By 1963 I had already failed at my first choice of a career, that of a fighter pilot. I had joined the Royal Air Force, gained my commission, and had started to learn to pilot jet aircraft. I wasn't so good, although I did well academically. My political science essays were worthy of a doctorate. It's worth a telling how this happened...
I was a little naive, being just eighteen, and wrote on my RAF application form my religion as "Baptist." It wasn't a lie, but represented one of the flavors of Christianity I could allow myself to declare. My mother and step-mother were both Baptists, the former by convenience as the church was near and the latter by conviction. My father was Anglican. I was agnostic and Buddhist, though not seriously convicted. So Baptist it was...
Little did I realize my declaration marked me as a non-conformist, duly punched on my dog-tags, and released me from attending church parades. Oh bliss. While others had the pleasure of spit and polish for one more half day each week, I was released to attend the church of my choosing -- and I chose a local coffee house in Cirencester called "The Mad Hatter" that produced the most wonderful cream filled meringues...
I had intended to pick up the Sunday newspapers and study what I would summarize and reorganize as my obligatory essay for the week. It was then that I serendipitously came across a magazine in the local booksellers, The Statist, which had been in print since 1878.
It was a source of brilliant, incisive commentary on the geopolitics of the time and, whereas the others in my year at the Academy often created essays which generally approximated each other, being based on the available Sunday papers, mine were original and thought provoking. Needless to say, I passed with straight A's and my tutor considered I was somewhat of a diplomat.
I never did reveal the source of my intelligence, neither did I ever copy slavishly, but merged Statist information with my family's socialist ethos to create something quite original. I left the RAF in 1963. The Statist, unable to handle competition from the Economist, went out of print four years later.
After trying out a few ideas, I ended up as a computer operator working for Ford's Tractor Group. The job was very straightforward, so much so that I read such books as War and Peace, The Study of History, and The Golden Bough while at work, without missing a beat. I wrote machine language programs for fun and wondered how I was going to find something interesting to do.
My savior came in the guise of Jess Tricker, an IBM Engineer, who suggested I apply to IBM and, as I would need to pass an aptitude test, should apply myself to working through a couple of paperbacks by H.J. Eyesenk - Know (and Test) your own IQ.
What a gift!
When I took the aptitude test, it was just like doing another set of examples. I aced it and within a year was supervisor of a computer installation at IBM and a year later, a programmer. I never looked back. It was to become a career that lasted me forty-five, mostly enjoyable, years.
And what makes an ideal programmer? To tell the truth, I don't know, but an interest in linguistics, mathematics, and a touch of autism helps. Remember, a programmer is someone who, when you ask them to pass the salt, they do so -- grain by grain.
I was a programmer from January 1963 through September 2010. Of course my career advanced from writing snippets of code to designing large systems, teaching, selection and early adoption of state of the art software and hardware, consultancy and advocacy of corporate computing strategies to executive management, and so forth...but at heart I was always a programmer. In fact, the last task I did before I retired, was to create an algorithm for regenerating unique and meaningful user identities for a colleague who was merging two email directories.
My first attempts at programming were coding machine language onto the bare metal of an 8k IBM 1401. I also found it easy to use Report Program Generator (RPG) as it was a code representation of the cycles generated by the 421/407 Accounting Machines which I had programmed by setting a plug board where quadrants were devoted to detail, accumulating, sub-totaling, and totaling processes. RPG code was not far removed from that of the Jaquard looms.
At IBM, I learned 360 Assembler, Fortran II, COBOL (ugh!), and formally RPG. I used Assembler mostly and wrote some interesting stuff including a process which included building chained channel commands to manipulate large records using sort techniques previously called scatter read/gather write. It was my first introduction to the operating system which in 1401 days had been initiated as Input Output Control System (IOCS). I learned to record state for complex processes, to create foolproof sequential update processes, direct access processing and, early days though it was, telecommunications access methods (BTAM, QTAM). I worked mostly on market research computing problems, considering for a while taking formal qualifications in statistics (FRICS) and being offered a partnership in a small market research company after I had moonlight-written a few programs for them.
These were the days when IBM was known as Snow White. The seven dwarves were Burroughs, Univac, Honeywell, RCA, Control Data Corporation, NCR, and GE. Very US-Centric -- unmentioned were the national computer systems of France, Italy, Japan, Germany, and the UK. So too, the earliest computer was lauded as ENIAC although the British Colossus, still shrouded in the Official Secrets Act, predated it. Everyone seemed to know of John Von Neumann, but few of Alan Turing and even less (including myself) of Tommy Flowers, the Post Office engineer who translated Turing's theory into practical hardware.
When I started working as a programmer, digital computers had been in use for twenty years already, mostly in military and scientific research. My advent coincided with the beginning of the commercial age.
In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities... I was a beginner, but was lucky enough to accept the unique possibilities afforded by a old political magazine and the timely advice of a kindly engineer...
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