TheBanyanTree: The State of My World as of Thursday Afternoon

[Roger Pye]

1986 when I attained the dizzy height of warrant officer in the RAAF I 
was selected by those in power at Air Force Office (HQ) in Canberra to 
head a team of software writers. Our task? To begin to computerise the 
squadron admin echelons thus releasing much needed bodies from the blunt 
end and sending them to more operational positions. In true air force 
style however no-one told me any of this when I was moved from one 
directorate to another - one building to another, as it happened. 
Instead, after a couple of months doing something completely different 
and very boring I was sent on an Introduction to Computing course at 
Laverton in Victoria. The first morning we were ushered into a classroom 
set up with half a dozen machines which looked very like typewriters, 
each had a monitor behind it. I don't remember where the 'boxes' were - 
or even if there were any!  Zenix, we were told, state of the art, we 
were told, and for five days we learned how to operate them. Then I went 
home to the National Capital and the others melted away wherever. I 
don't recall I ever saw any of them again.

Time passed and things - and people - began to arrive and fall into 
place. Somehow I acquired a boss (Flight Lieutenant), two senior NCOs 
and a Leading aircraftwoman (soon to be promoted to Corporal), all 
without asking. On a particular day several large cardboard boxes 
arrived carted in by redfaced men puffing and panting as they manouvered 
their loads off trolleys and on to the floor. After prevailing upon me 
to sign a chit which proclaimed I was taking delivery of an NCR Tower, 
11 monitors & keyboards, two printers (laser and dot matrix), numerous 
peripherals and miles of cables along with several unmarked cartons, 
they departed, leaving us to gaze in bewilderment at the clutter.

History was made that day but we never noticed nor did anyone else. It 
was the first Tower delivered to the RAAF which in turn was the first 
Australian armed service to use computers in administration and had been 
doing so in the personnel and records directorates for at least 15 
years. Mainframes, however, not systems like this one - and even though 
it was cumbersome compared to today, it and its mates would 
revolutionise the way administration was done throughout the ADF.

The anonymous cartons contained instruction books written by omniscient 
computing professionals. Omniscient because clearly they KNEW without a 
shadow of doubt that anyone reading the manuals would have the same 
level of knowledge as they. Problem for us was we knew nothing - the 
Tower was as far removed from the Zenix as we are from dinosaurs. So we 
learned about the computer by operating it and we wrote our own manuals 
as we did so. Over the next three years we taught hundreds of people 
from the manuals how to use computers and travelled all over Australia 
to do it. My time at the Directorate of Administrative Development was 
the best job I had had in 32 years of Defence service - 12 in the RAF 
and 20 RAAF - and I'll never forget it.

Or the Tower with its 80Mb hard drive, b&w screen, C prompt, a keyboard 
which would break if dropped, a tape drive for loading or running 
external programs, three software programs - Lotus 1 2 3, Uniplex WP and 
Informix. For some instructional visits we used to take a 'six-pack' 
with us - CPU, printer, 4 monitors, keyboards and cabling. With a bit of 
luck we could get all of that and us too into a large station wagon.

One of the things I do today is help to manage the Canberra Environment 
Centre - that's if a president can be called a helper - but I also do 
the books. I go into the office a couple of times a month, plug a 512Mb 
flash disk into a USB connection on a networked PC and record the 
accounting activities. After saving the data I unplug the disk, hang its 
cord back around my neck and go home where the data will be transferred 
to the permanent record on an Intel system driven by a Celeron 2GHz CPU, 
it has 748Mb RAM, 80Gb hard drive, 16 million colours, the Internet, all 
the bells and whistles anyone would want.

But you know what? I really miss that Tower!!

roger

Peter Macinnis wrote:
> Julie Anna Teague wrote:
> 
>> I'm laughing at you calling yourself "old school".  Ok, 300 baud 
>> modems, yes, that is considered old school, you little Gen X-er you.  
>> But I graduated from college in 1983 with a computer science degree, 
>> and talk about old school--we still used punch cards.  We ran them 
>> through a very large computer in the musty basement of an old 
>> building.  We flipped switches, indicating octal codes, on the front 
>> of this computer to debug our program.  And yes, damnitall, I walked a 
>> mile to school in the snow!  How did you know that?
> 
> Latecomer!  Raise you five and see you.  Five-channel paper tape, me, 
> using Baudot code -- that was 1963.  Three-ply double-quarto fanfold 
> printout with carbon paper in between.  Designed for single use, a 
> typist could get six carbon copies from a sheet of it, so all of us with 
> typewriters used to take bundles home.  I tossed out the last of it 
> three years back . . . the typewriter went twenty years ago, but I 
> missed this carefully filed folder of used-once carbon paper.
>