answers and it was tricky handling numbers with different magnitudes of ten (represented by the 3., 6., 1. and 2. to the left of the decimal points), but it was very satisfying. You needed ‘A’ Level Maths to understand how they actually worked, but not to be able to use them. Some also learned to use a slide rule for these kinds of calculations – a mechanical version of logarithms – but as I never had to, I’ll skip that one.

A Slide Rule

Due to a hopeless lack of imagination, I left school to work for a firm of accountants in Leeds. Contrary to what you might think, our arithmetical skills were rarely stretched beyond adding up long columns of numbers. We whizzed through the totals in cash books and ledgers, and joked about adding up the telephone directory for practice. The silence of the office would be punctuated by cries of torment and elation: “oh pillocks!” as one desolate soul failed to match the totals they had produced moments earlier, or a tuneless outbreak of the 1812 Overture as another triumphantly agreed a ‘trial balance’ after four or five attempts.

A 1960s Sumlock Comptometer.

But when it came to checking pages and pages of additions we had comptometer operators. Thousands of glamorous girls left school to train as Sumlock ‘comps’, learning how to twist and contort their fingers into impossible shapes and thump, thump, thump through thousands of additions in next to no time without ever looking at their machines. By using as many fingers as it took, they could enter all the digits of a number in a single press. It probably damaged their hands for life. I still don’t understand how they did it. There was both mystery and glamour in going out on audit with a comp.

A 1950s Friden Electromechanical Calculator

Back at the office we had an old Friden electro-mechanical calculating machine. What a beast that was. I never once saw it used for work, but we discovered that if you switched it on and pressed a particular key it would start counting rapidly upwards on its twenty-digit register.

“What if we left it on over the bank holiday weekend?” someone wondered one Friday. “What would it get to by Tuesday?”

Fortunately we didn’t try. It would probably have burst into flames and set fire to all the papers in the filing room. But we worked it out (sadly not with the Friden). It operated at eight cycles per second. So after one minute it would have counted to 480, after one hour to 28,800, and after one day to 691,200. So if we had started it at five o’clock on Friday, it would have got to 2,534,400 by nine o’clock on Tuesday morning. So, counting at eight per second gets you to just two and half million after three and a half days! It shows how big two and a half million actually is.

The obvious questions to us awstruck nerdy accountant types were then “what would it get to in a year?”– about two hundred and fifty million, and “how long would it take to fill all twenty numbers in the top register with nines?”– about thirty nine million million years. As the building was demolished in the nineteen eighties it would have been switched off long before then. But what would it have got to? 

An ANITA 1011 LS1 Desktop Calculator (c1971)

The first fully electronic machine I saw was a late nineteen-sixties ANITA (“A New Inspiration To Accounting”), one of the first of many truly cringeworthy acronyms of the digital revolution) which looked basically like a comptometer with light tube numbers.  Then, fairly quickly with advances in integrated circuits and chip technology, came the ANITA desk top calculator followed by pocket handhelds that could read HELLHOLE, GOB and BOOBIES upside down, and 7175 the right way up. Intelligence was as redundant as comptometer operators. We revelled so much in our mindless machine skills that I once saw a garage mechanic work out the then 10% VAT on my bill with a calculator, and get it wrong and undercharge me. It can still be quicker to do things mentally rather than use a calculator.

Around 1972, my dad saw one of the first pocket calculators for sale in Boots. It could add, subtract, multiply and divide, pretty much state of the art for the time, but at £32 (about £350 in today’s money) and not as compact as now, it required large pockets in more ways than one. I told him it was ridiculously overpriced. Infuriatingly, he ignored me and bought one. On the following Monday they reduced the price down to just £6. It was his turn to be annoyed but the store manager refused to give a refund. He stuck with that calculator for the next thirty years.

How often now do we even use calculators? Not a lot for basic arithmetic. Do we ever doubt the calculations on our computer generated energy bills and bank statements? Do we check the VAT on our online purchases? Do accountants ever question the sums on their Excel spreadsheets? Just think, a fraction of a penny here, another there, carefuly concealed, embezzlement by a million roundings, it could all add up to a nice little earner.

Career Analysts

Another self-indulgent piece I have been hesitant to post, but what the heck, it was all so long ago. 

Long-time readers may recall I left accountancy to go to university in my mid-twenties. Nearly everyone said it was stupid, and even my most supportive friends were dubious. “Don’t cock it up this time”, Brendan said, face contorted at the thought. 

My record hardly inspired confidence: weak and failed exams at school, the same in accountancy, and teacher training abandoned after just one term. I couldn’t succeed at anything. Examinations either asked questions I could not answer, or questions I could not remember the answers to. It was destructive and self-defeating, but you keep it to yourself and pretend to the outside world that all is well. What gave me the nerve to try again? 

Desperation, you could say. But there was one other factor. In 1976, I sought professional careers advice. This was not the free-of-charge Local Education Authority service I had tried a couple of times and found superficial and low in quality. It was from a leading London firm called Career Analysts. I can’t remember what it cost, possibly around £80. It also involved a day in London. It was not cheap. Career Analysts still operates, and similar advice is nearly £900 now. My employer might have paid, they were good like that with staff development, but having given notice, I had to fund it myself. It was money well spent.  

There was a lengthy morning of pencil-and-paper tests, followed in the afternoon by a searching face-to-face discussion with an Occupational Psychologist. It is interesting, after fifty years, to look back at the report. 

One test, the Connolly Occupational Interest Questionnaire, identified preferences for different kinds of activities. I scored highest on the Welfare and Literary scales, but below average on Persuasive, Artistic, Computational, Scientific, and Practical activities.  

