London, England February 1989
Learning on the job. Learn the hardware. Learn the operating system. Learn the software. Read the spec. Do the work. Do it quicer than a person who is a specialist on the stack! This was my challenge to myself in 1985 and it is still my challenge to myself in 2026.
Learn quickly. Program quickly. Implement quickly. Write maintainable software.
I was hired in my first permanent position after 2 years of contracting in England, South Africa and Australia, in a company in London, which specialised in EPOS and Mortgage Software.
I was given a desk and a computer and told to learn the systems, and that I would be slotted into training "soon". I asked for a specification of a system that needed to be written or upgraded, which I would use as a basis for my learning. I like to learn "on the job".
The company was working with Univac 1100 mainframes, with client hardware being Burroughs B20 machines running the ADS Database and Software Development platform. It was very exciting and I had never worked on this environment before.
About a month after I started, my manager came and told me that they were ready to put me throught the training program.
I said that I was ready to show them the program running from the spec they had given me. My manager said but that's a 3 month development schedule and you didn't have any B20 or ADS experience before coming to us. I said that I learnt their stack and wrote the system. They were very impressed, gave me a promotion and lots more work.
I had a lot of fun at Trace Computers in London and they sent me to Barrow in Furness a few times, to implement and maintain the Building Society System there and I also travelled to Darlington and to Plymouth. I stayed in a wonderful guest house in Barrow in Furness and on the last night before returning to London I would order a bottle of red wine and Canard à l'orange (duck with orange) and have a hearty meal knowing that I wouldn't need to work the next day, which would be spent on the trains back to London.
The mortgate system allowed clients to come into a bank on a particular day, fill in a form, and then overnight we synchroised each branch to the mainframe which did the calculations and then we transferred the data back to the branch before the branch opened the next morning. We used US Robotics 22,800 and 33,600 baud modems and we had to be light on our feet.