Square One

I was attracted to computers in the early seventies when I joined the Ford Motor company of Dagenham, England - in those days it was unheard of to actually own and enjoy a personal computer, it was unheard of to own a pocket calculator for that matter - these things were far too expensive and out of reach of your average technician apprentice on fourteen quid a week.

Being an apprentice "Engineer" as indeed I was in those days, working in a highly sophisticated technical environment (sic), I came into contact with the incredible computing machines on a 'need to know' basis every Wednesday afternoon for about 45 minutes. (This was good as at that stage of the week I'd normally sobered up from the weekend).

The incredibly dumb Decwriter terminal that I thought was a computer was actually attached via a modem and "acoustic coupler" to a Prime 220 computer (awesome in those days)....the Ford IT people who knew about this machine were very, very secretive about its operation - after all, it was a career in computer science that was at stake and if any "ordinary person" ever grasped any of the fundamentals, God help them.

So, here I was, a technical sprog, subjected to the 'need to know' technique of computer stuff. eg, heres a room, here's a terminal - we'll show you how to 'log on', give you a password and then allow you to run simple programs via paper tape. (but, we'll make sure thats all you'll get up to!) and never let you into the big game.

As time went by computers became more and more accessible to the general public as prices dropped, I've personally been through the loop with Commodore Pets, VIC20's, Sinclairs, Casio's, Mattels infamous Aquarius, Olivetti's M24 (IBM clone), The Commodore 64, The Amiga, a 386, a 486, a Pentium 100mhz, 166mhz, 266mhz, AMD K6-2 350mhz and at the moment I'm running an AMD XP 1600+ home brewed machine at home, which by todays standards is very much on the slow side.

Back in the days of that Prime 220, the running of the computer system was left up to an elite group of people, probably in starched white coats, these people surrounded themselves with technospeak and built themselves an ivory tower. They were the experts at the leading edge of MIS technology (sic again), If there was a computer related enquiry from one of the peons "below" then the normal procedure was to offer the minimum of information to satisfy the query - often raising more questions than answers. It was an impossible process to learn computer stuff without the help of one of these experts and a difficult one with their help.

There seemed to be a few rules involved when experts passed any information over regarding computers :

1. Smile that patronising smile.
2. Use the phrase "No, its far more complicated than that" liberally.
3. Talk quickly and do not repeat yourself.
4. Offer information only on the topic raised, do not springboard.
5. If forced to springboard, talk quicker and use a lot of acronyms.
6. Defend the tower

And so, here we are, thirty years later and I find that here at work, with the new security stuffed operating systems we have a renaissance of the MIS people, a new age of the dumb terminal and confused user. They don't wear white coats any more, but they certainly live in an ivory tower.

We're right back to where we started.