Wilson, Keppel and Betty

I call them Wilson, Keppel and Betty. They live inside my brain. I think they are three, but there may be more than one Betty. They are not the Wilson, Keppel and Betty some may remember, if anyone does, although, just the same, they sprinkle sand and scrape it around with their feet.

Betty, however many there are, is not too bad. She is not there all the time. She tries to make you forget things. Like when you know the name of the author of ‘Goodbye to Berlin’, but some cocky little sod from Edinburgh or Oxford shouts out Christopher Isherwood on ‘University Challenge’ while you are still thinking W. H. Auden, which you know is near but not quite right.

I can just about cope with Keppel. He makes your mouth slack and flobby, and blurs your words, but only when you are low on blood sugar. Others say they have not noticed, but that is how it feels to me.

No, Wilson is the worst. He used to put swirling patterns in my eyes. Dr. Hatfield tried to zap him away, but he came back. Mr. Thomson said he would cut him out, but he would not be able to cut all of him out, he would have to leave bits behind.

So Wilson is still there. He now blanks out a space just to the right of my point of focus, and if you can’t see the next             along a line of              then you can only read one word at a             rather than fluently. I should learn mirror-reading, right to left. He also moves words along, and up from the line below, and puts them where you are reading now, slows which letters slows things down even more. And, sometimes, he makes you look at letters for ages before you see what they are, and makes you write an M for a B, or a D for a P, or an S for C. He is a                        total                      mactarp. I have to get the computer to read things out, or Mrs. D.

They have stopped their sand dance for now. So long as I keep taking the Tepmetko Tepotinib they will be quiet. They don’t like it. It makes them ill. It makes me ill too, but not as ill as it makes them. Dr. Brown says that one day they will decide they have had enough and do away with me. It might be this year, but we thought that this time last year, so who knows? Perhaps they realise that if they do away with me, they do away with themselves as well. Mactarps!

https://youtu.be/pkhJpr2zR8s

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.