An interview with John Andrews conducted by Vincent Bodsworth on 7 September 2022 as part of the LEO Computer Society Oral History Project. 

Transcript :

John Andrews interviewed by Vince Bodsworth on 7 September 2022.

Transcribed and edited by Jon Hales. volunteer at CCH


INT: It's the 7th of September, 2022. I'm Vince Bodsworth and I'm interviewing John Andrews to give us the story of his involvement with the LEO Computers from the earliest days. Good afternoon, John. We're recording this interview as part of the LEO Computer Society Oral History Project and the audio version and the transcript will be lodged at a central archive and made available for researchers and members of the public. Perhaps you'd like to introduce yourself. 

JA: Hi, thanks Vince. I was born in 1941, just before my father, who was a coal heaver at the time, later an estate agent and then ran an estate agent, specialising in selling butcher shops to recruitment agency R&K Butchers during the post-World War to consolidation due to deaths of tradesmen and the people that learned better trades in the military. So just before my father was called up, I lived with my mum, who had been a clerk and was again later, a grandma who was a housewife and was originally a single mum, a step-grandfather and a great-grandmother who had borne 14 kids, but lived to 86.

INT: Some going. 

JA: Some going. Quite a girl. And we lived in and above a cobbler shop in Old Ford in London. Now bombing during the war with the early stages was quite frequent because bombers were deterred from the nearby docks in the East End and dumped bombs over us to fly higher and faster back to base. But we only actually suffered one bombing issue ourselves, though friends and neighbours were killed and made homeless. We bartered chickens, eggs, geese and so on that my grandfather kept in the garden and traded tomatoes with Mr. Eatwell next door who kept a sweet shop. And because we were repairing shoes and boots and repairing other bits and pieces with leather, bartering was a sort of way of life, so the rationing didn't leave us very short. Anyway, my father was kicked out of the RAF, probably for getting his leg over one of the officer's wives illicitly. I don't know whether it would ever be 'licit' to do that, but anyway. We moved to Kentish town where he had a job in an estate agency called Salterex. And I went to Toriano school as soon as I was of school age, got my 11+ and went to a local William Ellis and [inaudible]  grammar school, rather than as a scholar at the largely fee-paying City of London school. Snobbery still prevailed because the expensive school uniform at Robert Horn's [shop in] Tottenham Court Road, or more expensive still at a Hampstead and Endsworth shop, clearly had different blues on blazers and caps, pullovers and ties, slightly different shape to the school badge and so on. We of course went for the less expensive one, being Eastenders. There was no career guidance at home or at school, though the head of chemistry did say to me one day that I should be a salesman. Can't quite think why, because I did rather well at chemistry A level. I first thought to become a chemical engineer, but sixth form showed that I wasn't good enough in applied maths or physics, so my expectations of running ICI, or something similar or bigger, evaporated. So I decided I wanted to be a business leader based on economics and finance. I studied economics in two terms, got a good A level and selected a subject repertoire from a course at Leicester University, which was essentially like a business [a] bachelor of administration would be nowadays, but then was called a BSc economy, economics. They kindly said yes, can't think why, but next year please, because this year we're full, because I'd left it so late because I was screwing up my sixth form. So I bummed around for a bit, worked in a brass and aluminium casting business in Clerkenwell in London, repaired leisure boats in Regent's Park, re-varnished them in the winter and things like that. But a school pal originally from California, but he and his mum had come from there, she was a refugee from McCarthyism and moved into Hampstead. So he joined William Ellis School. So that chum, Tom Gold, left school just before the sixth form in bad odour because of various things he'd done and not done and followed his girlfriend Solvay back to Norway and suggested an airmail letter, can you believe it in airmail, not email these days. I get into computers for the rest of my involuntary gap year. He'd joined a Norwegian department store in Oslo with some IBM kit he was fascinated by. So in an environment where no career advice was available, nobody knew anything about computers, that I knew, certainly nobody at school and there wasn't a Wikipedia, an encyclopaedia, Britannica was last published about 1934, nothing in the library locally or anything like that. I wrote off for a job I saw advertised in one of the rags [newspaper] for an operator of a Leo 4 computer, I think a Leo 2-4  computer at Standard Drive Coventry. Now I turned up and I was interviewed, there was this strange guy who sat in the corner quietly nodding away. Nobody introduced him to me. They offered me the job but I said, well, if that's the wages, [you] I can't afford it, which I was perfectly sure I couldn't have done. So I went back home a bit despondent, having collected my expenses and took my cardboard suitcase back home. I was a bit upset. Anyway, a few days later I got a letter from dear old Noddy Gibson of Leo, inviting me to an interview for operations in the 2-5 service bureau in Bayswater. Well, that was easy for me because I was on a number 27 bus route. So I went for the interview. I can't really remember much about the interview except that a rather prim looking lady was his secretary who later on turned out to be not at all prim, very jolly, but she had a wonderful deadpan appearance, Olive her name was. Lovely olive skin too. And dark hair, sort of done up in that World War Two fashion of folded round a scarf. Although I think there wasn't probably a scarf there. Anyway, she brought in cups of tea and I was impressed with the quality of the biscuits. Clearly, 'Noddy' Gibson was a person of great seniority, at least I thought so. And he offered me a job at £550 a year, plus three shillings a day, luncheon vouchers. And I thought, well that's wonderful, you know, I cover my bus fare, pay my mum a few quid for...

