Computers, why bother? (Reminiscences of our times) − Why would anyone want their own computer? For that matter, who would ever want to even use one? I asked myself these questions nearly fifteen years ago and my answers were, “No idea” and “not me, that’s for sure”. At the time I hated maths and so I avoided it at all costs. My reasoning went that as computers do lots of maths, and do it very fast, I should avoid computers like the plague. Number crunching, be it in a bank or an office, seemed an utterly pointless and thankless existence. In those distant days, avoiding computers was the simple task of not going near one. I then worked in television and it looked as if computers would never cross my path.
In 1978, I joined the BBC and, like every prospective technical trainee, I spent a good part of my life attempting to survive the rigours of their gruelling Wood Norton training camp. Set in the otherwise beautiful Vale of Evesham, this was where people were tortured and tested to destruction − ‘termination’ in BBC internal parlance. It was also where the not-quite-dead lived on for a few years in a sort of half life as lecturers. My deep dislike of the place is genetic as my father had already been through the several compulsory multi-week ordeals and must have passed on his loathing of such places to me at my birth. Neither of us work for the Beeb any more.
The place was, and probably still is, a residential training camp. I have nightmares of it to this day. So bad were the (now demolished) nissen hut accommodation blocks that before Aunty could use them as the setting for a prison camp in a John LeCarre spy series she had to tart them up. The filming was done over a weekend when the internees were let free to wreak havoc in the country. After the filming, the crew removed the benches and curtains that they had added in order to make the place look bad.
The views were Wood Norton’s saving grace; they were always wonderful. They kept me sane. It was on a clear crisp day, much like one of those which may have dawned over aerodromes during the Battle of Britain, that I spoke to the man who changed my life. It was his job to talk − he was a lecturer. He told me − I don’t remember why − that he had once made a mistake and was still paying for it. He related sadly that in his distant past he had dutifully learned all there was to know about the high tech of his day. In the pursuit of good job prospects, he had reached the point where his knowledge could not be bettered. Sadly for him the world changed. The invention of the transistor had at first looked no threat to valve technology. Valves had been used everywhere, in everything. He had thought that there would always be good jobs for someone who could use valves to good effect. So he sat on his laurels, perhaps polishing them a bit from time to time, while the transistor revolution took off; by the time he noticed that, the writing had been on the wall for so long that new writing had been put on top of it − the integrated circuit had been born.
His outdated knowledge was still encyclopedic when he met me but long before then my teacher had realised there was no option but to dump his much loved valve and start learning again. Unfortunately, he had left it too late to catch up. No matter how well his undimmed brain dealt with the new technology, he knew he would always be at least two steps behind everyone else. The only job he could get was as a teacher.
The moral of his story soon became clear. He knew of my dislike of mindless, number crunching, maths machines and told me his story to try and stop me going the same way he did. Keep up with the new or get buried with the old he said. A very gloomy thought but one on which I acted.
Way back in 1985 or so, when Arthur was a boy and a “small” floppy disc was 5.25 inches, I was already into my second computer. The first had been, and to some extent still is, a home built but not home brew ‘Compukit UK101’. If you have never heard of it, go to the Science Museum. It was a bag of bits which, when assembled, turned into a fully working Basic-based wonder machine with 4 whole kilobytes of memory. It had a chip which provided full word processing facilities, it ran in an 8Kb ROM and did everything anyone could want. By then, I knew ROM meant Read Only Memory but didn’t believe I would ever have anything interesting to write, so I still didn’t expect to use the computer much. Anyway, to my delight the machine worked first time.
I could do so much with it! Firstly, I could show it off to people. Often the UK101 was the first computer my audience had seen and a lot of brownie points were to be had just by owning one. To be able to say “I made it” was a bonus. None of that cut much ice at work however. There everyone had a computer so I had to show a degree of proficiency with it to be able to show myself in public at all. Not everyone had the same machine, some had a Nascom 1, other people had the same as me, the richest had some sort of Apple, Tandy or IBM thing. I never liked talking to them, as I didn’t understand a word they said and it made me feel inferior. So I kept within my little group were we talked happily in our UK101 jargon.
