The student is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like their teacher.
Luke 6:40 (NIV)
One of the benefits of the ICL sponsorship is that I didn’t have to franticly find a placement company during my second year at University as some of my fellow students had to do. It was automatic that I would spend a year working for ICL (This was to be the third year of the four year sandwich course). While I was on my summer placement in London, I learned that there was an ICL office in Wakefield which is very close to Bradford. Since my parents had unhelpfully moved to Scotland, I no longer had my base in the South and I thought it seemed logical to request a placement in Wakefield. The Software Service Centre (SSC) was regionally based, and the Wakefield office housed the North East regional SSC and that is where I was assigned to work.
It fascinates me how small chance decisions can have a profound effect on one’s future. I had very little knowledge about the city of Wakefield (not even knowing the fact it was a city), but this then strange place was to become my home for the next 30 years. My first memory is leaving the Wakefield Westgate station and then walking up Westgate past the “Unity Hall”, and the Yorkshire Bank at the top of the hill. The city then was a very different place than it is now; there was a new shopping mall called the Ridings under construction. This was at the forefront of retail and when it opened, people used to come from far and wide to marvel at its glass elevator and innovative food hall. Wakefield had a vibrant indoor and outdoor market and as you walked through it to reach the ICL Wakefield office you could hear the rival market traders shouting out the price of bananas. Just beyond the indoor meat market, stood the Wakefield office, “Wakefield House” designated by the ICL building numbering system as WAK01. ICL had most floors of this 7 story red-brick office block which was adjacent to the matching Marsh Way multi-story car park. Since that time, the building has had an extensive refurbishment. As of the time of writing Fujitsu (the company that eventually took over ICL) has three floors of the building. The Marsh Way car park has now been demolished as part of a massive development including a new retail complex which replaces the ground occupied by the old market. The Ridings is now distinctly “old hat” and is sadly in decline.
Back in 1981, the building reception had a uniformed commissionaire, also acting as a receptionist who was able to call down my new boss from the second floor.
Fortunately, this time, I wasn’t called upon to do office adminstration tasks but to join a team supporting the software on the new ME29 minicomputer range. The ME29 was a replacement for the hugely successful 2903/4 range which had the advantage of being able to run all the programs which had been created on the old 1900 series of the 1960s and early 1970s. It also had extra features to make it feel more like the new 2900 range.
As was the case when I worked in London, we didn’t have any computer terminals in the office, rather we had access to all the known problems and solutions on microfiche and had to manually page through these to find what we were looking for. There were problem solving guides and comprehensive manuals, but that was pretty much all we had to go on. If we couldn’t work out the problem, we could refer the bug to the next line of support down south (Bracknell I think).
At the time in the office, we didn’t have an actual ME29 computer but there was an old 2903 in a computer room just down the corridor. I was given quite a lot of freedom to get to know this computer, create some software and generally familiarise myself with the way these things worked. It was quite different to the UNIX machines I had used at university, but I got the nickname “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” by the amount of tinkering I did.
Customers were also able to reach us by telephone and many would initially call to talk through problems before they submitted a formal incident report by post. There was no call logging or any record that a customer had called; it was very informal in this respect. There were also no on-line resources and the only way of communicating with someone the same day was by phone. Most of the office administration was done on multipart carbonless forms so, for example, the customer kept one copy, we would keep another and another would be sent to the third line support teams. A computer would record customer initiated incidents but really only the fact that it had been raised date/time/status etc.
Wakefield city centre was quite a good place to work because you had access to all the facilities, shops, restaurants and pubs. There was an on-site canteen but there was also a range of local pubs that were used for lunches. The culture of getting sandwiches and bringing them back to the desk hadn’t arrived yet and people tended to take proper lunch breaks, including, on occasion, the consumption of enough alcohol to write off afternoon productivity.
As a placement year, I couldn’t have wished for anything better. I was treated with respect and felt part of the team. I got lots of new skills and “real world” computer knowledge. There was a lot going on in ICL during the early 80s and I could see a career there would be interesting. However, there was the small matter of finishing my degree and so it was back to Bradford for one more year.
Richard Mann 