. _{Ongoing work - Most recent revision:31 Jan 2011}

Doug Glading -- Memories of IBM in the 1960s

NB - these are my recollections. So there may be the odd inaccuracy.....

CONTENTS	Why I joined IBM go to 'Joining' Trainee Systems Engineer / Basic Class B48 go to 'Training' Birmingham Branch / Punched Card Systems / IBM 870 / 40-column punched cards, then 80, 421's etc. go to 'Birmingham' etc What did an 'SE' do? go to 'SE's Job' Founding Nottingham Branch / Computer School go to 'Nottingham' First Commercial 1130 / Retail for Milletts / various 1401, 1440, go to '1130' 7090, 7094 Boots / Stock forecasting go to 'Boots' Very early 360 / BOS, DOS, MFT, MVT, Cobol, Fortran, RPG, go to 'Early 360 etc' Rolls Royce Aero Engines go to 'RollsRoyce' A really leading computer user Complex, Linked systems (HASP. ASP). Field Systems Centre go to 'FSC' Symposiums / Achievement Awards / Promotions / Business Trips go to these	see also: PAGE: IBMMemories1970s.htm IBMMemories1980s.htm IBMMemories1990s.htm IBM Memories Main Page = index.htm The 60s have been worked up, the 70s partly done the decades 80 & 90 are still at the outline stage....
Joining	Why I joined IBM I was working in the steel industry, for the Tube Investments Ltd. Information Unit - searching and abstracting technical papers, which was interesting, but I could see myself doing the same thing for 20 / 30 / 40 years. (well in fact computers would have changed, even replaced, the job in 20 years as it happened). A friend (Ray Nibbs) who I was still in contact with from Reading University, had joined ICT Computers and was doing well. I thought if he could do it, so could I. And there happened to be a clutch of job advertisements in the press from the computer industry. So I applied to ICT, English Electric Computers and IBM Birmingham. IBM had replied, interviewed me twice and offered me a job before ICT replied…. I actually applied to IBM to become a 'Customer Engineer' (the guys who looked after and repaired data processing systems), based on my background from the RAF and Microcell Electronics. But they actually took me on as a "Systems Analyst" (which became "Systems Engineer") - for £1,100 pa.. That salary worked out at £91.66 .... per month. That in fact was enough for us to buy a house, furnish it and plan to start a family (and we had no funds available from our parents). The allowance to cover 5 nights accommodation and food while on course in London was £8 (you could really live it up). I joined IBM Birmingham when they had one floor of an office block in Smallbrook Ringway. Within just a few years this had grown to probably a dozen floors on the Hagley Road and also spun off 5 floors in Nottingham. I definitely joined at the right time !!	IBM Job Advertisements 1963 Click for bigger picture.. Click for bigger picture.. IBM Job Offer 1963 Click for bigger picture..
Training	Trainee Systems Engineer / Basic Class B48 My basic training started on Jan 6rd 1964, at Lodge Road in London. Eight weeks I think it was (on a living allowance of £8 per week). A very mixed bunch of people, destined to become salesmen or systems engineers, from a wide range of backgrounds. Some with serious experience in useful industries such as insurance, some not. After a few days three of us (John Tansey, Brian Anderson) moved into a cheap B&B in Paddington. We fell into a routine of walking to Lodge Road, going back to Marylebone Public Library to do our 'homework' projects and playing a few games of darts on the way back to the B&B.	PAGE: B48 Course people and curriculum see B48Course.htm
Birmingham	Birmingham Branch / Punched Card Systems After 'passing out' from Basic Training I worked out of the Smallbrook office helping a range of punched card installations. Converting some from old 40-column cards to IBM 80-column systems. Wiring up 421 machine panels to produce electricity bills and so on. One conversion job was at a frozen food factory in Cleethorpes. Three of us set out from Birmingham by train - a very tedious, rattling trip of nearly 5 hours. When we got there we found the IBM equipment hadn't been installed - the CE needed a part, due next morning. One guy turned around, caught the train back and came all that way next day. Two of us couldn't face that, so we had a tour of the factory and went and found a B&B. The weather was lousy, so we didn't live it up in Cleethorpes. But we did have a lovely fish-and-chip supper. Another job I had was at a very old, very traditional 'metal-bashing' company in the Black Country. They had noless than seven eating-places at lunchtime. The IBM Salesman went to the Director's Dining Room. I went with the DP manager to the Senior Management Dining Room. The IBM CE went further down the hierarchy - probably the Foremen's Mess. No females were allowed in the Senior Management Dining Room. After G&Ts we sat and the man in the top chair for the day pulled on a cord. A team of women brought in a joint and the veg - no-one spoke during their presence. The top man carved and we ate. After all had finished he pulled cord again, there was silence, and the pudding came. On the days I had a female SE with me the DP Manager was a little embarrassed - he had to orhanise salads in his office for three The first innovative job of my own that I got was to implement an IBM 870 system in the Pathology/Haematology department of the main Birmingham hospital. The 870 was quite a rare system. Basically it was a modified card punch that could print on the cards and had a golf-ball typewriter attached. So you could log samples into the lab onto cards, use the cards for recording results, and with a companion card sorter produce reports. So I had to design the data cards, wire the machines to process them, define the working proceedures and so on. The bonus of this job was that we took lunch in the Nurses Home; the negative was they frequently wanted 'good' sample blood to calibrate the machinery - as a visitor I had to oblige.	Punched card examples, eg QE Hospital, Boots Click for bigger picture..
