Digital audio of a recorded interview with Patrick Ashcroft, who worked as an engineer on LEO II/1.

Interviewer: Vincent Bodswrth
Date of interview: 25 March 2019
Length of recording: 39m34s
Format: 3 original .mp3 recordings 165.13MB (transferred to .mp4 video for presentation on YouTube 125.44MB)
Copyright in recording content: Patrick Ashcroft and LEO Computers Society

Transcript editor: unknown

Abstract: Joined LEO Computers in 1961 as an engineer working on LEO II/1 then at Ford on LEO II/11 before working on a succession of other machines, staying until after the mergers and working for ICL. After leaving ICL, moved to Data General as Service Manager using minicomputers, then Wang in the late 1980s, once again taking on responsibility for Ford.

Transcript :

Speaker key

VB	Vincent Podsworth
PA	Pat Ashcroft

 
 
VB
The date is the 25th of March 2019 and I’m Vincent Podsworth.  I’m interviewing Pat Ashcroft to give us the story of his involvement with LEO Computers from the earliest days. We’re recording this interview as part of the LEO Computers Society oral history project.  The audio version and the transcript will be launched at central archive and made available for researchers and members of the public.  Perhaps you’d like to introduce yourself? 
PA
Okay.  Well, I’m Patrick or more commonly known as Pat Ashcroft.  I started working for LEO in 1961 directly from school.  I was doing my secondary school education in the ‘50’s.
VB
And whereabouts was that? 
PA
That was Wanstead Grammar school.  At the time I was very interested in science.  My favourite subjects were chemistry, physics, and maths, and the ‘50’s was alive really with technology. There were lots of things in the paper about electronic brands and the space race was just starting which was a very exciting time really, so I was determined that I wanted to do something in science but didn’t really know what.
 I got to the point where I was going to take my A levels in physics and pure and applied maths, and I hadn’t really decided definitely whether I wanted to go to university afterwards.  I think at the time all the grammar schools tended to prepare you for university. It wasn’t that common to go to university at that time.
VB
And what was the year when you were doing the A levels??
PA
Oh, that’d be in ’58, ’59.  In fact, I looked it up this morning out of interest and on the Guardian website, it says only 4% of children at school actually went onto university in the early ‘60’s. 
I had no family history of university, so it was a bit of an unknown coming from a working class family, so I didn’t really know what I was going to do.  But while waiting in the summer of ’61 for the results of the A levels, I saw an advertisement by LEO in one of the papers for operators who only require the O levels, so I applied just in case I didn’t get any A levels. 
I was interviewed at Hartree House, did the logic tests and a very basic programming test, not very much about electronics at all, well, it would’ve been needed for that job, and I was offered that job. 
Shortly afterwards I got my results and I had passed my A levels, so I then had to decide what to do.  
While I was umming and arring, there was another advert from LEO for computer engineers who did require A levels, so I contacted them and said, “Would they consider me for that?” and they said yes and offered me a job as a trainee computer engineer starting in September I think of ’61.  
So I went to Hartree House and had six weeks of basic electronic training.  That was quite a shock really because I had the physics A level background of electronics and nearly all the other recruits were RAF ex-radar experts.
VB
Right, so they got a good starter on you basically. 
PA
Yeah, so I was well behind on doing that, so that’s quite a struggle those six weeks although it was great fun and the people on the course were very friendly and I had a good time, my first job in a high-tech industry and based in Bayswater which was even more exotic then, probably, than it is  now. I certainly stood out more then…it was quite an interesting time. 
VB
Did you move up into London or you stayed…?
PA
No, I was still at home.  I came from the South.  South Woodford is where I live, 
VB
Did you get into London quite easily?
PA
Yes, in fact…well, I could get on the Central line across to Queensway for Hartree House.  But once I started work, which I did after the training course at Cadby Hall or Elms House on LEO II/1, I was almost immediately on shift work, so I then used my trusty old BSA Bantam, and went across South Woodford and right across to Hammersmith with the embankment and everything. 