INT: What year would that have been?

JA: Oh sorry, that was 1950, no 1960, just into 1960. And I started the day after the Duke of Edinburgh had paid a visit. But before I come on to that, I just want to say this, when payday loomed I was despondent because I discovered I wasn't going to get paid because Joe Lyons had a fidelity policy of withholding the first month's pay. I'd got [no more] my luncheon vouchers, but I was bloody hard up, I tell you. Saving has never been one of my stronger points. Anyway, I started back the day after the Duke of Edinburgh had been. Bill [?] Still had the old sign that the Duke had used in his office, which I thought was, well, less than charming, but Bill was quite proud. And funnily enough, Bill was my boss, but he hadn't interviewed me, only Noddy [Gibson], which I thought was very weird indeed. Seemed okay, luncheon vouchers kept me fed on weekdays, mostly at a Turkish cafe where you could get all the bread and butter you wanted and a two course meal for three pence less than the luncheon voucher. Very attractive, as were most of the women who worked at Leo. I was made head of job assembly [preparing the sets of punch cards, etc. for the series of 'jobs' to be run each day; 'job assembly' was explained further in interview with John Wilson] after about six months, as I seemed to one of the directors, Tony Barnes, to  be organising it anyway with a bit more dash, but then work was increasing. So my fags migrated from Players or Seniors [cigarette brands] to posh 'Players Number Three', which was definitely bird magnets. Money had gone up and we started working shifts, first two shifts, which is quite easy. We didn't get much extra for that, but then a five shift system. And we ran 21 consecutive days as morning, evening and night shifts respectively, then consecutive seven days off and seven on standby for any necessary standby work carried out at British Oxygen, in the evening and overnight. Bill still made very strange efforts to feed us. We'd got a microwave and he bought for the first night several huge steaks, but there were no implements to cook them and the microwave is not the ideal way of cooking a steak. So we said, oh, with that we negotiated some playing around. The shift allowance was very handsome, over 45% increase on base dosh [cash]. I think we got extra luncheon vouchers because we still got them on the 14 days or 10 of the 14 days when we weren't at ordinary work. So we went out onto Queensway at night and ate in the wonderful Wimpy Bar [restaurant].

Anyway, the characters at Leo at that stage included Bill, Julian, Bob Elmer, Charlie O'Brien, several directors, including Tony Barnes who had promoted me I think without consulting Bill or Jack Warrener, who was Bill's boss and who I hardly ever saw. I remember getting a severe rocket [telling-off] after telling someone who was calling around 7.30 one morning asking for T.R. Thompson. They wouldn't be in yet. He was, of course. He was waiting for a call from the great Mr. Simmons and one of the Salmons.

The jobs around included the RAF and Army Officers payroll for those of them who banked to Glyn Mills, a terrific daily production schedule for the CAV company, a subsidiary of Joe Lucas. CAV made almost all the diesel injectors for diesel engines made in the UK and other countries too, accompanied by a bloke who always had a stub of a roll-up stuck alight to his lips. Leered at all the women [and] was a pain.