SE Role	What did a 'SE' do? Good question! Firstly there was a 'pre-sales' role. Most IBM system sales were made via a 'proposal' - a book describing what the new system would do, what the benefits would be, how it would all be worked, what it would cost, etc. The IBM Salesman would write a lot of the good words and would, naturally, gloss over possible difficulties and try to absolutely minimise the configuration and costs. The SE, whilest having to try and ensure the sale was made, also had to try and make sure it would all work and would solve the customers problem. Sometimes it was all theoretical, sometimes it involved detailed 'benchmarking' (running a sample of the customer's work on a hopefully-similar configuration, if this was possible).	PAGE: Computer School C48, Attendees & curriculum: see C48Course.htm
1130	Commercial 1130 / Retail for Milletts Fresh from learning about various 1401, 1440, 7090 computers I did do a little work on these - then in due course got assigned to a customer getting computerised for the first time - with the IBM 1130 Scientific Computer This was to be used for purely commercial purposes. Another rare situation. It went into Milletts Stores head office in Leicester. One of their staff (Colin Plowman) and I worked it up into quite a nice little system. I wrote a paper about this: "Stock Accounting and Automatic Reordering in Small Retail Businesses by IBM 1130 Computer". It was quite an interesting challenge - the 1130 had one 2315 disk. This held 512K words - 1600 sectors of 320 words - but you had to allow for system files and program storage. So the 1300 sectors available could, with careful design, hold all the stock data for all the stock in all the chain's shops. For the first time ever Milletts could calculate the ratio of sales to stock for all their lines - and found they had 5 years stock of one type of sock.....	PAGE: To read the paper see : 1964paperon1130.pdf
Boots	Boots / Stock forecasting Boots had an English Electric 'Leo' computer and various punch card machinery. When Boots signed up for the brand-new 360 IBM put in an interim 1401 (or two?). As part of the promised support IBM put in two trainee SE's - myself and Gordon Scarlett. Gordon got the short straw and had to work on converting the Boots payroll system. I got to work with their retail O&M people who were trying to develop new ways of forecasting branch supply needs - ie predicting how much stock to deliver. I got to try and program all this onto 1401 in 1401 Autocode. I was not a programmer, so all this took much trial and error. Every run was a 'last test', that threw up new program errors. add something about the 1401 - tape data etc. I can't recall the exact date I started at Boots. Things were a bit hectic around then as our daughter was born in spring 1965 and my wife had to spend a bit of time in hospital before and after.