VB
Yes, because night transport in those areas was quite a problem I think, you’ve got to do shifts- night shifts and things. 
PA
Yes, that’s right.  That was the other big change to my life because suddenly I had all day, because they were very long nights, so I worked a day shift from 8:00am till 4:00pm, and then the night shifts were very long, from about 4:00pm right around until 8:00am the next morning, so that was quite a challenge as well really.  So that was my introduction. 
 My first day, I remember turning up at Cadby Hall, and for a single computer, it had a remarkably large contingent of engineers.  The engineer in charge when I first turned up was Sean McDonald, obviously an Irishman, and when I introduced myself as Patrick, his first comment was, “Oh, you should do well.” That stuck in my mind.  And then there were three computer engineer shift leaders, I remember Dick Cromwell was one, Jim Hume was one and I think Mike Landon was the other, and they each had a trainee computer engineer with them, so that’s up to seven, and then there were two mechanics who looked after the peripheral equipment, so that was quiet a big contingent really for one computer that wasn’t all that powerful.
VB
Were they sort of fairly constantly at work with the sort of things to be done the whole time ,or did you sit around fiddling your thumbs? 
PA
Well, yes, a lot of the time, obviously on the nights, became training sessions.  I was with Jim Hume, he was an excellent engineer and very good in passing knowledge, and we used to spend an awful lot of time just sitting over the bench poring over the logic diagrams and circuit diagrams and that sort of thing.
VB
So you learned a lot?
PA
Yeah, it was an awful lot of on-the-job training, but there was time to do that.  But like computer engineering all the way through history I think, probably even up to now, there are times when you don’t do a lot and then times when the pressure is enormous because everybody wants their payroll done within 15 minutes and then some, probably more so then, because they obviously break down a lot more often.  
VB
That’s Murphy’s Law.  It always breaks down just before the payroll is about to start!
PA
Yeah.  I think the next bit I was going to mention was that the fact that the LEO II/1 was still very much based on the same architecture as LEO I.  LEO I was still in operation next door in Cadby Hall when I was there, and we use to pop in and see them occasionally, but I didn’t ever work on that because I was on II/1 all the time.  
VB
Which is a transistor machine, I think.
PA
No, no, no, II/1 was exactly-
VB
It was another valve machine? 
PA
Yeah, exactly the same as LEO I except that it had a physically shorter mercury delay line memory and had interleaved memory, so the pulses were [Technical Note; Quarter length main storage tubes. Interleaved A, B,, C,,D pulses. A Pinkerton innovation. Sped up the first 7 LEO II stores] and I think that was the main difference really, they’d obviously tidied up some of the things from their experience on Leo I but it had a mercury memory, and didn’t have any tape although later LEO IIs did. 
 In fact, all it had really was two Hollerith line printers which only printed numerics but were fine for payroll as long as you had a clock number and not the name.  Two Hollerith 80 column card punches, three Hollerith 80 column card readers, it was all the input for all the programmes and all the data was basically cards, except there was some punched paper tape so there were two Ferranti paper tape readers as well, and then one very scary high speed card sorter which frightened the life out of us non-mechanical engineers. 
 It was rather strange really because having two mechanics on the site, they only worked days whereas the computer engineers worked 24 hours a day.  All the main repairs and servicing on the mechanical items were done by the two mechanics that were trained on Hollerith equipment and ICT, and in some ways then and probably even now, the term mechanic is a bit derogatory, but I really admired what they could do with the card puncher particularly, it was amazingly complex mechanically.  I did actually take one apart on a training course in Letchworth but to get it together again was an absolute nightmare.  
VB
But those card sorters were very impressive machines as well, weren’t they?