But anyway, there was an exciting overnight one for Lightning Fasteners, zip makers before YKK on Friday nights and Saturday mornings which involved going to Paddington and jumping into a goods carriage as the train stopped, grabbing two or three heavy wooden cases full of punch cards, taking a taxi back to Hartree [House: headquarters of Leo Computers] regardless of any priority as regards to the queue; hauling them up the many flights of concrete stairs to the back entrance because Whiteleys [Company] and therefore the lifts at the Leo office were shut for the night and immediately starting the job to be sure to finish in time to reverse the process and take it back to Paddington; sending the finished work early on Saturday morning; it being the next week's production schedule for most zip fasteners made in the UK. Most jobs involved the client supplying updating data in the form of 80 column punch cards with alphanumeric data entered column by column, nought to nine being supplemented by modifiers for alphabetic and symbols [that would cost] of course 10 and 11 pence because we still had those in the top two rows of each column. A few in addition to identifying data in columns for sorting purposes had digital fields using binary fields to be more compact across usually several columns, occasionally across 40. When card packs were dropped, and they were, sorting took forever using operations reference data which is a posh way of saying whatever the shift leader could remember; alternatively a phone call to a friendly programmer, on a very ancient and ill-served Hollerith sorter, despite my demands for a three times faster IBM sorter. A job ran the input updating data cards against then current data stored on magnetic tapes, written on Decca tape drives, faster than cards by far. A few jobs had limited data inputs on paper tape as I recall, I think seven holes to a column, but I'm probably wrong there. 

INT: It probably would have been seven holes, yeah, or eight holes, with the eighth one being about a parity check. 

JA: Right, OK, thanks, I didn't do much with paper tape. What I did do was the engineers said we could read the tapes backwards because the tape consisted of fixed blocks for a block stop marker, and at the end of the tape there was a process for reversing the process and writing a block from behind the previously recorded block stop marker. But the operators had the jinx [problems related to ...] on that because they had a few problems. Brian Mills, the excellent shift engineering manager said, assured me, he'd sorted it. Bill Steele was jumping up and down on my soft bits because we keep on buying tapes, not just tapes but cabinets to store the wretched things in. So I ran one shift round the bend as we called it and it went perfectly and thereafter we just told everybody that's what's going to happen and it did. I was quite proud of that because it saved a fortune and it stopped Bill jumping up and down to my soft bits. One job was very much punch cards. It was Eagle Star's group life endowment updating and each group life or employee, being a group, had a deck of cards which was the brought forward data and another deck of cards which was to update it. And God help us if we dropped it, but it was a nightmare administering these separate packs because they had to be kept separate for all kinds of reasons and the output had to be separated into individual groups and the summarised data, entirely for Eagle Star management purposes, had to be separated as well. So the operators just didn't bother to do it and the shift leaders were the instigators there, very naughty of them. But as we had an obligation to actually run the bloody job and I was the guy that got nagged by the chap at Eagle Star, I went to Bill Steele, and this would have been just before Easter 1961, and said look we've got to run this job otherwise they're going to take the business to IBM. And I had no legitimate reason to say that. It was a falsehood, but it got Bill a bit, shall we say, panicky because I clearly laid on him the responsibility not to lose it [the contract]. And, because he knew I was a gabby sod [talkative] and was drinking with all sorts of people, he thought it was prudent to go along with my idea that I should run the job over Good Friday, Easter Saturday, Sunday and Monday. We did a rough back-of-the-envelopes calculation and thought I should finish by Sunday evening. Well, that was a bit bloody optimistic, because I had to go and lug cases of new cards from wherever they were stored, I can't even remember that, because we had to punch output versions as well. And at one stage a Samistronic [Powers-Samas was a supplier] printer broke down which was not at all unusual and you had hours to get that fixed so I was running without an engineer. Bill's condition being: only, if both a British stronger standard bag [unclear] and a British standard kick didn't work, could I call on an emergency engineer. But we got the printer working. I never confessed to anybody when I went home on the Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights around 11 o'clock at night. I didn't turn the machines off, I left them running because I figured they'd be more reliable that way. I think I was right. Because with all those valves, dry joints would make a nightmare look quite attractive because you wake up from them [nightmares]. A dry joint is a nightmare, nightmare, double times-up. Anyway, we ran the job and I finished just before 7 o'clock on the Monday, [correction] Tuesday morning by which time I hadn't shaved for the entire weekend. I had had showers and things because I believe in that kind of personal hygiene. But, by God I felt like a wreck. Anyway, Bill was grateful, said I could take the job up to Hillside [inaudible] and I said 'maybe tomorrow boss'. He agreed that. But I at least phoned the guy and said I had run it, I'm just double checking it and I'll bring it to you tomorrow. It was a lie that I was double checking it. I double checked it as we went through. But I went home and had a really hot bath and went to my favourite Greek barbers and had a shave and shower, hot towels with the shaving, nice shampoo, had my hair cut and went out to the Finchley Road, which was my favourite place for picking up young ladies. I had a cup of coffee and a piece of cheesecake. No joy [luck] in picking up a young lady, but never mind. [I] went back home and slept.