Another test looked at values. I had above or well-above-average Altruistic, Intellectual, and Aesthetic values, but much lower Power, Material, and Religious. This was said to indicate someone “rather emotional, sensitive and imaginative”, making me “fairly quiet, reserved and introverted”.  

But it was the longest and most extensive set of tests, the Morrisby Differential Test Battery, that surprised the psychologist. This was an intelligence test of seven different aptitudes. It was very difficult. I was above average in everything, scoring exceptionally high in problem-solving and numerical skills, and in the top 10% for Verbal items and handling detail. Perceptual, shape, and mechanical aptitudes were also high. The report said it showed a “very high level of ability”, and I was “certainly capable of passing an Honours degree or professional exams”. And I had thought I was no good at anything! 

It was flattering, but before being accused of showing off it is no big deal. The tests simply say that I am good with numbers and can concentrate on detail. As regards the CST (Compound Series Test) of problem-solving, it is only like Sudoku with shapes instead of numbers. The other things are not unusual; for example, lots of bloggers are better writers, blessed with wit, wisdom, and powers of expression the likes of which I could never hope to have. And whatever intelligence may be, the tests show but a part of it. They say nothing about important qualities such as memory, motivation, social skills, emotional intelligence, plain common sense, and so on, in many of which I am sadly deficient.  

However, it did raise the question of why my exam results had not been what they should have been. From our discussion, the psychologist thought I had been scraping through without proper study and exam techniques, and that emotionality had held me back. It explained the inability to do exams. He was not surprised I was unhappy. I was not occupied in ways best suited to my interests, aptitudes, and values, nor at an appropriate level, my succession of accountancy jobs having deteriorated into the compilation of monthly reports. Career-wise, it left the difficulty of obtaining the basic qualifications to change or progress. 

One of several suggestions was to take two Advanced Level subjects at evening classes, with a view to university the following year. I could work full-time until Christmas and save enough then to concentrate on studies through to the exams. They would be happy to act as referees for my university application. It was only what I wanted to hear, but to be told it was not unrealistic by an unbiased, objective, third party, helped repair confidence and sense of direction. 

Regarding subjects, the aptitude tests rules nothing out, but interests and values suggested avoiding the scientific and mathematical in favour of people and ideas, such as Literature and History. Then at university, Literature, History, Psychology, or Sociology would be appropriate, depending on whether I might prefer an administrative or welfare type of career. I took English Literature and Geography at evening classes, and Psychology at university. I worked hard, got the syllabuses, practised answering past questions, followed all the advice, and things began to go well. 

Considering my interests were not “of a scientific, technical or design kind”, it might seem odd I later went on to gain qualifications and work in Computing, but occupational interests give a snapshot in time, which reflected a desperate wish to escape accountancy and work more with people. At other times the results might have been different. Also, my kind of computing involved a large slice of psychology and creativity. Most areas of science and technology are exciting if they catch your imagination. They crush the wonder out of it at school. 

Unlike interests, I doubt personality values change much through life. My dad always said we were too sensitive as a family, and I say the same to my children now. Should I worry about being labelled “emotional, sensitive, quiet, reserved, and introverted”? Does it sound weak and ineffectual? It probably overstates it, I am no pushover, but I would certainly not be much good as a ruthless salesman, or in dominating a class of unruly teenagers. Much as we might wish we were different, it is better to know and be happy in ourselves. I sense that most bloggers have this kind of contemplative nature. 

It makes us easy prey to those who do score highly on the Power and Material scales, especially the shits that seek to control and use others to further their own careers. It has been my misfortune to fall into the jurisdiction of two such individuals. They cannot understand that some of us are cooperative rather than competitive, and work for satisfaction as much as material reward. It helps to understand this. DLTBGYD. 

Grandad Dunham’s Flight Simulator

New Month Old Post: first posted 18th November, 2015

SGI Dogfight for the IRIS workstation

Like something from the future, it was the most amazing colour graphics workstation I had ever seen. I had got a job in a university where it was used to understand complex proteins by constructing and manipulating computer-generated images of the kind of ball and stick molecular models photographed with Watson and Crick in the nineteen-fifties. These models give insights into life at the sub-microscopic level, such as how molecules of oxygen displace molecules of carbon dioxide in haemoglobin. The details are so magically implausible you could come to believe in creationism. One researcher was moved to tears on seeing for the first time an image of part of the antibody she had been working on for three years.

It was the nineteen-eighties. The workstation came with a set of demonstration programs, among them a flight simulator. It was well in advance of anything any of us had seen before. The best you could have at home at that time, which replicated the dynamics of flight and motion with any reasonable accuracy, were black-and-white wire-frame simulations such as ‘Aviator’ and ‘Elite’ for the BBC Computer. The workstation simulator had coloured graphics and a choice of aircraft. You may now pause for a moment to speculate about the relative amounts of time we spent flying aeroplanes and modelling proteins.

At first, I was the only one who could land the Jumbo Jet without crashing. I had not wasted hundreds of hours flying under the ‘Aviator’ suspension bridge for nothing. I was one of the glorious few to have fought my way through to the secret code for my ‘Elite’ badge. What the others did not seem able to grasp – and some of them are now eminent professors – is that the pilot of a Jumbo-Jet sits the equivalent of three storeys high. You are still thirty feet up in the air as you touch down. If you try to land with your seat at ground level you will be too low, and smash into the runway with terrific force and die.

It all seemed terrifically futuristic. Yet my brother had a flight simulator twenty years earlier in the early nineteen-sixties. You might call it Grandad Dunham’s flight simulator. How could that be? Grandad Dunham was our great-grandfather who died in 1941. He spent the last two years of his life living with his daughter’s family. When he moved in, his son-in-law carried his chair through the streets of the town on his back.