PA
Super fast, yeah, and the line printers were still pretty fast for the day as well I think.  It was all good stuff.  But the big scary thing about the computer was that it had so many valves, I think that’s probably has been mentioned about Leo I.  I never counted them while I were there but looking at various bits and pieces, it seems to vary between five and a half and seven thousand valves, I think, that it had…
VB
I think it must be about that sort of level judging by the pictures I’ve seen because of the size of the stuff, because I know the Colossus that’s been built at- well, actually it’s 2,500 valves and that looks like just one of those cabinets basically that LEO had.  
PA
Yeah.  So that was a challenge because the valves obviously died over time and were not that reliable to begin with in some ways, so to get it run long enough to complete a job was quite a major challenge really.  And right from the beginning I think the programme was sorted out, restarts about every 15 minutes which sometimes it was quite really good to even achieve that, but there were times when it runs quite quietly as well.  So there were three shifts of engineers, 
VB
So that sort of explains really why there had to be engineers on hand the whole time because there’ll be probably a breakdown within the next half an hour and they’d have to do something.
PA
That’s right, yes.  They want to be there instantly, yes.  Although the decision then that had to be made - because most of the faults were intermittent and there were very few actual solids faults than I can remember - when something broke and it obviously had a chance of a valve blowing, there were thousands and thousands of diodes as well which could also fail instantly, and then the resistors capacitors, but also the main difference with later computers was the number of connections, four huge racks and the wiring between all of those, it must be miles and miles of wiring, and every one of those were simulated in a connector, so all opportunities for things be a little bit flaky, and certainly with II/1 my recollection is that intermittent faults were by far the majority of all the faults really.
VB
So you had a judgment to make whether you try and diagnose it to fix it or whether you just say restart.
PA
Try again, yeah.  I think some of the other people who worked on LEO can obviously tell you better than I can but my impression was that they used to always try it again first because the chances are it would then work, at least for a few hours anyway.  
VB
And you had the restarts built into the software?
PA
That’s right.  When you did have a solid fault, that was it, because … down to the racks and tracking it down to the specific component, so you’d end up changing the actual faulty part. You did have plug-in chassis so you could change the chassis and that was particularly valuable for the chassis that drove the mercury delay lines because they were probably the most edgy part of the electronics, I think. 
VB
Right, and there were probably a lot of them. 
PA
Yeah, there were and they were replicated.  So you’ll either change the whole chassis or if it was one of those that you didn’t have a spare for then you were down to actually fault finding it down to the component, but either way you then brought the chassis back to the engineer’s room where there was a big test rack, and the engineer’s job then was to fault find down to a known level on the chassis, so either way it always found down to component level either on the machine or on the test rack, and I guess that’s probably quite a major difference from those machines that follow that because engineers then just replace a plug  or an integrated circuit board, and then they went off back to the factory to be repaired so you know, really got the anti-component 
VB
No, and whilst you’re on the transistors, it was basically board level replacement.  If I remember rightly as well, the standard technique was to have a test set of boards, for all your racks, not to use as spares although in extremis they could be. If you think you’ve diagnosed which board is faulty, take it out and put the test board in and see whether the machine works, and then you go and get the spare but if you didn’t have the spare, you might…  They used to put big coloured knobs on the test board so you could immediately see if some bad engineer had left the board in.  
PA
That’s a good idea,  Yeah.  So a lot of it was built on this fear of the dreaded valve failures.  Just before I went to Cadby Hall, they did have a system at Elms House, they had a system where they would take out a whole bunch of valves on a routine basis [Technical Note. Tested valves were put in. Known as egg boxing because of the box used to assemble them etc. the valves. Abandoned in later years] land replaced them with new ones, and then they had two ladies with AVO valve testers who would then test the valves and come out (??).
PA
And I think it was this idea that it probably could introduce more problems, so that was discontinued before I turned up, and it was then down to trying to track down the bad valves. 
