Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.
Hebrews 11:16 (NIV)
When she found out I was going to Bradford, one of my mother’s friends was very worried. It was the time of the hunt for the so-called “Yorkshire Ripper”, where a serial killer was going around murdering young women on the Bradford streets and I think she thought it was generally a dangerous place to be! Of course, the rural Cambridgeshire village of Meldreth is a far cry from a northern industrial inner-city but when I moved up, the real culture shock was university life. It’s difficult to describe how different the culture and life at university was from the little secondary school where I had been sheltering for the last 5 years. The thing that took a little time to sink in, was that the students and the Students Union were responsible for student life, not the teachers as had been the case at secondary school.
The university was a modern purpose-built campus with quite a lot of student accommodation on-site. I had a room in an on-campus self-catering block which was part of a small accommodation estate know as Shearbride Green. In each block a common kitchen was shared by about 15 students. During the first week, the fire brigade needed to turn out every evening as smoke detectors were set off by students experimenting with cooking for the first time. I had a feeling that for some of them, it was the first time they had been allowed to have matches!
Despite this, home cooking wasn’t that common, at least initially, because there was plenty of affordable food to be found on and off campus. The University is set smack in the middle of Bradford’s Asian community and much of the students’ eating culture was in the curry houses that proliferated all around campus. Up until then, I had been a very fussy eater and would never have touched anything remotely spicy or exotic, so I was initially dismayed that Bradford students’ diet was mostly curry. However, it soon became obvious to me that life as a Bradford student was untenable without eating curry and so through the power of sheer necessity, I soon acquired the taste! These restaurants stayed open late enough to cater for our needs after bar and pub closing times and were extremely cheap. The meals were typically a bowl of Keema (minced meat curry) and three chapattis which you were expected to use instead of cutlery (unless you embarrassed yourself and asked for some). The keema came in three flavours of increasing hotness: Mild, Madras and Vindaloo. As time went on, we became more discerning, and there was some wonderfully exotic and flavoursome foods available.
The University Computer Centre was under the library. As you entered, the first thing you saw was the reception, behind which was the main computer room behind glass panels. When I started in the latter part of 1978, the university mainframe was an aging ICL 1904. This was a data processing workhorse and provided a range of processing needs for all the university’s academic departments. The department had developed software to allow all kinds of jobs such as statistical analysis to be carried out for research projects.
The method of using the mainframe, was to submit your work, hand written on coding forms to the computer reception, whereby they would be punched up on cards and processed. Your output would be ready for collection the following day. There were a limited number of on-line terminals where students could interact with the computer directly, but these were for postgraduates only.
The University Computer Centre had two functions. The first was to provide a computer facility for all the other departments of the University, which was what the ICL mainframe was primarily there to do. The second, was to house the School of Computing, this hotbed of computer science learning to which I had now gained access!
The actual teaching of computer science was based around another of the centre’s computers, a DEC PDP 11. This was there for the School of Computing and the computer was housed in a small computer room next door to a room of around 20 terminals (mix of VDUs and Teletypes). This room became a second home for some of us who would spend many late hours developing and refining our code. We were taught using a programming language called Pascal which was a language used a lot at the time to teach good, structured programming style. It was a far cry from the relatively crude BASIC that I had learned at school, but the school background put me at a massive advantage relative to my fellow students.
Because of this head-start, I found the first year of programming teaching very easy and I had the tendency to show off in coursework going above and beyond the brief.
Some of us were bored enough to torment the systems admin guys responsible for this teaching computer. We wrote a program that would pretend to be the system that asked for a username and password to get access to the computer. This enabled us to steal the main administration password for the whole system. We would then cause some minor trouble, enough to let the admin team know that we had compromised their system. I am quite surprised we didn’t get into more trouble playing these “games” but in one way they probably appreciated someone showing up the security flaws. It’s sobering to note that this trick is exactly the same as the one used today, by criminals out to steal your passwords and I don’t quite understand why that loophole is still open 40 years later!
The computer ran what was then a new and experimental operating system called UNIX. This is the system that gave rise to LINUX which is the base for very many modern computer systems including mobile phones and Apple Mac computers. It is astonishing to think that this and its derivatives are firmly at the mainstream in the 2020s. Having this exposure to UNIX was one of the most significant long-lasting benefits of my 4 years at Bradford.
The other real-life skill which came from that first year course was typing. We were all made to learn touch typing, not on computer terminals but real typewriters. We learned from a typewriter training book and were tested on our speed and accuracy against the clock. A computer keyboard is much more complicated than a typewriter keyboard and special keys are all in different places so my typing style is not textbook, but I am really thankful that I can type text without looking at the keyboard. I owned a small portable typewriter, and I was able to practice in my room (the laptop computer hadn’t been invented). We tended to type up coursework using one of the terminals in the computer centre and printing it off one of the computer printers. The software we used was called “roff” and was a primitive early word processor even though we didn’t call it that.
Although the term “email” hadn’t yet been coined, I did get my first ever electronic mail message during my first year at Bradford. At school, I had written a crude program to calculate Pi to around 30 decimal places. Now I had access to much more computer power, I ran the program on the PDP11 Computer and let it run overnight (to see how many decimal places I could calculate). The following morning, I logged in and saw the message “You have mail”. Now remember that I had never heard of (or even conceived of) electronic mail so automatically assumed this meant that some memo was waiting for me to retrieve from my pigeon-hole next to the faculty office. I duly went round to the office to find no mail for me. What was explained to me later is that if I typed the command “mail”, the computer would give me a list of messages in my electronic inbox. That first mail was from the computer manager, telling me that if I ever left a program like my “Pi” job running again, he would turf me off the system! He had spent the previous evening trying to find out why the whole system was running slowly and discovered my program running away in the background.
Part of the ICL sponsorship that I had obtained prior to starting the course was to top up my spending money while on the course and this made a real difference to my life at Bradford. The grant you got for living expenses, when added to the “parental contribution” added up to about £1,500 per year (around about £7,600 in today’s money). The amount of living expenses that your parents were supposed to provide was calculated using a means test. There was no such thing as a student loan, and I think many of my fellow students struggled because their parents simply didn’t pay them what they were supposed to. However for me, the ICL sponsorship added an extra £300 to this meaning a top up of £100 per term. The bottom line is that I was relatively well off. If you think even that isn’t a lot of money, I remember that I made a withdrawal from the on campus Lloyd’s Bank cash machine of £15 each week and that covered living expenses for the whole week.
Finally, I have heard it said that to teenagers, parents are excruciatingly embarrassing and I can testify that this is true. Bless them, when the end of the first year came, they volunteered to drive all the way from Glasgow to pick me up from Bradford and take me home for the summer holidays. Given the amount of stuff that I had accumulated in one year as a student, I was very grateful since trying to do this on the train was a complete non-starter. My parents had two cars, my dad’s Triumph Dolomite which was a good sized family car, and my Mum’s Fiat 126 which can take three people at a push, only so long as one feels like a sardine, and has just enough luggage space for a small set of golf clubs. Now you can probably guess which one they turned up in and suffice to say, it is a miracle the little motor managed to make it back and in fact it almost conked out on the final hill up to their house!
Richard Mann 