From the rising of the sun to the place where it sets,
Psalm 113:3
the name of the Lord is to be praised.
After a brief period working on a major government account as an account manager, I transferred into ICL’s IT technical skills division which was then called Power of 4. I found myself fairly low in the pecking order which was a bit of a culture shock because a few years earlier, I was part of the management team of the now defunct Network Services.
This was the mid 1990s and the latest technical innovation that was beginning to interest people was The Internet. Relatively few people had used this new entity and those who had, used dial-up modem connections, viewing web sites at an agonisingly slow wait. Although It was considered a bit of a plaything, organisations began to think that it would be a good thing to have their own web site. This was not so much because they understood their on-line vision, but that they didn’t want to get left behind. Not many people understood even what the Internet was for and certainly not what it would become.
Because of my experience of networks, I had developed a good knowledge of the Internet and related technologies. I was therefore approached by the part of ICL which was then, selling computers to schools. From the early 80s when the aspiration was that every school should have a computer, things had moved on to the extent that schools now had dedicated classrooms full of computers. My brief was to come up with something that would enable every computer in a school to safely access the Internet.
I attended a meeting with ICL Education and a company called Sun Microsystems (Sun, since subsumed into the Oracle corporation, was a company that produced high end mainframes, servers and workstations all using the UNIX operating system). Sun’s idea was to sell a Sun internet server to each school, which would provide a a gatekeeper between the school and the Internet. These servers looked very impressive and had all the software used by the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) of the day including web browsing and email. Furthermore, there was software which could intelligently filter out undesirable web sites by analysing content in real time. This would give schools, “industrial strength” internet services at a fraction of the usual cost through Sun’s very attractive education discount structure. The brand name used by Sun for these servers was “Netra” and this became the buzz-word of our Internet offering.
I volunteered to put together installation and support these servers and ended up spending a year or so, in around 1996, travelling round the country helping schools set up and use all this technology. Over the time I met some inspiring teachers and head teachers because of course, it was the most switched-on and innovative schools who would have the foresight to install this sort of technology.
One of the most memorable times was travelling to the island of Jersey to “Jersey College of Girls” to set one up. I was entertained in the home the enterprising head of ICT who treated me to a lovely steak dinner at his home overlooking the seafront.
The era of using Sun’s technologies for doing this was sadly coming to an end however. The first problem was that most of the schools struggled to get to grips with the Sun Netra Servers. These all used the UNIX operating system which was very different to Microsoft Windows which they were all used to. The amount of support they needed was far more than we had envisaged. The second thing that happened was that Microsoft had just signed a big deal with the very top of ICL committing us to always prefer Microsoft technologies globally. This put an end to Sun’s goal of making Sun, ICLs technology of choice for schools.
I found it difficult to get my managers in Power of 4 to engage with the problem of having to provide support for Internet servers in schools and this caused a big fall-out at the time.
So I “jumped ship” and ended up working directly for ICL Education. This didn’t really solve the problem of how to support these Sun computers but I was able to get much more engaged with the bigger picture of ICLs vision for learning. In hindsight this was a really good move and enabled some of the greatest projects of my career.
Richard Mann 