Title: Good Intentions

Author: Bob Schmidt

Date: 06 November 2017 16:54:26 +00:00 or Mon, 06 November 2017 16:54:26 +00:00

Summary: R. Brian Clark proves that sometimes tomorrow does eventually come.

Body: 

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Never do today what you can put off ’til tomorrow.

I’ve had good intentions for a long time to write something for an ACCU journal but kept putting it off until tomorrow! However, the request from the Membership Secretary to give details of my Honorary Membership has at last roused me to pen the following. Please don’t be put off by what is now considered to be somewhat old fashioned jargon.

I can’t remember when I joined CUG(UK), the forerunner of ACCU, but it was a few years after its formation. Francis Glassborow kept requesting articles for the journal and at last I’ve got round to submitting one! He also kept asking me to attend the AGM, which then I think was held at a Motorcycle Museum in the Birmingham area. As they were held on a Saturday, I never did, as the weekends were the only time I had to devote full time to my family.

In 1998, I retired and the ACCU very kindly offered me Honorary Membership. In the early years, email wasn’t as widely available as now and some members of the Committee weren’t connected! So I acted as a hub for email, forwarding minutes of meetings, messages, etc to those who had and by smail to those who hadn’t, and also helped in a minor administrative role. Then my email address was username@uk.man.ac and you had to route the messages, eg to send to the USA it went via University College, London. However, we thought it was wonderful as it was so much faster than smail and cheaper than a telephone call. You had to be careful not to use too much bandwidth. Of course, by 1998 I had long stopped doing these as everyone was connected and we had www (who remembers when it was text driven!).

It may be of interest to give a brief account of my life in computing from those far off days. In 1978, I was appointed ‘Computer Manager’ to manage a DEC machine which the Department had just bought. My knowledge of computing then was as an infrequent user but I knew a little about what made them tick. Some years previously, I had to do some calculations and it was suggested that I did them on the University computer. So I learnt Atlas Autocode – sorry, I can’t now remember anything about it. In preparation for my new job I learnt Basic, and some Assembly Language. About 1980, one of the professors said he had heard that Unix developed by Bell Telephones was a much better operating system then DEC’s so off I went to Newcastle University with a removable Winchester Disc and got a copy. It was duly installed and over the years updated, as was the computer.

The Unix machine was considered as a main frame, so very early on Apples and BBC mini computers were also used and eventually computers running Windows. I used to write programs in Fortran and Pascal and finally C. A few years before I retired, I attended a course on C++ given by B Stroustrup and as it seemed a bit complicated and C fulfilled my requirements I decided not to bother.

When I retired, I installed Linux, which I still use, on my PC with the intention of installing some of the programs I had written. Of course, I only did a couple before my interest waned and I started on something else.

I started computing untrained, I wonder would I be taken on now with such a background?

I hope you have found the above interesting and don’t consider them the ramblings of an old man.

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