He looked David over and saw that he was little more than a boy, glowing with health and handsome, and he despised him.
1 Samuel 17:42 (NIV)
After getting through the first year of university the time came to prepare for the long summer break. The promised Student summer holiday would be a massive 3 months of joyfully doing pretty well nothing – a welcome break following the stress of the exam period, wallowing in the relief that I had got though the first year and passed all of the exams.
Then, a few days into the summer, I received a letter from ICL, telling me to report to some office in London in about a week’s time. They had made a terrible mistake, I thought. They had obviously thought that my one year placement year started now (a year early), and a quick phone call would sort things out. “Oh no” they said “This is for your summer job”. “My summer WHAT?” I thought, this wasn’t part of the plan.
Once, I had thought it through though, it wasn’t all bad. For a start, I would be on the payroll and all said and done, when I had finished the summer, I would be about a thousand quid better off which in those days, was almost a life changing sum of money, for a student at least.
So, I had to go to London for my introduction to the world of work. I think I had only been to London about 2 or three times before in my whole life. As a family, we had visited the Science Museum and Madame Tussauds. With school, I had visited the Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum (when artifacts were loaned to the UK by the Egyptian museum in Cairo), but that was about it. Now, having to live and work there for three months was something quite different entirely. Culturally, the London of the time was probably about as distant from the northern City of Bradford, as that was from my home town of Royston in rural Hertfordshire. Since my parents had moved to Scotland, any prospect of commuting wasn’t there, I had to somehow travel down to the ‘Big Smoke” and fend for myself there for the next three months.
ICL kindly put me up in a hotel for the first two weeks. This in itself was quite a revalation at the time to think that this company would actually pay for me to stay, in what I considered quite a swanky hotel! The place was called the Coberg Hotel and that was on Bayswater Road (on the north side of Hyde Park). This Hotel is now called the Hilton Hyde Park. The Hotel was probably not as posh as I thought because it seemed to be run by Basil Fawlty. This highly excitable hotel manager managed to make a real meal of talking one of the receptionists through the complexities of changing a light bulb.
In those days, you couldn’t just find a local cash machine to draw money and if the banks were closed it was common practice for hotels to cash cheques for you. Well of course, Basil had to make a real show of where to find some cash for me so after that, I made sure I didn’t run out of money.
The Bayswater Road goes along the north of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens and sits between Marble Arch (at the end of Oxford Street) and Notting Hill at the other end. At weekends over the summer, artists would display their wares along the pavement in front of the park so it was a very pleasant spot, but unfortunately the company would only stand the hotel bill for a couple of weeks.
Trying to find somewhere to live in London on a budget has never been easy and I certainly couldn’t afford to stay in the ICL funded hotel. I found a cheap hotel in Battersea, in the shadow of the iconic power station (which was just still going I think). This was OK but they couldn’t provide breakfast in time for me to go to work and in any case, was still too expensive.
Finally, through a flat agency, I found a bedsit in Shepherd’s Bush. I can’t remember the exact address but it was just round the corner from the QPR Football ground and the Iconic BBC Television Centre. This accommodation was “cheap and cheerful” but the landlady kept out of my way and it did the job.
The ICL office where I was to work was called Bridge House South in Putney and this was adjacent to Putney Bridge tube station. Travelling to and from work was by Tube and this was also the means to explore London. I can vividly remember the sounds and smells of the London Underground in those summer months. The warm air being blown out of the tunnels by an approaching train is one sensory experience that I never forgot. When years later, whenever I visited London for work, these memories came flooding back each time I descended the escalators and felt that warm air again. I do quite like the Tube, not only for the sensory experience but the fact you can almost teleport to any part of the City.
The building where I worked is now a Premier Inn but at the time, was part of a cluster of ICL budlings in Putney including the former headquarters which has been converted into an up-market apartment block called Putney Wharfe Tower. The entrance included a product demonstration area, and it had the latest shiny new product, the ME29 minicomputer on display. You knew you had arrived at ‘Tech Central’ when you walked into the reception area and saw the latest, fully functioning ICL computer on display.
The department where I worked was called the Software Service Centre (SSC) and this embodied two concepts that the firm was just beginning to get to grips with: Software (something not considered previously as having much value) and service (again, not something that had been valued very much on its own merit).
In those days, any company (or government) who purchased an ICL computer, would also employ a team of designers and programmers to write the applications needed to make the computer operate their own business processes (like running the payroll, issue invoices etc). What ICL provided was the computer and the core software to make the computer go (the Operating System) and the tools to enable the customer’s own programmers write their applications (computer languages, databases and stuff).
The job of the SSC was to be the contact point for customers to resolve any problems with the software provided by ICL. The theory was that the customer was supposed to have sufficient skills to solve most problems on their own and only contact ICL as a last resort, when they thought there might be an error with the ICL software.
