George Drummond, GPO (BT) –Reminiscence Born in Fife Scotland in Feb 1947.Attended Kirkcaldy High School, then Strathclyde University. Initially applied to the Post Office and was interviewed in Edinburgh for an Executive Officer post ( as they were called in those days ). During the interview I was asked if there were any specific areas in which I would like to work, and I said computing. I was then asked to go down to London to sit a computing aptitude test, and from there I was offered a job on the Telephone Billing programming team in Docos House, Aldgate London. I was the last BT in-house instructor to teach Intercode and CLEO programming. When the St Albans training school no longer had instructors in house, it was passed to the TB3 project team to take over that role, as we were the last operational user of those languages. We even had a few non-BT students on the later courses as , by that time, no-one else taught those languages. As a result of BT’s decision to offer this externally I had to go through a six-week course at BT’s training college to learn how to become an instructor and to become an accredited courses lecturer before BT could ‘Sell’ this training commercially. I started work originally with the Post Office in 1968 working on the Leo 326 Telephone Billing Suite of programmes known as MFC ( Major File Change). These were a suite of programmes used when Telephone Exchange Ranges were being altered to support the STD dialling system. The suite was capable of carrying out complete, or partial, exchange re-numbering. I also worked as a senior programmer on the introduction of Post Codes, Decimalisation programme, and VAT introduction for Telephone Billing. From several years I took charge of the programmers who provided Software Support to all of the operational Leo326 telephone billing systems. When BT then moved to the 2900 systems, I relocated back to Edinburgh ( my home town) as a System Software Support manager based in Craiglockhart. I subsequently moved into an IT sales technical and system consultancy role for the final four years of my 39 year career with BT.I retired in 2007 now live on the South Coast in West Sussex.
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