Between 8:00 and 9:00 every morning, the engineer set a maintenance hour when they turned it over to us. That’s when the day shift came on to take over from nights, refreshed, and took over the machine from 8:00 until 9:00, and built into the operator’s console was an electrical margins panel on the left hand side, you’ve probably seen it on the photographs. 
 In theory it was a very, very clever idea really because basically…all the binary signals enter the valves on the grid to be amplified on or whatever they were doing with them, so the injective via the margins system assigned a sign wave on the grid so the pulse would go up and down, and you had a big knob on the front of the control panel which you turned up gradually while a test programme was running in a continuous loop, and certainly it got to the point where either you reach the level where it was considered everything was all right or it would fail, and interesting…the way that you knew it was failing was that Leo II had a loud speaker connected to part of the computer so that it could warn them what was going on. 
One of the prime reasons for that was so the operator could tell when the cards that they were inputting had run out and so the machine all the time that it was processing the input cards, would made a certain noise. Once the channel had hung up because the card reader was empty, it made a high pitched noise and they could tell, but it was also used for the engineers, so then we’d run a loop, that we’d do a certain test, and once you turn the marginal voltage up to a certain point and it was failing, you actually hear it blipping on the sound, so you can then turn it back a bit.  
The idea was you take the little point where it was blipping and you had a failure, and then you had two banks of switches, pushing the switches where you could isolate down to chassis and certain marginal test points on a sort of a group basis like an X, Y, Z, sort of mixed wire grid, eliminate it down to a certain one, and then you get down to a lot of the failing and then you either replace that chassis or fault-find that chassis.  
There were mixed opinions of it, how useful that was- I used to find that working with Jim Hume in the mornings, we found it very useful, we certainly fished out an awful lot of valves. Whether they were going to fail anyway, I don’t know, but it’s certainly a very good feeling that you were doing some preventive maintenance.  
VB
I think those techniques developed after the valve.
 PA
So that was the electrical margin system, we also have mechanical margins, because one of the problems with valves is they can go microphonic, in other words they can become sensitive to vibration.  It wasn’t unusual to go around, if you had an incident, tapping everything. A bit of an amusement with the visitors and so on but it was very effective, and you can sort out contact problems as well that way.  
Not only did you have lots of wiring contact from the chassis to the indirect wiring and so on, but also obviously lots and lots of solder connections on the chassis, and the soldering to begin with wasn’t very high standard. It was very common to find a dry joint where it hadn’t been soldered through correctly.  Quite often we spend time in the engineer’s room just running the soldering irons over the whole chassis, re-soldering the components, so hitting things wasn’t that uncommon really, although we thought it very often. 
 The control desk had three cathode-ray tubes where you can monitor what was going on in the main memory and registers and other various things, and you could input things there, so if all else failed you could input an input output instruction yourself on [inaudible ] certain input output channel.  
I mentioned the shift working.  The one big bonus of working at Elms House was being a part of a large headquarters.  It had excellent catering services, so coming directly from school I was amazed really that lunch time we would go down to the staff canteen which was really, really good, good as [inaudible ], and even better when we’re on nights, we were allowed to use the manager’s mess over in Cadby Hall and we went over there for excellent breakfast and superb meals where we got things like quail and very exotic fish of all sorts I’ve never even seen before.  Now, that was really a big bonus. 
There was also the [inaudible ] shop where you can get very cheap cakes and so on, and if you were lucky enough to be 21 as I was when you were there, you got a free 21st birthday cake as well, that was a good place to work. 
VB
How long were you on that particular LEO? 
PA
I was there from ’61 till about…I think it was about ’64 I think.  I then went to Ford’s to work on LEO II/11 which was quite an eye opener really because that was obviously the last of the line of the LEO II and the big, big bonus was that it had core memory, tri-score memory. 