I now have that very same chair, twice refurbished, and very comfortable it is too. On its back and covered with an eiderdown it makes a wonderful aeroplane cockpit. My brother played in it happily for hours. Sometimes he would let me be his co-pilot. He chalked some controls and instruments underneath the seat. They are still there after sixty years.

What makes it particularly poignant is that my brother died at thirty-six. The grandchildren he never saw are now about the same age he was when he drew those simple chalk marks. They can have all the latest tablets and smartphones, and simulators so realistic you forget they are only software. But one thing I do know. No matter how advanced the technology, it will never be one-half as much fun as Grandad Dunham’s eiderdown-covered chair with the chalk marks on its upturned seat.

Elite and Aviator for the BBC Computer

Template

This is my entry for the Weeping Horse award for the most boring blog post of the year. Another item stuffed in the back of the drawer of things I didn’t know what to do with.

We were told to buy one of these when I started my Computing Masters course in 1980. Except for the square and rectangular boxes, I never used it. 

What is it? I don’t really know, other than to say it is a template for drawing symbols used in computer flowcharting. I hardly gave it a second glance until now. It relates to an approach to programming that was becoming outdated before the course began. I think it was used for designing COBOL programs that took ages to run with no human input once started. I have no idea how to use the symbols. What is an auxiliary operation, a terminal interrupt, or a transmittal tape? And there were even more symbols on the packet it came in, on both sides. 

The packet it came in, and an example of how the symbols are used

The course taught us a different technique called Jackson Structured Programming (JSP) which was more suited to programs that interact with the user, as in most of today’s software. JSP defines programs as combinations of sequences, selections, and repetitions. It uses a notation consisting only of rectangles, plain for sequences, marked O for selections and * for repetitions. If you adhere to its rules for putting them together, you avoid the unintelligible, spaghetti-like tangle of code that defeats most novice programmers. I found it invaluable. 

Later, I used something called Structured Systems Analysis and Design Method (SSADM). This employed a further set of techniques with names such as Data Flow Diagrams, Logical Data Structures, and Entity Life Histories. It organised data into the most flexible and efficient form, which was helpful in systems that handle complex information, such as customer orders, stock control, or bus timetables. This figure shows some of the notations. I could probably just about remember enough to explain them further, but it would be gobbledygook.  

Jackson Structured Programming example from my Masters Dissertation
SSADM Logical Data Structure and Data Flow Diagram

I know it is off the end of the autistic spectrum, but I enjoyed this kind of stuff and took great pride in it (and in what I was paid to do it). If the design is right, software works as intended without bugs that need fixing all the time. At the computer company I worked at, our large and complicated service management system did what it was supposed to do. It was used throughout Europe and elsewhere. The design was right. I would say that, today, companies like Amazon and Ebay largely have it right. So why don’t government systems such as for the DSS Carers Allowance? Why didn’t the Post Office? There used to be a saying based on the quality-time-cost triangle which was that you can have it good, you can have it quick, and you can have it cheap, but you can’t have it all three. 

To come back to the template, it was not used. Like with books, do not buy anything a university or college recommends until it is needed. It might not be. 

What to do with it? It takes up little space. It is back in the drawer with all the other useless rubbish. 

Ten Years

I started this blog on 11th August, 2014, which means it has been going ten years as of today. The idea was to write a kind of autobiography covering how life has changed in England since I was little. 

The changes are many. After the war we still had ration books, bombed buildings, gas lights in the street, and Prefab houses. Later, in Leeds in the 1970s, my job took me to banks, building societies, manufacturers, merchants, shops, publishing and entertainment concerns, and businesses of all kinds that packed the city and further afield. Nearly all have gone. You could take evening classes in almost anything, and there were four or five cinemas in the city centre. The Leeds trams were no more, but sometimes I had to use the trolley buses in Bradford. 

I then went late to university, which led to a new career near the edge of the computer revolution, and saw change as it took place. I suppose I played a small part in it. I also came late to having a family, which has been great fun. I wanted to write it all down. 

There were few readers at first, but when I began to comment more on other blogs a few years ago, and chanced upon this friendly community, things began to pick up a bit. 

At times during the last two-and-a-half years I thought I would not see this day. I was as good as told it, but I am still here. The next milestones are more fruits of the garden, my birthday, and then Christmas. And then we will be into 2025 and hopefully it all comes round again. Or will it? That sounds gloomy, I know, but it is what it is, and that is all there is to it. 

It does not get easier, as my comment and response rates are beginning to show. The list of what I can no longer do, am not allowed to do, or would be stupid to try, is depressingly long. My reading difficulties make blogging slow and difficult, and I have thought of giving up, but it is one of the things that keeps me going, and I still have posts to write. I enjoy the exchange of humour, ideas, and opinions, reading what others have posted, and writing creatively. I am amazed others read it. Thank you so much, everyone. 

Computers, Education and the Conservatives

Conservative governments are non-interventionist. They do not like the state to run anything. They spent the 1980s and 1990s selling off the country’s assets and giving away the proceeds. It continues today in their unwillingness to pay for public services or regulate things properly. Some of them would privatise health and education if they could get away with it. That is why, if my health holds out, I will not be voting Conservative at the next election. I will see the bastards* go to hell before I do. 

And yet, in the 1980s, they did intervene. A 1978 television documentary, ‘Now the Chips are Down’, made clear how woefully unprepared Britain was for the silvery white heat of the computer revolution. It scared the Thatcher government so much that they funded a number of costly initiatives. Two in particular stood out for me.  

