Preface

Hi Kids. Sometimes in the past you have asked me “what do you do at work, Dad?”

You may remember that I used to tell you that I write computer programs, and that was true some years ago. But nowadays you may have heard me say that I go to work to attend meetings and send emails all day and get paid for it, which is also partially true now, unfortunately.

To answer you properly I decided that I would write down some of the things that have happened at work over the years since I started working with computers. As I started to write, I thought of one or two amusing things that have happened and I figured it would at least fill a couple of pages. But as you can see it has now grown into many pages ahead of you.

I’ve written it so other people can read the story as well. So wherever it says “Carol”, you should read “Mum”, and where it says “Holly”, you should read “your sister” or if you are Holly you should read “you”. Anyway, I think you’ll get the idea.

I've changed most of the people's names because I don't know if they would like to be included in my story or not.

This is really just the first part of my computing career up until about the time I started being a computer consultant. Maybe I’ll write more about the later years another time. Anyway, hope you like it…

How it started – The Surveyor who liked Computers

Many years ago after I had left school, I trained to be a technician land surveyor. I managed to get a job with the NZ Forest Service in Gisborne. The good part about the job was that I got to live away from home and stay out late, and the great part was that I met my wife, Carol. The down side was that it meant working outside and having to walk up and down hills carrying heavy packs across the East Cape (north of Gisborne) all day, rain or shine … or snow.

In late 1982, I decided I needed a change and I managed to get a promotion and transfer to the Rotorua office of the Forest Service. I was now a Land Survey Technician, Grade 1. Although I didn’t know it at the time, this was the change that would kick off my computing career.

I’d had a few brushes with computing before. At High school (about 4 years earlier) we had just one computer in the whole school. It was called a Commodore Pet and you had to be the teacher’s pet to get near it, so I could only stand by and watch one guy who got to use it all the time. At Tech (3 years earlier) when studying for my Land Surveying Certificate, we did a computing paper and I got to write some basic computer programs on an early mainframe computer.

And about this time I also bought a VZ200 computer from Dick Smith. It had 8KB of RAM and you could even write programs with moving graphics so long as you didn’t need more than 8 colours or 2048 pixels . There was even a late night national radio show about computers. At the end of the programme (at midnight) they would play a stream of computer bytes. You could record it on a tape cassette and then load it into the computer as a Basic program. Amazingly it worked for me once. Perhaps more amazing is that I stayed up just to listen and record the data stream.

So when my boss (Ron Spencer) decided he wanted to retire in 1983 and asked if I wanted to take over the development of 3 survey programs that he had helped to write, I jumped at the chance. I didn’t mind that they were written in Fortran - a programming language that I would have to spend weeks learning - or that I had to book time on the shared computer terminal nearly every day. I was just keen to have a go.

Ron was replaced by two new managers. Noel Holliday was interested in computers (although probably more in his new HP calculator), while James Kirkwood had no interest in computers at all.

I wanted to be the computer guy for the office and process the Survey Traverse Sheets and develop the Survey programs further, while James felt that computers would never catch on and I should be out in the field surveying. In the end, with some help from Noel, I managed to do a bit of both which suited me.

The single computer terminal for accessing the Survey programs was in the main office across the road from the Survey office in the centre of Rotorua. I spent a lot of time there but I also spent time at the computer centre (where the ICL 2904 mainframe was located) in the Forest Research Institute (FRI) campus on the edge of town.

On one of the trips to FRI I learned that they now had a new graphics plotter. Great, I figured as well as calculating the coordinates for traverse sheets I would now do some basic plan drawing as well. A new toy!

I spent a few days learning the plotter commands and then a few weeks writing a program to drive the plotter. It was all quite tedious work. The commands included pen-up, pen-down, move-pen-to-x-y-position and several others. Of course the plotter was located at another office at FRI so I had to create the program to send the data to the plotter, then go out to FRI and pick up the plan, only to find I had made a mistake so I had to drive back to our office in town, walk across the road and try again.

Once I could produce a plot, I announced to the other survey staff that I could now produce something that would save time when we produced plans. I figured I’ll get some Kudos from this. One of the other surveyors (Bill) suggested I plot the new plan he was about to start.

Bill was one of the guys who liked to do his Traverse Sheets by hand so I had to first enter his data into the system, and produce the x/y coordinates for the plot. I sent it to the plotter and went to pick it up. I thought it looked great, it was a basic plot with small circles for each boundary mark and solid lines to mark the boundary.
I arrived back at the office and placed it on one of the large plan desks. Bill and a few surveyors gathered round.

“So where is the plan?” asked Bill.

“Well, that’s it. You take this basic plot, and you can place your new plan sheet on top. It will save time with manual plotting because you don’t need to mark out the coordinates for each boundary mark. You just trace them from this sheet onto your plan, then add the rest of the plan detail.” I was smiling.

I could tell Bill and the other surveyors were not as impressed as I was. Bill sounded surprised that the plotter could only plot the basic lines and pegs. It couldn’t do all of the graphics and text that go onto a full plan. He then said, “I can’t really see the point.”

I felt deflated. The other guys appeared to be agreeing with Bill. I quietly left and went back to my desk. Maybe Bill had a point.

A few weeks later, another surveyor had a new forestry road to survey. Rick Ngapui was given the job of mapping a very remote forestry road. It was going to take several weeks and because there were no existing survey marks in the area, it would require Resections (calculations of location by observing multiple trig stations) and Sunshots (measuring the bearing towards the sun to find true north). Both of these surveying techniques, which were not often used, required extensive calculations, or a computer program.

I jumped at the chance to help. Rick loved being outdoors, and I knew he would rather I do all of the calculations on the computer. We both agreed the job would go faster if we shared the surveying as well.
Rick was a tough guy who worked extremely hard and I struggled to keep up initially. We leap-frogged with a theodolite and one chainman (assistant) each and made observations at each corner of the road. Rick did all the Sunshots except one (where he supervised me) as I had only ever done them while training before now.

As we got close to the end we agreed that I would go back to the office and do the calculations while Rick would finish off the surveying for the last few days. I spent those days entering the data and doing all of the calculations (Traverse sheets, Sunshots and Resections). Rick came back and I added his final data and we both checked everything. At the end I did a computer plot of the whole road although Rick had already started to plot it manually by the time I picked it up from FRI. He used my plot to check his plan and then complete it though.

We probably saved a week off the time it would have taken to do the calculations by hand. I had proved the worth of the computer, but no-one else seemed that interested. Rick did say “Yep, it’s good” once, which I knew was a huge “thank you” from him.
***

In 1985 one of the guys in the computing centre mentioned they were going to set up a new programming office in Rotorua for the Forest Service Electronic Data Processing (EDP) department. They could not increase headcount so they were looking to

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Texte: Andrew Roberts (2012)
Bildmaterialien: Andrew Roberts (2012)
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 23.12.2012
ISBN: 978-3-7309-0388-9

Alle Rechte vorbehalten