Early 360	Boots / Very early 360 Boots were planning new HQ buildings, but the 360 was going to come before that site was built. So the home of the new machine was a plastic tent! They had a big warehouse that was eventually going to be the site of a highly automated 'picking system'. Meanwhile a large wooden frame was built in a corner of this warehouse with a raised floor, air conditioning units and a polythene cover put over it all. This was a very eirie place to work at night as the warehouse was a hugh dark area and the polythene waved in the air currents. The emergency exit sign pointed to a thinner bit of polythene and said 'jump through here'. As one of the first 360 machines in the country it was quite an 'interesting time.' Luckily there was good help available from the experts in the IBM London Systems Centre (especially one Tony (later Sir Anthony) Cleaver). And the Boots' Chief Programmer, Ralph Hollins, was brilliant. I know that one day Ralph and I started about 9 'o'clock, ran into some problems, had to work through the night and went home at the normal time next day. 'IBM meant service' - you had to do these things. Meanwhile Dick Grey, the IBM Salesman (who was a nice man, but completely non-technical) could only chew his propelling-pencil. So I got into the intricacies of the very early IBM Operating Systems - BOS, DOS and eventually MFT. I got my first foreign business trip too in April 1966 - to Rotterdam to test on a 360 there. I took a disk-pack (a 2311 - a stack of 14-inch platters holding a whole 7.2MB) in my holdall. On the way back I was stopped at Customs - could have been in big trouble as one should have had a clutch of import/export documentation. Very luckily the Customs Officer had just applied to IBM for a job and became just interested in what the disk-pack did. Somehow I also got involved in teaching a bit of the Cobol language, and some of the first 'end-user computing' - running courses in the RPG language for various Boots non-programming staff.	/
Rolls Royce	Rolls Royce Aero Engines / Linked systems (HASP, ASP) So I got moved on to bigger and better things, and was transferred from Nottingham Branch in 1967 to the 'Special Accounts' Branch - which comprised several major customers who justified special attention because of size or sophistication. I got drafted into the RR Engines HQ at Derby, which was becoming one of the most advanced computer sites around. To stay ahead at aero engine design and manufacture RR needed immense, and complex, computing. They were pouring major investment into supporting their engine range and developing the new RB211 engine. In 1967 the company had 1,100 people working on computing, of which about 320 were systems analysts and computer programmers. In October 1966 they had just opened the main RR installation building at Derby, which was a big galleried computer room, housing several of the largest IBM computers - 1401s, 7074, a 360/50 and in 1967 were just installing their first 360/65. You have to realise that computing at this time was heavily "batch" orientated. Each batch job had its input data coming in as punched cards. The job ran using one or several input magnetic tapes, wrote out several new tapes and printed many boxes of paper forms. All programs were 'written' by being punched onto cards. "Random Access" disks were used, but mainly for system files and some limited, key, frequently used, data. Every day Rolls data preparation girls produced 120,000 cards to feed the computers. The first challenge was to upgrade the Operating System and make and carry out plans to implement this on the current and new 360s. We selected the MVT OS and implemented this - creating operational procedures, training operators and system programmers and so on. At the same time things were moving on. The Rolls strategy was to progress to more powerful machines, with much more disk space - and this disk space shared between several machine for greater flexibility. There still would be many tape drives and printers and so on. Increasingly jobs would come in from remote places by RJE too. The challenge was how to schedule and manage all the thousands of batch jobs across all these resources. And how to operate and control the whole complex. Some new control systems were emerging in the USA - HASP - (Houston Automatic Spool Program) and ASP (the Attached Support Processor). So we had to evaluate the options, design the overall solution, work out a comprehensive implementation plan and get on with it. I got involved in the joint RR/IBM team doing the assessment and selection of the future environment and worked closely with RR systems staff (eg Barry Evans). We went on several visits to the USA to investigate other major users and to attend meetings of the major user group (SHARE) to help this. The first SHARE I went to was in Oct 1968 to Atlantic City with 3 RR staff (I can remember we flew out on a VC-10, so noisy you couldn't talk or sleep). We stayed at the then-famous 1,000 room Chalfont-Haddon Hall Hotel, which was demolished some years later (Atlantic City evolved into a major casino resort). We all went up to New York from there - by Greyhound bus. On another trip with Barry we went to Boston then drove down to visit an advanced computer user in Hartford en-route to Poughkeepsie. We stopped over-night at a motel we passed called something like 'The Inn at the foot of Bear Mountain' - to this day I don't know where that was. After eating that night we got chatting to some American staying there. It was the day of the Presidential Election (Nixon?) and we spent a fair bit of the night sitting in his room drinking and watching the results while he explained the complexities of the collegiate vote etc. It didn't stick. I have some of the actual planning documents still for the ASP implementation, which took about a year. There were 11 Rolls staff and 7 IBMers working fulltime for many months. The Systems Diagram gives only a slight feel for the complexity. Another interesting piece of work I got involved in was looking at ways of doing inter-departmental charging for the use of computing. You could develop some fearsome looking formulas for accounting for each job's use of every resource element (tape, disk, core memory, cpu, priority and so on). At the same time all this was going on we were seeing increasing use coming in of 'on-line' computing. The engine designers were getting specialist graphics terminals, programmers were getting type-writer-like 2741 terminals, administrators getting the first monochrome CRT screens. I must have got involved in some of this on-line computer use too (see thank-you letters re CPS. Conversational Programming System was an early Time-sharing system that came out about 1967. It was novel in that it provided highly interactive PL/1 programming via terminals). In 1968 we moved house, to the north of Birmingham (which was handy for Rolls Royce Derby, and the Birmingham office).	IBM Team at RR - Organisation Click for bigger picture.. RR Computer Hall Click for bigger picture.. RR Systems Complex diagram Click for bigger picture.. CPS demo thanks Click for bigger picture.. Finishing at RR thanks Click for bigger picture.. Material Held includes: "Organisation and Objectives" - Aspects of Computing at Rolls-Royce. By Len Griffiths (Chief Computing Engineer, Rolls-Royce Ltd and Rolls-Royce Aero Engines), Data Processing magazine May-June 1968, p 130-135 "Current Applications" - Aspects of Computing at Rolls-Royce.by Jim Foord (Divisional Manager, Computing & Data Processing Operations, Rolls-Royce Aero Engines), Data Processing magazine May-June 1968, p126-129 "Installing an ASP System" J B (Barry) Evans, , Software - Practice and Experience, Vol 1, p 51-60. 1971. - describes the configuration, install plan, core layouts, etc Also various Planning and Implementation documents.
