Alan Hooker memoir.
Alan Hooker’s reminiscences: here is what I remember of my time at LEO. Some of the dates
area bit vague and might be suspect but then that describes me now!
I’ve also included notes on my visit to New Zealand which you might find interesting. In 1963 it
was like pre-war Britain and that scenario has gone forever now.
I joined LEO in June 1958 at Elms House from the BBC and went through a six week LEO II
training course, at the end of which I was thoroughly confused and questioning whether I had
made another bad career choice. I was given a number of small maintenance jobs and utilities
to work on then assigned to some major changes to LEO I programs. As I remember they were
full of formed orders (Editor: orders created by the programmer by treating an instruction as if
it was data held in store) as there was no B-line modification and my program errors frequently
caused me to try to obey data. It was here that the penny dropped–the computer can try to
obey data or do arithmetic on instructions, in memory they are both the same. Even so the
Lyons bakeries were not brought a grinding halt and I emerged with the beginnings of
programming ability.I returned to LEO II work under Betty Cooper (Newman) to write the Lyons
Ice Cream suite. For Betty I had to code in ink and she checked of code. Any sheet of code she
disapproved of was returned to me for rewriting (in ink). By the time the code got to Data Prep
it was fit for testing. Another thing I remember about this suite was the correction to sales
commission due to fluctuations in ambient temperature between this year and the
corresponding temperature last year. I therefore was required to code a routine which, inter
alia calculated corrected sales as actual sales times a constant raised to the none integral power
of the difference between the temperatures calculated to one position of decimals. This could
be positive or negative. Whilst I was sitting there with furrowed brow John Lewis helpfully told
me to increase the temperatures by ten and divide the answer by 100. And so the calculations
were done and so the commission was calculated and the salesmen found it incomprehensible!
About this time Lector was introduced and the Xeronic printer installed in Elms House, so I
worked on modifying the Teashops system to accommodate them, In 1960 I was assigned to
help The Standard Triumph Motor Company (LE$O II/8) in Coventry develop their stock control
system under the management of Arthur Payman. Arthur had a Messerschmitt two seat/three
wheeled bubble car in which we trundled up the M1 every Monday morning, and I returned by
train at the end of the week. I think I worked on this project for about a year.
I then moved to Hartree House to work for Doug Comish on the Persian Lamb Sales System for
the Hudson’s Bay Company (Editor: a LEO II bureau job). This was the first time that I had acted
as the front man doing requirements, design, coding, testing and delivery. Added to that the
Powers Samas Samastronic printer was LEO’s first Alpha numeric printer and was a bit
whimsical in behaviour. It struck me as a bit odd that Persian Lambskins grown in South West
Africa should be auctioned in London by a company with a Canadian name. Very little went
according to plan. The sale was originally going to be small with plenty of time between receipt
of skins and the auction to sort out problems, and the manual system would be the backup. In
the event, because of the African weather, lambing was late, the closing date for the sale was
late and a quarter of a million skins had to be and processed. On the day of the sale, David
Caminer, and the engineer (who brought his French Horn and played Till Eulenspiegel for us)
and sundry volunteers worked through the night, sometimes with fingers in the dyke, and
delivered the results in the morning. What is more, despite the complexities of the accounting,
we balanced to the penny!
Shortly after this we did stock control and sales forecasting for Lightning Fasteners, a subsidiary
of ICI and the major source of zip fasteners in the UK. This was interesting because it was an
early commercial use of exponential smoothing of averages. Another stock control system we
did was for the H.J. Heinz company, a just-in-time raw commodity scheduling system for their
factory in Hayes. I don’t remember when LEO 3/1 was installed at Hartree House (Editor: 1967)
but I was then put in charge of a number of programmers working in Intercode and I also
lectured on the LEO 3 Programming Course .My manager was Helen Jackson (Clark). People in
the room I remember were Alan G Hooker, Jim Feeny, Tomas Maria Leonard Wizniewski,
Rosemary Oakeshott, Diana Myra Loy Cooper (Didy); others whose names I don’t today recall
but will probably remember tomorrow whilst forgetting these. I was then tasked with setting up
a unit to write standard commercial programs. We managed to design a flow chart for updating
serial files and a prototype data vet program, but the availability of random access discs and
IBM’s initiative with CICS took the wind out of those sails and efforts were diverted to standard
commercial routines.