PA
It made a huge difference and I’m still working 24-hour shifts.  I can’t really remember the computer ever going wrong really, I mean obviously it did because it still had about 7,000 valves but not in the memory, so in retrospect I suspect that the early LEO, a lot of the problem were actually down to mercury memory really more than anything else because the II/11 at the [inaudible] really did got along during my working nights, my ability to play darts improved no end because there was so much spare time. 
 Some of the bad news was that they didn’t really…  They did have the Decca magnetic tape system there which they didn’t have on II/1 but a lot of the later LEO IIs did, and that really filled up your time, whereas the mercury delay lines didn’t, because it wasn’t a very reliable system. 
The tape ran at very high speeds but it had all sorts of…  Well, it was a very early system so I suppose I’ve been learning an awful lot.  It was amazing what it did in a way, I mean, it had vacuum capsules to suck it and put it on reverse,  and as I remember it, a hurdle to take down writing blocks of data and then - because they needed to check them- it would stop writing and then the head next to the write head immediately did a read after write check on the same block of data. While it was doing that it left a gap on the tape, so when it got to the end, it then reversed and whistled back and wrote in the gaps, so there were lots of opportunities for things to get a bit stretched and some, probably most, of the engineer’s time really when I was there was spent on the tape decks more than anything else. 
They did have [Technical Note. Power Samas alpha numeric] printers because they’d gone on from the numeric by then.  The bad news with that was that they were French, they were all relay logic with no electronics and none at all, and all the diagrams and books were in French, so that was a bit of a struggle but my schoolboy French came a little bit handy. 
The other big thing that sticks in my mind about working at Dagenham was that it was a time when it was still a full-blown car production site. We were right in the middle of the engineering building which is the office block, and the foundries weren’t that far away. 
 On nightshifts you’d see the trucks going past and you come out in the morning, your car was covered in fine sand, and because of that they had to upgrade the filters and not only to the air-conditioning. But they don’t have big fans that would suck air and blow it over the racks to cool down the valves, and what they didn’t obviously want was to suck in all these debris from the foundry so they installed big electro-static filters. 
So, rather demeaning, we thought in a way, the computer engineer from time to time had to steam clean with a hijacked steam hose.  So that was a different aspect of the job altogether really.  
VB
Those were the days also, as you indicated with Ford, that car companies like Ford did have their own steel works, made their own steel and they did in America as well.  But now of course they’ve sold those off to other people and just buy steel.  
PA
Yes - for the parts. On II/11, the one I was on, did payroll and I’ve seen it written on the warranty claims because we used to look out of interest for the warranty stuff coming out on the printer, you could see what was going wrong with all the Prefects or whatever they were at the time. 
VB
So that was a bit closer for you to have 
PA
That was a big attraction really, yes, it was just down the road. I had swapped my BSA Bantam for a Mini by then and it was slightly frowned upon at Fords but there we go.  I was probably there for a couple of years and then - so it was getting well into the mid ‘60’s and Charles Ashbury who was in charge over engineering for I suppose it was by then. 
VB
What year are we in?
PA
Must’ve been 1965.  He got on to the site which we thought was unusual for a royal visit (??) but it got to the point where II/11 was going to be run down but II/5 and II/7 in Hartree House, II/5 being the initial bureau machine in Hartree House and II/7, the British oxygen machine they brought back to Hartree and back to the bureau, were going to run on for some time, and they needed some LEO II engineers, so he sort of bribed me by saying that if I would agree to go back to Hartree House and see out the LEO IIs, I would then jump over LEO III and go straight onto the very first System 4 which sounded quite attractive for me so I did that. 
 So I then went back to Hartree House where II/5 and II/7 were chugging away, they obviously would have deck and magnetic tape decks as well unfortunately. They had some Powers Samastronic printers which weren’t too bad, mainly looked after by a mechanic anyway, but they were the first sort of dot matrix printers, so they were dot matrix line printers which was quite interesting but challenging for the mechanics, I think.  
They also had drums which I hadn’t seen before so there were some new stuff there as well.  III/1 had obviously been commissioned - that was being commissioned when I first went there in ’61 - so that was up and running there, and they were preparing to introduce the new range which was System 4. 