A few of the many programmes in the BBC Computer Literacy Archive
https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/programmes

In one, the BBC was recruited to raise awareness of the skills needed. It led to the ‘Computer Literacy Project’, which ran from 1982 to 1989. It was linked to the specially commissioned ‘BBC Micro’, which was taken up by many homes and most schools, with over a million sold.

In the other, the ‘Microelectronics Education Programme’, massive amounts of money were spent putting computers in schools, setting up and funding resource centres, and training teachers. Politicians boasted that Britain led the world in “equipping the children of today with the skills of tomorrow.”    

Did it actually achieve anything, or was it bluster and spin?

At least it got my new career off the ground. After escaping from accountancy into a dream job as a university researcher, I knew as much about these new concepts and technologies as anyone. It would be hard to overstate how immersed, obsessed even, I was in this bright new world of colour and light.

I recently discovered that the television programmes, and more, are freely online in the ‘BBC Computer Literacy Archive’. It has the 1978 documentary which set things off (still informative 45 years later), and Dominic Sandbrook’s wonderfully evocative reflection on the social changes of the nineteen-eighties (not only computers). Incredibly, one programme even shows my own small part in this.  

Watching again now, I am struck by how aware we were of the social questions posed by what was about to come. How would people spend their time in a world with less work? How should wealth be shared across society? It is not turning out as well as it might.

Most fascinating for me is the series ‘The Learning Machine’ (1985), about computers in education, the area in which I worked. Here, once again, are the names and faces I knew and discussed things with at workshops and conferences, such as the main writer and presenter, Tim O’Shea.

He was scathing of the Microelectronics Education Programme, which, he said, had foisted cheap, underpowered computers and poor software upon parents and schools. The attractive message about improving the quality of education, disguised what was really on politicians’ minds: the job market, supporting British industry, and making education cheaper. Eventually, we might even do away with schools and teachers completely.

The then ubiquitous programming language, Basic, comes in for particular criticism. It encouraged tangled, undecipherable code, leading self-taught home and school users to think they knew how to write software, when, really, their knowledge was badly lacking.

I think Tim was broadly correct, but we were all still trying to understand how to use computers in education, and few teachers had the skills to teach programming. I was taught structured methods and had no difficulty creating reliable, intelligible Basic programs several hundred lines long.

It can also be argued that the initiatives did have benefits, but they were two decades in the making. A generation of youngsters became fascinated by computers, seeding Britain’s successful computer games industry. So, perhaps it did work out well in the end. Tim did well too. He became Principal of the University of Edinburgh.

One other series caught my eye: ‘With a Little Help from the Chip’ (1985), about helping those with special needs. I was astonished, in programme 3, to see a one-minute clip of software I designed and coded, being used in a school for deaf children. I have written about the programs before, but never seen the TV programme. It brought back all the satisfactions of going into schools to observe and collect data. 

Do you ever wonder, were it possible, whether you would happily go back to an earlier point in your life? I would, to this time for certain. And I would jump at the chance of another forty years. Most of all, it was an innocent, optimistic time, focused on what we were doing rather than the unrest and disruption taking place. We were trying to make the world a better place. We could do with more of that now. 

* A name used by Margaret Thatcher for Eurosceptic right-wing Conservatives. 

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.

The Mighty Micro

New Month Old Post: first posted 4th January, 2017. 

In 1978, Dr. Christopher Evans, a psychologist, computer scientist and expert on the future of computers, confidently made four predictions for the year 2000: (i) the printed word would become virtually obsolete; (ii) computer-based education would begin to supplant schools and teachers; (iii) money, in terms of physical bits of metal and paper, would almost have vanished; (iv) substantial and dramatic advances would have taken place in the field of artificial intelligence.
 
His only uncertainty was about the pace of change. It might take a decade or so longer, or occur more quickly, but the changes about to take place would be so stupendous as to transform the world beyond recognition. There would be more changes than in the whole of the two previous centuries. We were about to experience rapid, massive, irreversible and remorselessly unstoppable shifts in the way we lived.

Evans expanded his predictions in his book and television series The Mighty Micro. As well as the four main predictions, he thought we would soon see self-driving collision-proof cars, robotic lawn mowers, doors that open only to the voices of their owners, the widespread commercial use of databases and electronic text, a ‘wristwatch’ which monitors your heart and blood pressure, an entire library stored in the space of just one book, a flourishing computer-games industry and eventually ultra-intelligent machines with powers far greater than our own. Every one of these things seemed incredible at the time.

The social and political predictions were even more mind boggling. Evans foresaw a twenty-hour working week for all, retirement at fifty, interactive politics through regular electronic referendums, a decline in the influence of the professions, the emptying of cities and decreased travel as we worked more from home, and the fall of communism as underprivileged societies become astutely aware of their relative deprivation.  

I remember how fantastic and exhilarating this view of the future seemed at the time, but it gave me a serious problem. Having escaped my previous career in accountancy, I was half-way through a psychology degree trying to work out what to do next. If Evans was to be believed, and I believed a lot of it, then most of the then-present ways of earning a living were in jeopardy.

What was I to do? The answer seemed obvious: something that involved computers. So like Evans, I looked for ways to combine psychology with computing, and after gaining further qualifications that is what I did.

Dr. Christopher Evans talks about educational software

It is fascinating to revisit Evans’ predictions. How many were correct, what would have surprised him, and why? Many commentators conclude he got more things wrong than right, but I am not so sure. The printed word no longer predominates; computers now pervade education, albeit with teachers in schools as guides rather than in the didactic and solitary way Evans imagined; and nearly all significant financial transactions are carried out electronically. And the less-bizarre predictions are already here.

