Just thoughts …

Category: A former life …

  • My first encounter with computers

    For me it would be being introduced to an ICL 4130 (formerly an Elliot Computing 4130) mainframe and the use of punch card decks. I was instructed on how to program the computer using the computer language Algol-60 and I had to write the code on sheets that were then punched by punch card operators. Somewhere, I have a booklet which describes the machine … somewhere!

    Anyway, by the time I’d got started on my computing life the 4130 was getting a bit long in the tooth and the form for Universities in those days (remember everything was centrally funded by the Universities Grant and Research Grant Committees of the Education Department then) was to get a visit from the Computer Board – a group of the wise and worldly (it must have been, I went on to serve on its successor body much later on – the Joint Information Systems Committee) who would adjudicate whether an institution needed a new computer or, if it was between its regular visits, whether the Computer Centre needed new peripherals such as disk drives, printers or plotters. As a research student (at UCW Aberystwyth) I, along with my other researchers were fully prepped to be able to say the right thing just in case one of these visiting folk asked a question. What fun! The preparation must have paid off because we got a new machine.

    The ICL 4130 was replaced by an ICL 1900 series machine running George 3 – a proper operating system [I think a second machine was purchased later on and they were linked so that one could handle batch punch card jobs and the other handled teletype terminals and possibly output]. Of course this was the time when Computer Operators were needed and they ran jobs (including back-ups) overnight and had to be in attendance to change magnetic tapes, and handle printed output – a lot of which was created by me!

    I was teaching myself multi-variate statistics, mainly based on linear and multiple regression models, but also principal components and factor analysis and using standard programs which I modified in part to my research subject because I needed mapped output, on a line-printer! The main program I worked with however was written (in Fortran IV) by David Wishart from St Andrews for Cluster Analysis, so I learnt to program in Fortran and this soon replaced Algol-60 as my preferred programming language. This program and its adaptation to spatial analysis (in which I followed the work of a fellow researcher called Stan Openshaw who was using the technique in human geography to group together similar grid cells from maps) was to take up a huge part of the next 10 years of my life as I worked hard to avoid actually going out to do any field work on my research topic “Contemporary Erosion in mid-Wales”. Most of my jobs were by now being run by remote job entry at the Manchester Regional Computing Centre as the size of my data set was too large to run in the UCW Aberystwyth Computer Centre.

    It was an exciting time to be a geographer and books and monographs were being published on quantitative geography amongst which were ones in the Institute of British Geographers CATMOG series, still in my possession, by a certain John Silk. A lovely coincidence that brings John and myself together and allows us to reminisce on the early 1970’s and “the quantitative revolution” as it was called by some!

    Through the 1970’s I returned every summer holiday to Aber, and camped at the top of Penglais Hill to get time on the mainframe. In between these visits I would sit at a teletype at Doncaster College of Education, where I was now a Lecturer in Physical Geography, and submit jobs to the IBM 360 mainframe at what was then Sheffield Polytechnic. It had to be said that by 1978-9 my main interest (apart from the family that was now arriving on the scene) was in computing, not geography, and so when a friend asked me to put my knowledge to work in programming some engineering design problems, I accepted the challenge, set up my own consultancy (with my HoD’s approval) and started programming an Olivetti P6060 desktop computer using Basic. Having it at home to do the work allowed my eldest daughter (44 yesterday) to have a go at programming …

    So now the link to geography had begun to be broken. This was severed by Shirley Williams decision in 1978 to close the Teacher Training part of the College where I worked. I bravely, one of my colleagues thought foolishly given that we had by now three young children, decided to opt for voluntary redundancy on the basis of being given a year’s fully-paid retraining. I went to Bradford University and did a one-year MSc in Computer Science giving me letters after my name to go with my 10+ years programming experience. Here I was introduced to the DEC PDP-11/60 mini-computer – a lovely machine running Unix, which was a lovely operating system which I continue to use in it’s Linux incarnation, to this day. I wrote my thesis on building a disk operating system (Modus) for a PDP-8 using a high-level structured programming language (Wirth’s Modula) on the PDP-11. I could now program in Algol-60, Basic, Fortran iV, Fortran 66, Cobol, PDP Assembler, Pascal and Modula.

    It was the latter language (the first concurrent programming language and the precursor of first Modula-2 and then Ada) that enabled me to get a job as a Systems Programmer / Computer Lecturer at South Glamorgan Institute of HE at Llandaff. I was returning to Cardiff and HE. Not a very bold move and “only for 4 years max” (which is what I said to Jenny). That was not to be! At SGIHE/CIHE/UWIC I oversaw the introduction of a mini-computer service based initially on a Prime 550, then Prime 750 and so on, initially writing the systems programs for its operating system – Primos in Fortran, PL/P and SP/L, and then becoming Head of the Computer Centre where I dabbled in producing the first website for the institute, which has since been a continuing interest for me.