 So I worked there until the end of the LEO IIs up there at Hartree House.   Again, on shifts I’m back in the exotic Bayswater, it’s quite  good fun really, made quite a lot of good friends there as well.  
So we got to the point there where eventually the LEO IIs were finally decommissioned.  
One of the enterprising mechanics there decided he was going to scrap or buy some of them for scrap, he can make some money on scrap income.  I think he got asked for a quote on selling the mercury and when he contacted this guy that dealt him mercury he said, “For goodness sake, don’t put it all on the market at the same time, the price will be crap.” 
 I think in the end he didn’t actually end up buying any of them because the logistics of getting them out of Hartree House would’ve probably wiped out any profits,  but it is a pity that when they were broken up, I didn’t really keep any bits and pieces, all I’ve got now is a core memory plane which I think came from III/1, and that was decommissioned, and the LEO III/1 board.  I haven’t got anything from LEO II really.  
So I was in a strange position then of jumping from valve and mercury machines onto…??  Because System IV wasn’t ready- they bought in Spectra 70/45 it was based on what they claim was the first integrated computer in the world, I don’t know if that’s ’65 but RCA claimed that then. 
VB
Well, I think IBM had packaged components maybe integrated circuits in some of their machines. 
PA
They weren’t really big integrated circuits, some will say- they’re called flat packs, I seem to remember on the RCA, and so I worked there…oh, I actually worked on commissioning it with some other people at [inaudible ] and I brought it into Hartree House.  That’s a good find there.  The machine base I think was pretty solid by then, as computers would be by then, so most of the work was on peripherals and they done away with mechanics by then so you had to learn I think. 
PA
The printers were still a big challenge and the other bits and pieces but in a way tape decks but nowhere near as much, and it soon got to the point where you didn’t need a whole team of engineers for a computer.  It could take quite a while to get off that so I went then…  Do you want to go through the System IV a bit or is just the LEO bit?  
VB
I think we can go onto System IV 
VB
Pat Ashcroft interview, section three.
PA
Okay, so having completed my memories of LEO, I’m going just to bring us up to what I did after that time.  I think I mentioned already that I went onto what was to become System 4 which was the RCA Spectra, 7045 at Hartree House, and then I was promoted to be engineer in charge of the Post Office’s Spectra 7045 at [? Barbican] near Tower Bridge.  
Having done that, I was then promoted to supervisor over a group of System  4 machines and Spectras, and then eventually after that, to service manager in the City, so I was on my way up, sort of.  
I did that for a number of years, always in the City in London and then later, I actually moved out of engineering and went to work for sales as a reliability consultant in the central government sector at Computer House.  I sort of had some contact with them already while I was an engineer and they had some secondment time.  
They had an engineer seconded to various sales sectors and I was with the Central Government sector then and it went on from there.  That was quite an exciting time.  It was at the beginning of 2900s and reliability was still not very good.  I think perhaps longer than LEO II but I think the mean time between some of the early 2900s was no more than about 6 or 7 hours, so there was still an awful lot of rerunning - but I didn’t have to fix them and I was just advising.
VB
One of the issues, if you recall, perhaps it wasn’t…too many people didn’t necessarily know at the moment was Millard integrated circuits that were bad, the 2980 in particular, which was causing the [inaudible ] to stay high because there were a lot of failed…
PA
Yes, and I think a lot of failures were unharmed  by them either.  It was the brand new operating system
VB
Oh, so the software was crap as well?
PA
Yeah, it was very ambitious, wasn’t it, to try and introduce a completely new range of hardware and a completely new operating system at the same time.  I can’t imagine anybody would ever do that again.
PA
So that was quite interesting and a lot of the time was spent with customers trying to improve the ways that they manage their systems, particularly in change control on those sort of areas which did help in the mean time between failures up to some extent.  