The basic modus operandi of the SSC was as follows. The customers (not end users but corporate data processing departmental experts), would send in incident reports on multipart paper forms, accompanied by supporting “evidence” on vast reams of listing paper. Customers could also call-in with problems that might mean resolution without needing to send in a form. The subject matter specialists in the SSC, known as “Diagnosticians” would look at the problems and try and work out the solution. If it was “known error”, something that had been reported and solved before, we could send a fix to the customer, otherwise the paperwork would be sent to another part of the company, the Systems Maintenance Centre, based in Wokingham. This part of the organisation provided the access to the next level of expertise capable of creating new repairs to the software. If you think that sounds convoluted and bureaucratic, you are right – it was!
If you think each member of this team had a computer terminal to search the on-line database of problems and bring up the on-line documentation then think again. This was the office world of the 1970s, computer terminals on professional people’s desks were not part of that reality. Keyboard skills were considered a menial task and professionals would not lower themselves to that level and having a screen and keyboard in front of you would indicate a particular lowly status. The University policy, which was sending fresh undergraduates to typing school was inspired and really was training us for the future, even though the reality of the office culture seemed firmly stuck in the 1960s.
If you also think that I would soon be rolling up my sleeves and getting deep and technical into solving problems, you would again be mistaken. I don’t really think the SSC had any idea what to do with me. I expect my stated interest in “software” matched the departmental title and that’s where I ended up. I am not really sure the knew what sort of person I was or skills I had but my role for this 12 weeks was probably best described as “office boy”.
I was part of the SSC admin team which kept the processes and workflow around the team going. We would receive the new mail each day and log each incident in on our system. Our “system” was a set of so called T-Cards (cards in the shape of a T) which were filled in with the incident reference and put up on a board to show its status and which team was looking at it. We would also make a list of all the new incidents and incident closures and TELEX them in to Wokingham (the people in Wokingham would then enter them into a database on their mainframe). Yes, TELEX was the standard method of electronic communication, widely used by organisations because it was not only instant, but communications made this way had legal status. Email simply did not exist, and Fax machines had not yet taken hold. I remember typing in the morning, a list of incidents into the telex machine and in order not to tie up the sending or receiving machine, we would punch the message onto paper tape which would then be read in to send the message once connection had been made to the other end.
As well as providing an extra pair of hands for the admin team, I was also asked to put together a weekly statistics pack for the manager. This involved creating a graph showing the numbers of incidents at each stage of the process for each day of the week. This was done the hard way with a pencil, ruler and graph paper because there was no possibility of using a computer to do that task.
One piece of technology that each diagnostician did have was a microfiche reader. A microfiche is a transparency about 6 x 4 inches, each sheet, containing photographs of around hundred A4 pages and the reader was a big magnifier showing each page on a screen. The complete set of documentation ran into several dozen fiche and was updated regularly so this was a very space efficient way of managing that volume of documentation (short of storing it on a computer). Rather than search an on-line database, members of the team would scan through these fiche searching for known errors and fixes.
While I was there, we did get one terminal on-line to the database and we used this to replace the need to create a telex each day and we were also able to search the known error database and print off patches. Today of course, any patches or updates to software would be downloaded from the internet so it may therefore be surprising that repairs would have to be manually typed into the computer digit by digit and very often we would have to telex the patch to the customer so they in turn could re-key it in locally.
The ICL Mainframe terminals of the day were massive orange things. I recall the model number for these were 7561 and a number would be connected to another computer which was in turn connected over a telephone line to the mainframe. This other computer, called a 7502 had just one job which was to connect a group (say a dozen) terminals to one telephone line and the mainframe.
Being used to the university environment with ready access to computer terminals, I was surprised how few computer terminals or other equipment there was in the office. How could these experts be really effective at supporting customers when they probably had less access to the equipment than the customer did? (the probable answer is that they weren’t very productive at all).
I didn’t know anyone in London so it was a good job I liked my own company since I have never been the sort of person good at going out and making new friends. Exploring London was exciting and it was summer so I could enjoy the sites. I did go and see a short lived stage production of Douglas Adams’ Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy at a theatre near Finsbury Park called the Rainbow (this was a music venue for a number of years and is now a church).
What can I say about how it felt to work for ICL during those 12 weeks? Apart from one awkward moment when I was told off for being too chummy with the technical diagnosticians (my immediate boss was quite traditional in outlook and thought people ought to know their place), I found ICL a very amenable organisation. It was a good atmosphere, and I was treated well, even though what I was asked to do wasn’t exactly what I expected. I learned that ICL was quite an old-fashioned company and although it was part of the IT industry, it probably wasn’t very prepared for the coming revolution.
There was also the small matter of the money I was paid during those weeks and I think I went out of it very well off thank you.
Richard Mann 