Undoubtedly, he over-estimated the pace of change, especially the emergence of advanced artificial intelligence. Futurologists are still predicting it. Stephen Hawking warned of the terrifying possibilities of machines whose intelligence exceeds ours by more than ours exceeds that of snails. On the other hand, it may still be as far away as ever. It remains unclear what qualities such super-intelligence might have, or whether intelligence might have an upper limit. Perhaps our inability to imagine these things defines our stupidity. Where Evans was wrong, if it can be regarded as wrong, is that he was no seer. He could not escape the prevailing mindset of the nineteen-seventies, and foresee the innovative new uses of computers.

He did not foresee the internet. Multimedia crops up only in the form of a brief mention of “colour graphics”. Graphical user interfaces were still little more than a research project. He thought that electronic communications would take place through “the family television set” rather than personal hand-held devices.

And if you could not foresee these things, there is no way you could imagine how they would be used. Evans, with a seemingly naive view of human nature, imagined we would all be using computers to improve ourselves and make our lives easier; that our leisure time would be devoted to cultural, artistic, philosophical, scientific and creative endeavour of various kinds. I wonder what he would have made of internet pornography, fake news, selfies and cat videos.

Evans’ over-beneficent view of human nature coloured his vision of the social and political changes he thought would take place. Take the twenty-hour working week and retirement at fifty. The efficiencies brought about by computers could already have reduced our work significantly, but this has never been offered. It would upset too many powerful interests. Governments answer to the establishment more than the ‘man in the street’. As a result, for those who have jobs, the trend today is the opposite. And for those who don’t, wouldn’t it be fairer to share the jobs out?

Imagine if twenty hours per week up to the age of fifty was all we had to do. What would happen? For a start there would be those who decided to take on additional work in order to fund superior accommodation, private education, health care, better holidays, a more luxurious lifestyle and a more comfortable old age. Anyone content with just one job would begin to lose out. To keep up, we would all continue to work more than necessary, and the extra wealth would evaporate through increased spending, inflation and rising house prices, and disappear into the pockets of the elite minority, much of it overseas. Does that sound familiar? The only way to avoid the inevitable self-satisfied winners and miserable losers would be to ration the amount of work one could undertake, or the amount of wealth one was allowed to have. The necessary laws and financial penalties would be unpopular and difficult.

And how would we use our over-abundant spare time? One could easily imagine an intensification of social ills: epidemics of obesity, alcoholism, drug dependence, mental health issues and the breakdown of law and order. 

‘Parkinson’s law’ prevails: work expands to fill the time available. Anyone with experience of large organisations will know how work once considered inessential or unaffordable, now occupies an entire additional workforce who administer quality, accountability and ‘political correctness’. Rather than reducing the overall workload, computers have increased it by making possible what was once impossible.

Stephen Hawking concluded his forewarnings about super-intelligent computers as follows:

“Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far the trend seems to be towards the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.”

Sadly, Christopher Evans died shortly after his book’s publication, three weeks before his television series was broadcast. It is often said that if you make predictions about the future the only certainty is that you will be wrong. Evans would have known this, but I suspect he would have been fairly satisfied by the extent to which he got it right. 

My original post in 2017 was quite a lot longer and included links to the archived television programmes, so I have left it here. The programmes are fascinating to watch if this kind of thing interests you - the future as seen in 1978.

Full Circle?

The way we save our computer files seems to have come full-circle, as if we are back to forty or fifty years ago.

Clearing out more of my life’s debris reminded me of this. I had accumulated a collection of disks and tapes that are now little more than museum pieces. You once had to be so methodical in looking after your documents and images. But, before that, it was all done for you. An so it is now.

At first, with mainframe computers, systems managers made sure everything was safely backed-up. I learnt to program in a room full of teletypewriter terminals - the noise was deafening - that were connected to a computer centre somewhere else on the university campus. Once you had typed in your program and asked for it to be save, you could be reasonably sure it would be there ready the next time you logged in.

However, if you wanted to move programs or documents elsewhere, or if you had one of those new-fangled micro-computers (i.e. a PC), you had to transfer it on to magnetic takes or disks. The first PCs had no internal disks, nothing was saved automatically by an ‘app’, and there was no OneDrive or Google. The internet did not get going until around 1995.

I learnt the hard way using Tandy TRS80 computers. Everything had to be saved on C60 audio-cassettes, which were notoriously slow and unreliable. I lost hours of work more than once. It was a godsend when floppy disks came along.

Here are some of the storage media I used, now destined for the tip.  

8-inch floppy disks containing my Masters project, which was written in Pascal on an LSI-11 machine. UMIST insisted they had to be protected by special folders. 

The 8-inch disks look enormous next to the later 5¼ -inch and 3½-inch ‘hard’ floppy disks you may remember. 

This is a 6-inch cartridge take from a nineteen-eighties PDP11 Unix system, containing some of the work I did as a university research assistant.

Later, I used zip-disks which were a bit like thick floppy disks, but had greater capacity. Only a few home computers had them. 

 

Then, we all moved on to CD ROMS and DVD, and USB memory sticks and SD cards. I used a pair of memory sticks to transfer files from work-to-home and home-to-work. My first memory stick had a magnificent 256MB of space (that’s Megabytes not Gigabytes). 

How things have changed! Nowadays, some home computers have internet access only, and no disk drive or USB ports. Some have minimal internal storage. That is also the case if we work only on phones. It feels as if we are being pushed towards keeping everything on the ‘cloud’, like returning to the mainframe days.

Microsoft is removing the Windows video editor from our PCs (through Windows Updates) because they want us to use the online ‘ClipChamp’ editor. Google circulated an email saying they are deleting accounts inactive for more than two years. That could well include blogs. Andrew in Australia lost years of blog posts because of something unspecified he supposedly said. Next, they’ll be trying to charge us to store our stuff.

