Hello, my name is Anthony and as I turn 59 this year and will also become a grandparent for the first time, I began along with the New Year reminiscing over my career to date and it struck me that over the years I´ve crossed paths with some interesting (from a now historical point of view) computer systems. So I thought I would share some of my journey from a 12 year old self-learning Fortran 4 in my home town of Hull, UK through to Senior Consultant Ab Initio at synvert Data Insights in Munich, Germany.
That journey really starts with my Father, his job at the time was maintaining linotype and intertype machines for the local newspaper.
As you will see from the link these are mechanical machines using hot metal to produce typeset blocks that can be used in a printing press. As technology advanced, so did my Father´s role and he eventually became head of the digital systems department when all the mechanical systems were replaced by computers. This led to my introduction to my first computer – a PDP-8 in 1978.
This computer had no screen, no keyboard and no mouse (a mouse controlling a computer was first demonstrated a decade before in 1968 but they still weren´t generally available), instead, just a series of switches and lights on the front panel. It also made use of magnetic core memory, and it was my first introduction to binary.
In 1980 (I was 14) Sir Clive Sinclair released the ZX80
and although my Father ordered one as a kit to build himself, it never arrived so instead he ordered a microtan-65.
This computer plugged into a standard TV and came with a hexadecimal keypad – the full keyboard didn´t appear for another year or so. This was my introduction to 6502 microprocessors, BASIC and machine code.
By 1982, my school friends all seemed to be in the ZX80/81 and spectrum camp, I was a little out of step on “cool” games to play as we moved from the microtan into another family of 6502 processors, namely the Commodore Vic-20 and then the Commodore 64.
This was the era of loading games from cassette tape. The spectrum made use of a standard tape player whereas the Vic-20 required a specific and thus more expensive dedicated tape player. The disadvantage of the spectrum was that the loading was very susceptible to the volume – too loud or too quite and the game wouldn´t load; the commodore didn´t suffer from this issue. The next innovation for our Commodore 64 was the addition of a Commodore 1541 5.25 floppy drive. This had a capacity of 170 kilobytes.
This year was also my first tentative steps into writing computer games. One of my friends had a ZX81, with a graphics expansion pack (quite an expensive item at the time) and additional 4kB memory. As we had both just watched the Clint Eastwood movie Firefox, we decided to write a game based on this movie. The game like the movie came in two sections – getting to the aircraft and then stealing it and flying to a friendly zone. We did this as a text based adventure that led to a flight simulator, we even had rear view cameras displaying the enemy jets. It sounds great, but in reality I´m not cut out for writing adventure games and the graphics expansion pack required to play the game cost a considerable amount so we didn´t gain any interest in selling it – probably for the best.
At this time my school had an agreement with the local University, they had a Nord ND500, and we could send them hand written programs written in ForTran 4 on preformatted forms, they would type the code in and a week or so later, the output along withe the punch cards would be returned. I very quickly learned to double check my spelling and coding before sending the forms in the post – lest after a week of waiting the returned output said “syntax error line 7”. Such events led to an appreciation of quality control and testing. The following year we gained a direct teletype link to the university computer so I was able to type my code directly after school. My school also had a Research Machines 380Z
but I didn´t like it as I´d grown up on 6502 processors, and the 380Z was a Z80 processor so the instruction set was different.
At home, following the Comodore 64, there was really only one option available for the next system, a Commodore Amiga 500 followed by an Amiga 2000.
These both used a 68030 processor. I was able to expand the 2000 to include a bridgeboard for an Intel x86 and this was my first introduction to MS-DOS.
Now into 1984 when I was 18, and my next computer system, a Commodore Pet.
This particular model came with the very useful Commodore 4040 twin 5.25 inch floppy drives. Although the small built-in green screen took a little getting used to, I used this system to write and sell my first commercial software, written entirely in BASIC. Back in 1982, the UK national newspaper Daily Mail launched a bingo game played through the newspaper with a large cash prize, but due to an issue in the production of the numbers, thousands of people ended up winning a share of the prize, with each person getting around £2 each (BBC Archive).
In 1984, the local newspaper (The Hull Daily Mail) had decided to try the idea again so I was tasked with writing the code to produce the cards and run the games. The dual floppy drive came in very handy as I could run the program on one disk and maintain the game database on the other. Now this is 1984 and there weren´t any database systems available — at least not one that would run in a 170kB 5.25 floppy on a Commodore Pet, so I wrote my own file based database. The game was played in testing for four months before being approved for publication, sadly at this time the Gaming Commission refused permission to run the game so eventually it was shelved unused.
In 1989 I was 23 and I joined BP Chemicals Hull as a freelancer and eventually joined a project called Utilities Control System (UCS). This project was to computerise the entire chemicals site and so modernise how the engineers and operators managed and ran the site. This was my first introduction to Digital VAX and the OpenVMS operating system. All the code I wrote here was in ForTran 77 although we did have a short project running in Prolog. In 1996, I went back to freelancing and stayed with OpenVMS running on VAX and Alpha systems until 2009.
In 2009 I was working at NYSE Euronext in London, still using Alpha and OpenVMS and coding in Pascal. Management made a decision in 2009 to migrate from the 30 year old Pascal system to a modern, extensible, high performance system and Ab Initio was chosen. I transferred over to that team and the rest is as they say, history, I have now been working with Ab Initio for over 16 years. At this point I have run out of old computer systems, as Ab Initio will pretty much run on anything, cloud or on-premise.
NYSE Euronext closed down at the end of 2014 and still freelance I moved first to Edinburgh, then to Brussels. Finally in 2021, I was offered a permanent role with synvert Data Insights, a decision I´m still very happy I took. I now live in Munich as a permanent resident, my German language level isn´t great but I´m working on it and I´m looking forward to the coming years helping synvert Data Insights clients get the most benefit from their data.