We then got to the 1980s or 1980 when there was a bit of a downturn all around in computers, particularly with ICL.  
They started to make a big loss, I think, and there were redundancies, so I started looking around at what would happen if I had to, and found a job as Service Manager at Data General.  Unknowingly, I did apply for voluntary redundancy because they were asking for volunteers at the time and I would’ve got 20 years of voluntary redundancy but they said no, so I had to leave without any money which was a nuisance but there we go, you can’t have everything.  
So I was then working at Data General, southern half of the UK I was looking after then as a service manager.  Quite exciting times overall.  Minicomputers were the in thing then.  They were going into quite important positions that they hadn’t really went in before, so all the Banks were installing many computers in quite time-critical set-ups and currency exchange people and all that sort of thing were using them so it was an exciting time in the City. 
 There was sort of a demand on 24-hour service, very rapid response and fixing and so on and we still were at the time where computers were super reliable.  The minicomputers themselves were, but we still were in the dreaded replaceable disc area and that caused no end of trouble, particularly with banks and people with time-critical systems.  
The number of times I was woken up in the night because a Bank had an operator that had taken a removable disc drive off one drive, dropped it, and then put it on all the other drives to try and make it work and crash the heads all over the 
VB
Of all other drives, yes.
PA
Yeah, that’s it.  Nightmare.  So the engineers then were on for hours, replacing all the heads and setting them all up, so there was quite a few opportunities to still get it wrong and communications wasn’t very reliable either then, so there was a lot of problems with that as well, so that was certainly not a quiet time, quite interesting.  
After a few years, I then actually moved onto Wang.  It was a similar role in the city again, similar setup, but interestingly, with Wang, and as a manager, I then re-inherited Ford because Ford Europe had rather bravely gone down the route of having IBM mainframes in their data centres, but all the other computers and all the research centres and everything else were Wang’s and even the PCs were Wang-built then, so there was a huge customer base throughout Europe for Wang and so there I was back down…not at Dagenham so much but more in headquarters and the offices around there looking after them again.  That went on for a few years.
VB
What sort of dates are we talking about?
PA
The late ‘80s.
VB
Late ‘80s?
PA
Yes.  Wang had really gone through the boom time of making lots of money due to their word processing software and then into the city again, they made quite a lot of sales there on some of the things, the many computers they had. 
 Unfortunately, they tried to do Local Area Networking with cable TV technology. When it worked, it was fine, but it caused an awful lot of problems in Ford, when they had all of this cable TV technology going around all their Research Institute setups and it gets a lot of intermittent faults - again back to the old intermittent fault – [so plumbing] on the cable TV network and so on.
  I then did a short spell with SDC Defence.  That was more to do with  communications than anything else and then finally ended my career with Neotronics which was an electronic company based near to where I lived, near to Stansted Airport and they specialised in gas detection on oil rigs and various other industries and so on, and I then realised a bit too late how easy it was to be in electronic servicing that wasn’t computer-based because although there were critical systems, there was no [inaudible ] pressure that you got from a Bank being out or anything like that, so I ended up with a quieter life fortunately and here we are now in retirement 
VB
When did you retire then?
PA
In 2007.
VB
Okay, so I’ve got a thing I have to put at the end, so if we are at the end, shall I do that now?
PA
Okay, yeah.
VB
This interview has been recorded by the LEO Computer Society and the computer society would like to thank you Pat very much for your time and reminiscences.  The interview and transcript will form part of the oral history project documenting the early use of electronic computers in business and other applications but particularly in business.  Any opinions expressed are those of the interviewee and not the society.  The copyright of this interview in recorded form and transcript remain the property of the LEO Computer Society 2019 and it will now be transcribed, and the transcription will be sent back to you for editing and comments and if you want to add or change anything, you’ll be able to do so.

Provenance :
Recording made by the LEO Computers Society as part of their ongoing oral history project.

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