I don’t trust the b------s at all. I now have enormous amounts of material: family history research, my parents digitised photograph albums, our own photographs and colour slides, our own digital photographs, digitised videos from cine films, our own digital videos, ... and archived blog posts.

In all, it fills over 100 Gigabytes. I’ve backed it all up in duplicate on a pair of hard drives. I’m glad I learnt the discipline.

VAXen

New Month Old Post: First posted 15th April, 2018 

VAXen. It’s the plural of VAX. It used to say so in the DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) computer manuals in the nineteen-eighties. VAX computers could be run as clusters of VAXen. Most universities had them.

A DEC 'dumb terminal'

So I was delighted to see some of these iconic machines again in Jim Austin’s Computer Collection at Fimber near Fridaythorpe in the East Riding. By “again” I really mean for the first time. Hardly anyone got near them in the nineteen-eighties. The privileged might be allowed to look through the glass of their air-conditioned rooms, but ‘users’ were never allowed in. Their only contact with the computers was through remote ‘dumb terminals’. At Fimber you can touch the machines and even open their cabinets and take the boards out. Of course, they are not switched on now.

He even has the first computer I used, the Elliott 903, not just any Elliott 903 but the very same one from the psychology department at Hull University. You really had to keep your fingers out of the way when the punched paper tape was flying through. What a sorry state it is in now. For a moment I imagined myself volunteering and getting it working again. 

The Elliott 903 from Hull University, a punched paper tape computer

I returned home fizzing with enthusiasm, thinking of the blog posts I could write. My wife was not impressed.

“Great! A barn full of old grey metal cabinets. Fascinating!”

“Well, some of them are black. And you can open the doors and look inside.”

I babbled on excitedly about all the machines I had known so well: the Elliott 903, IBMs, ICLs, PDP-8s and PDP-11s, SWTPC minis, LSI-11s, Sun microsystems, Silicon Graphics, VAXen …

"Vaxen!" My wife ran out of patience.

“Did they come in boxen? Ordered by Faxen? Is our fridge Electroluxen? Cooling the milk for your Weetabixen? Vaxen makes them sound like little animals, or the name of one of Santa’s reindeers.”

“Reindeer(s?)”

Now, there’s another plural to conjure with.

Accents and Subtitles

When my mother-in-law used to travel up from the South to visit us, and passed through Barnsley on the train, one of her worst fears was that her grandchildren would grow up to have accents like those she heard around her. The broad Barnsley accent can be quite difficult to follow, and unintelligible to many from the South.

Some of our children’s contemporaries did indeed speak like that, but not them. As I mentioned in the last two posts, our daughter was teased at school for sounding ‘posh’, and was embarrassed by her voice in the two stop-motion video stories we made when she was little. It was quite a surprise when she said recently it is now her Yorkshire accent that bothers her.

The rather impressive subtitling on YouTube has no problem with it. It transcribes almost all of it correctly. In fact, I wasn’t quite sure of the word “daydreaming” until I switched them on. 

I doubt it would have so little trouble with unmodified Barnsley. I also wonder what it would have made of my mother-in-law’s mixture of South London and “Snolbans”. I endlessly mimicked her pronunciation of “strawbrizz, raarzbrizz and guzzbrizz”? “They are raarzbrizz, not rasp berries,” she would strike back.

And what of my own unbroken childhood accent? It can be heard in an exchange 45 seconds into the compilation I made from the old take of my dad singing and reading poetry (Days of Wine and Roses, May 1st). It includes the following exchange:

        (laughter)
        Dad: Right. I am now about to begin.
        Me: You’ll ’ave all the laughing in.
        Brother: Yes, you will, won’t you.
        (more laughter)
        Me: Hey! When you think about it what we’re all laughin’ at? It's a waste of tape.
        Dad: My tape.

Embarrassing as I now find it (and there is a good deal more on the full tape), the YouTube subtitling copes with it surprisingly well. And although it struggles in places, it even follows most of my then sixty-five year-old Grandma’s village accent, fashioned before the First World War, as heard playing with my baby cousin later in the extract.  

I also had a cassette tape of chatting with friends as teenagers. Listening again recently, I was appalled, not only by the accents, but also by the language used and what was being said. I rapidly abandoned my first idea of sending it to them and threw it away. Now, I wonder what the subtitling would of made of it. I can’t imagine. We don’t always like what we see or hear when we look back.

There is one further aspect of YouTube subtitling I find astonishing. It can automatically translate into any one of over a hundred and twenty other languages. For example, if you want it in French: 

Not always perfect, but it can only get better. It can even do Welsh, Irish, and Scottish Gaelic. Who knows, one day it might be able to do Manx and the Yorkshire dialect?

Molly’s Family

One of the perks of working in a university is that you get to play with the latest bits of kit.

I was asked to get involved in one of the new multimedia courses springing up around the U.K. in the mid nineteen-nineties. Surprisingly, many were in engineering departments. I believe the first was started by engineers at Bradford University around 1993.

One element of our new course was digital video. We were all encouraged to understand how it worked. As a result I was allowed to borrow one of our new hand-held video cameras and take it home. It was great fun filming our children when little, playing in an inflatable dinghy in the natural pool on the beach at Sandsend.

I know that sounds like a frivolous waste of taxpayers’ money, but we needed to know how to use these new technologies ourselves, and understand how they might relate to other parts of the course and what their possibilities might be. Silicon Valley technology companies often allow staff time to ‘play’ with new software and equipment because it generates innovative ideas. In our case, it led to course developments and research funding. 