I moved on to work for Ralph Land as a consultant, basically a Sales Support analyst. One
Monday he said to me “How would you like to do a project in New Zealand for a couple of
months?”. “When?” I asked.” “Next Friday” replied Ralph. So four days later with a suitcase,
passport and a round the world ticket I set off for Wellington, via Hong Kong and Sydney. I
arrived in Wellington late Monday afternoon, was met by David Howard, the local General
Manager and was driven straight to the office of English Electric Leo Computers to start work! A
good job I had broken the journey in Sydney. The computer bureau was based on an EE KDF6,
and offices were housed in a small square perhaps about half a mile from the harbour. I had
been booked into a small hotel a few minutes’ walk from the offices, on the face of it very
convenient, but in the event it turned out to be little different from a dingy boarding house with
nowhere to work in the evening. When I complained about this the next day, the excuse was
that there was large business convention in town and nothing better was available. I therefore
went to the best hotel in town, the Grand, and booked a room for a month. After that I
returned to the office to start preparing my Tender. The Company was hopelessly under
resourced to bid for a distributed banking system, or to support such a system if the bid was
successful, but I was there to have a go. At the end of a week I had overwhelmed the typing
resources (no word processors in those days). Then there was a break of a week while the
commercial and other local aspects of the proposal were prepared, during which I was sent
down to Christchurch in South Island to investigate the potential market for computer bureau
business. I made a few appointments, but I felt the time was not ripe for a start-up bureau
centre.
Returning to Wellington to submit the proposal to the Bank of New Zealand, I was offered the
post of General Manager of South Island with a view to taking over from David Howard as
Country Manager when his contract expired in a year’s time. Although tempted, I asked to
consider my answer after returning to the UK and assessing the future there. I also took the
opportunity to call in at the local office of Atlantic and Pacific Travel whose Managing Director
was the brother of Ian Crawford, a LEO consultant and one of my Kingston flatmates. They
kindly rerouted my return trip via Fiji, Tahiti, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York,
returning to Wellington.
From Wellington I flew to Auckland to touch base with the local office of English Electric. I had
a great time in New Zealand but it was a technological backwater; looking back, I probably
made the right decision from a career point of view. Once back in the UK I found it difficult to
find a career niche so I left EELM to become the General Manager of Tyndall computers in
Bristol in (I think) April 1965. Apart from acting as Director of the ICL Computer Users
Conference, I had very little contact with ICL for the next few years. I joined Dataskil in 1979 as a
Project Manager in PMS Reading under Ollie Smith and John Benbo, largely in a support role for
other Project Managers and doing project Audits. One project I managed was to act as the
General Sales Manager for Dataskil under George McLeman. Acting as line management of
wheeler dealer salesmen and their was beyond my experience, and I was regarded with
suspicion by the unit. However with a £30 million sales target and a year to achieve it we had to
get on with it and we made the numbers. I Then returned to PMS. Several company
reorganisations later I was the manager of the unit but the culture had changed and I resigned
from the unit to manage the transition of the BAA data processing systems from Honeywell to
ICL computers. It was a five year project, the largest project I had managed and when I took it
over it was exactly two years behind schedule. Three years later we finished it on time and
budget! I then took early retirement.
A fuller account including recollections of travelling and holidays is included in:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/qjywskwpwzrnyn1t0lb2n/Alan-Hooker-memoir.doc?dl=0&rlkey=eecbdm3e0e5zydk5k4gkoyf29
