Oliver Bell’s Weblog

The answer, very selfishly, is that these are the technologies that got me progressively more interested in what was at the time the emerging field of personal computing. 

I have to admit that when it comes down to it I’m a geek in every sense of the word, I always have been and hopefully always will be. I love technology, sometimes for the innovative new way that it can be used to accomplish something and although I know it isn’t vogue to say this, sometimes just for the sake of it.

This is not a recent phenomena for me.

My first introduction to computers came with my first, very innocent, introduction to girls when I was about 8 years old. A girl in my year at school give a wonderful recital of Beethoven’s Fur Elise in assembly one morning, my father had just bought me a cassette tape of classical music that had this piece on it and I somehow ended up chatting to her about how much I enjoyed it afterwards, on the basis of that we became very firm friends for a while.

One Saturday I was invited around to her house to play and I discovered she had a Commodore VIC20 which we spent most of the day playing various primitive games on. After a few weekends I think she worked out that I was more excited by the 8-bit computer she had plugged into her living room TV than I was in playing games outdoors and oddly I didn’t get invited back all that often after that.

The following Christmas my parents and my grandfather clubbed together to buy me a Sinclair Spectrum 48k. Sir Clive Sinclair did an enormous amount of good work in promoting micro computers for the home in the UK, and this was his second or third generation device. It was an amazing machine, running on a Z80 processor. Sinclair had managed to work out that a successful computer needed to have a plethora of supporting partners delivering tools, games, educational applications and so forth, and as a result there was a wide array of applications for the Spectrum, along with support for a native programming language called Sinclair BASIC. I eventually donated the computer to my school library, I had written a very simple application that tracked books as they were taken out by students and printed out a long list on a dot matrix printer that listed return due dates. 

An Uncle of mine worked for IBM, and he first turned up a the house with an original IBM PC when I was about 10 years old, complete with the click click keyboard and a monochrome orange (or maybe green) screen. At that point I started by writing the same game that everybody probably wrote in their early days of programming in IBM BASIC, it generated a random number between 1 and 100, then gave hints as the user tried to guess what it was. At the time it felt like total genius.

The IBM PC felt much more like an industrial machine, my father was a small business owner and we eventually bought one with a 10Mb hard drive for the family business. The application that I wrote at the time was similar to my library application, it used to track all of the companies customers, when they had been in, who had spoken to them and when they need to be contacted next for various reasons of service and support.

Then the fun began, modems started to become available to the consumer and computers moved on from being stand alone devices and morphed into a communication tool, although it was obviously only one computer talking to one other computer in those early days.

The obvious thing to play with next was the Bulletin Board Systems that were emerging at the time. This was amazing technology, and brought with it the ability to talk to people far away through discussion forums and direct person to person email. The fact that it might take a week or more for an email to reach the other party and garner a reply really seemed irrelevant at the time, it was a big step forwards for communication. At the time I remember trying to explain to a friend that there would be a day when we would all be able to email each other, he told me recently that he immediately marked me down as being a little bit “out there”.

The particular BBS network I got involved with was called GT Power. It was a niche network and the primary developers had their own ideas about transfer of mail and discussion information in a manner that didn’t directly integrate with FidoMail, the dominant player at the time.

Somehow I ended up playing two roles in the network.

First of all I rented a service called a “Night Line” from British Telecom. At the time long distance person to person calls were pretty expensive, the night line service cost about three hundred pounds a quarter (expensive for me in my mid teens) and for that BT would turn off the billing between midnight and 6am for me daily. Using this service I scheduled calls to every GT node in the UK twice a night, one round to pick up any mail that was waiting for delivery, I would then process and “re-bag” it, then make a second round of calls to deliver whatever I had collected and repackaged. This meant that by 6am every morning the entire network of about 50 UK nodes was entirely up to date. Email was faster, and more exciting to use!

Secondly I started making calls overseas for the same purpose, but only once a day for these. In the UK at that time making an overseas call was quite a rare thing, and I remember my parents being very confused about the whole deal. Regardless, daily calls to friends in the US, in Australia and various European countries got the job done and kept the network functioning.

Looking back on it, I think the whole process taught me a great deal about systems design and management. Not the best education but certainly one that was very hands on.

At the same time I also started writing freeware utilities for GT Power, they were a combination of management and reporting tools. If you search hard enough on the internet today you will still find a couple of them available for download. Quite why you might want them, or what you might be able to do with them today after obtaining them I’m not really sure.

Interestingly for me, and probably a reflection on the unique state of the industry at that point in time this then led to my first introduction to corporate computing. The lead for the GT Power network in Germany got in touch one day to talk about how some of my utilities managed the sequential delivery of entries into discussion groups, it was obviously important that discussions arrived in sequence for them to make sense.

He was working on a data distribution tool for a company in southern Germany that would extract data from an IBM mainframe and deliver it in sequence to a series of machines to be used by sales representatives around the country, and he was curious to know if the code that I had written could be applied to his problem rather than just simple mail transfer.

I spent the next six months or so working with him on this problem, we eventually deployed a pretty interesting system based mostly on freeware to a major German corporation.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Oddly over the last couple of weeks a few of the people involved in this twenty or more year chain of events have been turning up in my inbox again, tools like Plaxo, LinkedIn and FaceBook are slowly bringing us all back together. It is fascinating to see what has become of these early influences on my interests in technology, and unsung pioneers from the early days of consumer computer communications. They range from being employees of Cisco Systems and IBM (and Microsoft of course!), running their own independent software vendors, and in one case living the England’s beautiful Lake District as far away from technology as he can be.

It has been fun to track these folks down, if anybody else is out there who recognizes any part of this story please drop me a line!