This did not last for long. The BBC had great plans for the future. One day, standing outside a meeting room above Ealing Broadway Station (where BBC Enterprises once was) I got a glimpse of the first BBC Micro. I was very impressed. For a start it was a British colour machine (not an American color one). It had lots of memory and said New Brain on the box. I never saw it again. When the BBC model A came out, it was made by Acorn, the Atom people. The Atom was no match for the New Brain I had seen, but as soon as the computer was available, I joined the queue.
As a member of BBC staff, I expected, hoped, even counted on being able to wangle a good deal on one of the first machines. No joy. We all had to pay the full whack. Never mind, at least we had one. This new machine was also colour, it had a 16Kb memory, built-in sound and could be “easily expanded”. Rapidly, I found out that expansion was obligatory. There was no real need for more memory if all I wanted to do was write a few letters or play some very simple Teletext graphic type games, but all of a sudden, magazines were published advertising all the new programs (not programmes) to be had. Each of these needed lots of RAM for pretty pictures on the screen. The better the picture, the bigger the memory, so I bought some more chips, plugged them in and called the box a Model B, which it wasn’t.
In those days, the only way to get round having to type-in a program before the machine would do anything was either to buy it on cassette tape or type it in and save it onto ordinary cassette tape and keep it for next time. This saving and loading on tape was a pain of the highest order. Although the BBC worked much more reliably than the UK101 ever had (or the Sinclair ever could) it was still a long wait watching the “LOADING” banner before anything much would happen. Sometimes, the program maker would give me something to look at while the rest of the data loaded, but the extra wait before the program proper was very irritating. Just one tape glitch and the transfer stopped and asked for the tape to be rewound. I yearned for a disc drive.
A true Model B bought from a shop had a disc interface already partly installed. My machine hadn’t. So my just getting the BBC B disc upgrade kit didn’t do the job and it took some time before I could relax to the sound of those tiny little clunks but the effort was well worth it.
I still didn’t have a lot of real intrinsic use for the machine but my organic brain had started to do things that I had always thought were far beyond it. In retrospect, this is the best part of computing for me − not what I could do with a computer but what I could do with the brain in my head after having learned how to use a computer. For example, I found that, with a bit of effort, I could solve the Rubic Cube. Having proved that I could concentrate for long periods on relatively dry computing subjects, with the hope of something good at the end, I learned that I could do the same thing in real life. For another and more important thing, I passed my BBC exams. On top of the fun of computing, it also gave me a subject to talk about to people I didn’t know, and it was something to do when nothing was on telly.
Once, I took my UK101 in to work so that I could get paid for watching telly and use the computer at the same time. Perhaps that is why I didn’t get promoted. I typed out a program called Cell and Serpents, one of the first Dungeons and Dragons games for a computer. It was very easy to adapt and great fun to play around with. That was the essence of computing for me then, the simple fun of thinking of what to make it do, trying to make it do it and then playing the game to see if it was all worth doing. Lovely.
There was no need for me to bring a BBC computer in to work. Soon almost every room at Telly Centre had one sitting in a corner. These machines where not there to gather dust. They were work horses, keeping records of edit sessions, generating ‘clocks’, even for putting subtitles onto CEEFAX broadcasts. Sometimes the CEEFAX screens themselves were created with them. More than once I transmitted a “what’s on next” caption to a satellite-based cable TV system using a BBC B to generate a screen of Teletext graphics.
By then, I was heavily into writing. Nothing intended for reading, just diary-type notes for fun. This sort of thing was not expected at the Beeb and there were not many wordprocessors available, so I wrote one. As a program it was rubbish, but it worked. The addition of the ability to write words as well as programs helped me develop many aspects of my powers of deduction, reasoning, thought and inventiveness. In short, computers gave me more than just something to do, it gave me the ability and the reason to bother to do it. As my self-confidence grew, so did my abilities. The uncomplaining nature of my dumb assistant let me learn what I wanted, at my own speed, where and when I wanted to learn it. Perfection. Now I am a lecturer, teaching computing to special needs students. It’s the best job I’ve had (apart from writing articles). Funny old world.