    Here are a few pictures of the Computer Centre at UWIC taken before I left for UWCM at UHW (The Heath) …

    The Operator’s Consoles for each system are on the left, the tape rack for the day’s tape back-ups are in the background, a terminal room with micro-computers was alongside the Computer Centre …

    The original Line printer (orange) was till in service, the Prime 750 is in the background …

    I’d become a manager, and the rest is another story, which I’ll record another day!

    At home we’d purchased one of the first BBC-B Computers – the first of a long series of domestic computers which again is another story, which I’ll record another day!

    David Harrison, June 2020

     

  • Core and chore, or me and more disruptive thinking

    Core and chore, or me and more disruptive thinking

    This is the text of a post I was invited to contribute to the Institutional Web Managers Workshop (IWMW) Blog as a retrospective to a presentation that Joe gave at the Workshop in 2009.

    When Joe Nicholls and I started our conversation back in 2007 on what the IT Services role should look like in the age of “disruptive technologies”, we had a vision that things were never going to be the same again. Indeed in a farewell valedictory at the Welsh Universities IT Services Gregynog Colloquium in 2010 I gave a talk entitled “So that’s it for IT Services … or is it?” after previously writing “We’re all doomed …“. Therefore when Brian invited me to reflect on the relevance of the talk “Servicing ‘Core’ and ‘Chore’” that we presented at IWMW 2009 to the institution today, it set up a whole stream of thoughts running – which have taken some time to commit to words.

    First of all I’m extremely grateful for two recent posts by Derek Law (on this blog) and Martin Weller (on the Ed Techie blog) which gave me the courage to proceed when I was beginning to feel that I had no place, being now a number of years out of active institutional web and IT Services involvement, to express any views – let alone suggest they might be relevant! Apparently I’m not completely out of step.

    Essentially “‘Core’ and ‘Chore’” is about giving a different perspective – in fact a users perspective – on what an IT Service function needs to deliver in terms of service offering. It is an explicitly user-centric view of IT Services, as it looks to provide the user with the tools THEY require, and with the support THEY need to make full use of them. This is what we have called enablement. As a precursor to enablement, you need to go through a process of envisioning the possibilities that are available and how they might be incorporated into a users’ way of working and then engagement with the user, and as a result of following this process in partnership with the user, you aspire to deliver excellent education. We presented these ideas in a paper at Eunis 2009.

    Just words I hear you say, but look at a few of the slides from Joe’s slideset and then judge the relevance to your institution today.

    Core_and_Chore_6.001

    The individual researcher or student has a completely different view of what they want, and need, from an IT service offering. All they require are tools and training in their use to get the educational task done. This is core to them.

    Core_and_Chore_5.001

    For them the interaction with corporate systems is a chore, often an unpleasant diversion from getting things done!

    Core_and_Chore_7.001

    This leads into a conflict because much of what the individual requires is outside the institutional firewall, and by its placement “in the cloud” is “not controllable” by the organisation. I have discussed governance and security elsewhere and previously, and don’t intend to follow that up here. Suffice to say, both issues can be resolved, through trust and education. Working in partnership. Thus we arrive at this seeming impasse …

    The ‘core’ services and activities to the institution are the ‘chore’ to the individual. The ‘core’ services and activities to the individual are often not identified by the institution as necessary, or at worst are actively prevented from happening.

    I would love to be able to say that I am confident that what Joe and I presented back in 2009 at IWMW has now been committed to the Room 101 of institutional web history as having been acknowledged, accepted and actioned. I fear it hasn’t. In fact I know it hasn’t as the horror stories of failed collaboration across institutions, of difficulties in migrating content into, out of and between institutions, and the failure of the very seemingly straightforward task of ensuring proper archiving of digital content is accessible outside the institution, continue seemingly in an unremitting manner.

    So I conclude with just one plea for institutional web managers. I realise that you will most certainly not be in a position to alter institutional strategy, but please just please remember the individual in your service offering. Be prepared to readily provide advice on setting up a personal web presence outside the institution – that means providing advice on getting personal or project domains. Be open to the probability that researchers will want to port content out of institutional systems when they move, or retire, and have a way that enables them to do that easily. Be aware that digital content only lasts as long as it is archived properly – boring I know but time spent now will prevent tears later on. Be an envisioned and engaged web manager, enabling the user to achieve their educational objectives. Your attendance at IWMW 20, suggests that you are well on the way to doing this.