Handling a video on a computer was not straightforward then. You had to run it through programs to digitise and ‘render’ it into a viewable form. You needed to be aware of the type of video coding (‘codec’) you were using. Only then could you begin to edit it or write programs to do state-of-the-art clever things such as spotting objects and faces. There would be a lot of ‘re-rendering’. Computers were so slow that every stage took ages. Nothing was automatic and effortless like now.

Back home, I realised that the camera made it easy to create stop-motion animation. With my then eight year-old daughter’s lovely wooden dolls’ house, the figures that went with it, and her enthusiasm and child’s take on family life around her, this, below, was one of our first attempts. Yet another example of something that would be much easier with today’s software. You wouldn’t even need a real dolls house. I know which I think the most fun.

She made up most of the story and moved the figures, while I mainly operated the camera. Surely, the story is not based on her own family, is it?

Unprincipled Spivs

Moving from the public to the private sector was something of an eye-opener. It was a very different culture. I had not expected to be working with such an unprincipled set of spivs.

Previously, I had only worked in the accountancy profession and universities where the main considerations were thoroughness and accuracy. In accountancy, we checked everything to the penny. There was no short-cut sampling and rounding as now. It was similar in universities. We aimed to review and understand all previous work in a field before attempting to extend it. Where I did have dealings with the private sector, it was either with audit clients wanting to demonstrate compliance, or with the research arms of large companies governed by quality procedures. You could say that things were done properly.

Then, along came nineteen-eighties ‘Thatcher’s Britain’, when competition and cost-cutting were king. You could say that standards began to drop.

Universities were driven to seek commercial partners. By then, I could bullshit pretty convincingly about ways to make computers easier to use, so when a systems company with problems came along, I was sent to talk to them. It was not supposed to be part of the plan for them to offer me a job on a lot more money. Feeling near to burnout with university work, I took it.

It was a medium-sized systems company driven by sales and profit, with an eye on what things cost and how long they took. The computer system they sold had been developed for an equipment maintenance business, but as the system expanded to handle more and more business functions, other companies wanted to use it too, and it became valuable in its own right. By the time I joined, there were around seventy computing staff, and the system was used by some of the biggest firms in Europe, from cash machine operators to telecoms companies. It had become immensely complicated and few fully understood it any more.

I identified problems, improved the information provided to customers, and began to take on consultancy roles, as they said I would. I can’t complain about that. But I disliked the prevailing ethos which was aggressive, competitive and sales-led rather than professional.

It oozed down from the owner. He had left school early and chanced upon the opportunity to lease and maintain office equipment, such as internal telephones and fax machines. He was a first-rate wheeler dealer and could spin a good yarn, and the business grew rapidly. He was also arrogant and ruthless. I cannot repeat all the sexist, racist, homophobic and explicit things I heard him say. In one meeting, he complimented a non-white staff member on his wonderful sun tan, and asked where he went on holiday to get it. In another, he likened a map of Scandinavia, “where our biggest customers are, Ladies”, to a “penis and testicles”. I suppose he thought it humorous; the sort of humour I had not heard in years. His attitude was that if customers were not complaining, we were giving them too much too cheaply.

This brand of arrogance pervaded company culture. Many of the staff, especially in sales, went along with it. They were paid ‘loadsamoney’ to drive around in company sports cars. There was pressure to go out drinking and socializing with customers. I did not feel ‘part of the team’. I don’t know if others felt uncomfortable too, but if so, they hid it well. The promise of more money and a company car tends to keep people in line, even when they never materialise.

The owner did not tolerate dissent. If you wanted to keep your job, you kept quiet. Those who crossed him were sacked, sued or both. One employee broke his leg playing football and was dismissed because “the injury was his own fault”. Another left to set up his own company and foolishly solicited business from his ex-employer’s customers. He was brought to the brink of bankruptcy.

The firm took on large numbers of new computing staff to redevelop and modernise the system. When they had served their purpose, 50% of the systems division were made redundant. I was tipped off by my manager that it was coming. He said that even if I survived I should get out as soon as I could. The phrase “unprinciples set of spivs” was his. I survive but he didn’t.

In all, I stuck it out for nearly four years. As I said, it was well-paid. The crunch came one Friday morning when I had to drop everything to go to Stockholm to sort out an urgent problem. I popped home to pack a bag and leave a note that I might not be back until Tuesday. It began to look as if more work like this would come my way. It might sound exciting, but it was all work. There was no free time to see the places you visited.

Newly married, with a family in mind, this was not the kind of life we wanted. It was a relief a few months later to find another university job. Although on a lower salary, I reasoned that the public service pension benefits compensated for that.

Mick Copier

Most university lecturers work very hard (at least in my experience). They spend hours planning teaching and helping students, and give up too many of their evenings and weekends dealing with email. I also used to put in further time carrying out research, writing academic papers and applying for external funding. With some success, I might add.

Yet I always had a sneaking regard for those who did basically what was asked of them and little more. One such colleague was called Mick Copier.

I first came across him when I still worked in the software industry. My employer sent me on a course in SSADM (Structured Systems Analysis and Design Method) and Mick was on the same course. Around a year later I got a job at the same university where he worked and found myself sharing an office with him. If truth be told, the course helped me get the job and Mick put in a good word for me.

Part of my role involved visiting students out on their work placement years. Late one morning, arriving back on the train, I was surprised to see Mick at the railway station. “Are you on a placement visit too?” I asked him. “No,” he said, “I’ve done all I need to do today so I thought I would have an afternoon out in York.”

Mick based much of his teaching around the SSADM course we have both been on. I sometimes used it too, but Mick took it to extremes. Every June, our office would fill up with boxes from the reprographics room. Soon they were stacked four or five high and three or four deep. They were his teaching materials for the next academic year. From October to April, all he then had to do was to hand out these pre-prepared notes and worksheets week-by-week and guide the students through them. They nicknamed him Mick Photocopier.

