Hello – I’m starting a blog now because we’ve recently started applying AI to Azquo.   But before I start, I thought it would be a good idea to tell you a little of myself and my history in computing, so that you understand my point of view

In future ,most of my posts will be about my approach to ‘teaching’ AI (I’m using Claude Opus) , how quickly it grasped the concepts, the mistakes it made and the mistakes I made.  I am nearly sure now that AI can de-skill the use of Azquo almost entirely – insofar as it will remove the need for any specialist knowledge before using Azquo.  This opens up masses of questions as to when AI can be trusted to ‘understand’ and even, what ‘understanding’ means.  On a more practical note, how can we start to live with these astonishingly powerful apps that seem to get better by the minute?

However that will not be my starting point.  First, I must introduce myself.  I am Bill Cawley, aged 78.  My first encounter with coding was when I was 17.   I took a year off between school and university to get a taste of the ‘outside world’.   Up to that point I had been at Eton, which, while it offered me some excellent teaching (I particularly am thankful to Norman Routledge – please look him up) was, I thought, a very small pond in which to swim, so I was pleased when my science teacher, Jack Goodier, found me work, first with Philips in Holland, then with IBM at Hursley.

IBM Hursley was the home of the ‘Winchester disk’ – which, to you and me, is the way in which data was stored universally for the next thirty years until solid state storage took over.  I arrived and was allocated to the ‘systems programming’ department which was responsible for maintaining the operating system of the vast ‘7090’ computer that occupied a room the size of a cinema.  It was reputed that, if there was a fire, the company would forbid firemen into that room as the cost of the damage would be too great.

I didn’t like the systems programming department – all the changes happened in the US, and my job would have been simply to paste in code that I neither had created nor understood, so I was reallocated to the hardware development department,  Here most of my time was soldering components together and checking performance on a very expensive oscilloscope.. Even then the leads had to be the same length as time was measured in nanoseconds.  More fun was that I was allowed time on the 7090 – a great privilege as this was a very expensive machine. If I was lucky I could get two five-minute slots in a day, but usually only one, to load my stack of punched cards into the machine.   It took me a couple of months to generate a program that mimicked my physical work to produce a response curve for the booster circuit I was testing.

What was the 7090 doing for the rest of the time?  Sending out electricity bills.   There were a dozen of the sort of tape drives around the walls that you see in old films, which must have contained millions of household names.  Astonishingly the chain printers at that time could print 1200 lines a minute – so fast that if the paper was not watched an untidy heap would appear.  Remembering that before the 7090 each of these bills would have been sent out by hand, it is not surprising that this was its prime use.

But back to me.  It so happened that after my stint at IBM, and after my time at college, I was more interested in exploring other avenues, and, in quick succession over a period of ten years, became

  • a graduate retail trainee (among other things, I managed a shop in Oxford Street – I tried cycling to work but arriving in Oxford Street after keeping up with the traffic round Hyde Park Corner, does make you sweaty).
  • an officer in MI5, where, to my astonishment, I found that women with the same qualifications (Stella Rimington was hired a year before me) were employed as ‘assistant officers’
  • a journalist.  I wrote the property column for the Investors Chronicle (perhaps the most memorable moment was visiting the London Metal Exchange – another of my briefs – and seeing the sort of pandemonium that gave many of its members heart attacks,
  • a decorator (I was not sure what to do next, and my parents had bought a new house)
  • a teacher (including teaching maths at Eton, where my best results occurred in a class with the worst discipline)
  • and finally, a farmer (my brother was a farmer and was pleased that I was prepared to take on a field of hops, and we planned to plant blackcurrants and strawberries).

So none of this has any relevance here except to say that when PCs became available, and the farm could afford a PC, it was irresistible to buy one.  The first one we bought – a Tandy – was, frankly, useless for any practical application.   You could write a program in Basic (I worked out that 90% of all the instructions related to input/output rather than processing), and only when we bought an Apple II did we have a possibility of doing some proper programming.

But that’s where the story of my coding career really begins – more on the next post