FSC	Field Systems Centre The 'FSC' was a collection of specialists, available to go out and advise or work with SE's with challenges in their customer situations. Whilest at Rolls I did some work with the FSCs in London, Manchester and Birmingham. And in July 1969 I formally transferred to the Birmingam FSC. Incidentally in 1969 IBM "unbundled" software and services from hardware sales - ie it stopped giving most of the free SE help which it used to to assist customers in planning, implementing, teaching etc. And Incidentally also in 1970 Rolls Royce Aero Engines ran into crisis over the RB211 engine and in Jan 1971 became insolvent
Promotions	Promotions Part of the career structure at IBM laid down prerequisites for promotion. To move from 'Trainee' to the first qualified grade you had to complete all the training phases (Basic/Computing/Applications/SE schools). Because I was busy at Boots etc I wasn't able to attend booked courses, so managed to become the 'oldest' Trainee in the company. Eventually I got to 'Associate SE (level 52 I think this was), then quite rapidly to 'SE' (54) and then in October 1968 to 'Senior SE' (56). By May 1966 my salary had gone to £141.13.4 per month. And by Dec 1967 it hit £204.3.4	SSE Promotion announcement Click for bigger picture.. Click for bigger picture..
Awards	Achievement Awards IBM rewarded special efforts with Awards and, for SE's also there was selection to special European SE Symposiums held annually at different places across Europe. In Jan 1967 I got a £150 (actually £100 after tax) -- which we spent on a holiday to Pesaro in Italy. This was not long after our son was born. (amazingly £150 is equivalent today to £2,030 if calculated on RPI and £4.080 on average earnings base!!) In Feb 1968 I got another award, and spent this on something concrete - a Breitling watch (£27.15s ! - equivalent to £360 on RPI)
Symposiums	European SE Symposiums These were a mix of technical sessions and a bit of entertainment. Attendees were the 'top' selected SEs from all the countries of Europe. Typically about 100 SEs went from UK, so the total attendance was many hundreds. I went to the 4th SE Symposium in June1967 on the strength of the paper I contributed re Milletts and the 1130. This was in Berlin - very interesting as this was when the Berlin Wall existed. I actually skived off one of the technical sessions and took a coach tour over to East Berlin. This proved most nerve-wracking as the boss of IBM UK (Eddie Nixon) also got on the coach and I had to keep avoiding him as we got on and off at sight-seeing stops. And coming back, waiting to see if you could get through 'Checkpoint Charlie' was really quite frightening. And in 1968 I was also selected to attend the April 1968 Symposium in Cannes and present a paper there. I gave a joint presentation with Terry Halsey and Tony Cleaver (later Sir Anthony) on the topic of "Performance Improvement".	PAGE: see this webpage for more on the Symposium speakers and the script of the talk 1968Symposium.htm
Trips	Business Trips The first US trip I had was to a big pre-announcement workshop up near Poughkeepsie. Quite scary flying into JFK, collecting a car and driving, for the first time in America, up-state to Peekskill, New York. (? Nov 67?) On a later trip I went out to run some tests on a forth-coming big machine (the 360 Model 85). About then I had been playing with trying to write the smallest possible programs for 360 computers. I had one small program (about 70 bytes I think) that read punched cards and printed the content - it was nice to run this on what was then the most powerful commercial computer in the world!	see if I can find paper I did on these programs