To be fair, he was extremely knowledgeable, and the students liked and respected him.

With his preparation all finished, Mick  then took all his holiday in one block over the summer. While workaholics like me spent our time writing and researching obsessively, he kept a boat on the River Ouse and could comfortably make it to the Mediterranean and back on the French canals. One day I would be like that, I told myself.

Mick came unstuck in the end. Well, sort of. The university decided it needed to reduce the number of lecturers and began a redundancy consultation. I survived, largely because of my research output. Mick didn’t. Instead, he accepted a large voluntary severance payment and walked straight into a new and highly paid position with a nearby passenger transport authority, restructuring their database of bus and train timetables. He even took some of our students on placement. He knew what he was doing, in more ways than one.

I never did get to be like Mick. I think now that I drove myself far too hard.

Premium Bonds

In August, 1957, my grandfather bought me and my brother one of the first £1 Premium Bonds each. They had been introduced just under a year earlier on the 1st November, 1956, to encourage people to save. He bought us each another £1 bond in 1959.

Rather than paying interest, bonds were entered in a monthly prize draw, drawn by ERNIE (Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment), a Colossus computer. They retained their original value and could be cashed in at any time.

In those days, the maximum you could invest was £500 and the top prize was £1,000, as compared to £50,000 and £1 million today. Also, today, you cannot invest less than £25 at a time.

I didn’t cash mine in. In fact, I later bought more, and once won £500. I still have the original two, along with the others, and my Premium Bond record shows a total investment ending in 02.  The original bonds are now numbered 000AB01---- and 000AB76----.  

The records are all electronic now, but here are my two original paper certificates. 

A dutiful grandfather thinking of his grandchildren’s financial future? These two particular bonds have never won a thing.

More Thoughts On Clients

I was encouraged by the interesting comments on my last post about the businesses I came across while working in accountancy in the nineteen-seventies, and the further thoughts they sparked off. The following captured my ambiguous feelings about it at the time:

Brown paper parcels containing vouchers,
Cash books and day books, bank statements in pouches,
Ledgers and ledgers, both sales and bought,
Ticking up postings requires little thought.

One big difference between then and now was the lack of computerisation. Nearly all records were handwritten. Some were in beautiful leather-bound ledgers, and there was a sense of pride and skill in being able to keep them neat and tidy in fountain pen, without mistakes and corrections.

Others might be in scruffy self-duplicating docket books. It was interesting to follow them around factories, matching them to drums of dye colour, or to trace them from lengths of cloth to the despatch of finished items of clothing. This was done to ensure the accounting systems were working correctly and detect possible fraud (which was rarely found).

But often the books of smaller clients would be brought into our own offices where you might be stuck for several weeks bored to tears, hence my parody of ‘Favourite Things’. 

I made distractions for myself. When we took on a model agency as a new client I was asked to produce a set of example book keeping entries for the owner to follow so that she knew how to fill them in. To the annoyance of my boss I used the names of famous models such as Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton, causing him to exclaim: “For goodness’ sake, Tasker, we’re a firm of Chartered Accountants, not Monty Python’s Flying Circus!” Too late. They were already inked into the first page of the cash book.

We also prepared sets of annual accounts for clients, filed them with the Inspector of Taxes on their behalf and dealt with their tax affairs. As a result I have never been afraid of dealing with outfits like HMRC or the DSS.

You could also get stuck of larger clients checking off lists against each other. It wasn’t called “double entry” book-keeping for nothing.  At one cloth warehouse it took several weeks to work through the sales ledgers. Statistical sampling and tests of significance would not have been considered adequate then. We checked nearly everything.

Another big difference was the sheer variety of types of business. We made so many more of our own things before globalisation. Now, Central Leeds seems to be predominantly financial rather than physical, and nearly everything takes place at desks in offices.

Computers sucked the life blood out of everything.

Slide Copier

If you want to copy of an old photographic colour slide or negative, say, to post online or to make a copy of someone else’s slide, what do you do? You take a photo scanner if you have one (I have a Canon flatbed scanner with a film and slide copier in the lid), scan in the image (I use 3200 or 4800 dots per inch), and, of you are a perfectionist, tidy up to dust marks and scratches with Photoshop or similar. It makes for a better quality image than you ever used to get projecting the slide on to a glass bead screen.

But what did you do in the pre-computer nineteen-sixties and seventies? Think: Tandy TRS-80 introduced 1977, Sinclair ZX80 and ZX81 in 1980 and 1980, the 8-colour BBC Microcomputer in late with 1981 and the Sinclair SX Spectrum in 1982. None of these would have been capable of running photo-scanning devices even if they had been available. For example, to Hewlett-Packard Scanjet was introduced in 1987. It operated in black and white at 300 dots per inch, could handle only reflected documents and not film or slides, and cost a fortune.

So what did you do? Another trip to the loft has found my slide copier. 

 

 

I have the cheapo SLR Mk II version, basically which is a metal frame that just screws to the front of a camera lens. It appears to have cost me £5.34 in around 1974. Here it attached to the front my Zenith E single-lens reflex camera. I have also used extension tubes between the camera body and the lens.

It was terrible. I could never get it to produce a decent image no matter what kind of lighting I used.

For example, here, in a copy from a friend’s slide, I am nearing the top of Ben Nevis in April, 1974, straight up from the Glen Nevis car park. It has not been Photoshopped. I did not even manage to get the light consistent on this one. You didn’t get to see it until the film was processed, and the cost meant you couldn’t have as many goes keep trying until it was right. 

Looks like another item for metal recycling. Thank goodness for modern photo scanners.

For the sake of completeness, here are the instructions that were in the box (or download as pdf)