And the next day I went in, I think it was the next day, yes it must have been, and I was allowed to take a taxi all the way to the Mall [inaudible, Pall Mall?], just off the Mall. I think it was King Charles the Second Street. And pressed the bell outside [inaudible] and said yeah I've got some stuff for Mr So-and-so. And Mr So-and-so duly appeared. I think it was all he could do but not give me a big hug. But we managed to get all this stuff up to his office and he was very grateful and gave me a whole cup of coffee. But that was a wonderful weekend, of course the amount of money I earned was equal to about two weeks pay, so the next payday was very nice. So that was that. 

What else? That's right, what everybody hated was when the job failed but the machine was working, passed all the tests, such as they were, and we had to call on a programmer, for assistance. I remember we called Wendy Peak for one job. Wendy later became my wife of forty-seven, forty-nine years. And another time, that was at Hartree House and then when we were at British Oxygen, we had a really stubborn problem and we had to call Rosemary Gilbert, as had been. She and I had walked out for a bit, about a year I think. But, we called her out, with her then husband, who drove her out to British Oxygen. I think she sorted it and we were so grateful we offered her a pork sandwich, which was the entire reason why we were happy to go to British Oxygen in Edmiston [uncertain? Edmonton?], because outside the gates was this marvellous pub with a great big landlady, who had the most super pork leg sandwiches. So, that was always difficult but the most memorable one was on a Saturday. There was a chap called Eric, I'm sorry I forgot his surname, and we had a problem with a programme which was the Saintly Mary Blood's and we didn't have an address or a telephone number. Oh dear. And we didn't like to ring the management because that would involve confessing that Charlie O'Brien, the boss man, had fouled up and therefore Bill Still had fouled up and therefore etc and oh gosh. Anyway, Eric did a masterclass in persuasion over the telephone. In those days directory enquiry operations, mostly ladies in the daytime, even at weekends. And he charmed this lady into ringing people in a neighbour that Eric was convinced Mary lived until she hit on one, who was not only a neighbour and knew Mary, but agreed to go and tell Mary at the earliest possible moment to call us which she duly did shortly afterwards and we got the problem solved over the phone which was a remarkable feat, both by Mary Blood, can you imagine how difficult it is doing it over the phone, but also a tribute to Eric with his gravelly voice after all these years of smoking and drinking no doubt, charming this operator into doing it. I was deeply, deeply impressed. 

I might say by way of a sort of aside of course no smoking was the rule in the computer room but it stank after the night shift of smoke, never mind the rules. There was one little compensatory feature of the evening and night shifts in Hartree House because in a flat opposite us, in Queensway, there was a woman who started work whenever it became dark; and she had a client and she left the curtains open and the lights on. Our minds boggled [surprised] but we never recognised the client subsequently in the street nor her, so I can't think why that was. 

By this time, I'd written to Leicester University saying I was researching computing. What a terrible lie that was, in business, and would be sure to want to start my course with them in a few years' time. But of course I never did. The money, the fags, the booze, the parties and not to mention the dosh [money, pay] and the excitements of the jobs that kept on progressing, got in the way. All the operators and engineers were very good pals and worked in a good-humoured way. Ekke Mjollum [?] also emerged as the blonde Mike Malloy. Dave Rock was a fast minivan- driving engineer, great fun. Mike Mills, their very good-humoured and very clever boss. Operators, including Julian, engaged to a very pretty Katie [?] on reception, Bob Elmer, Dick Halford, he of the great perpetual frown.

INT: [Stops recording, presumably to change cassette] 

JA: Dick Halford, he of the perpetual frown, and my mate Ernest Harrison who went on to run up Rolls-Royce's [IBM] 1401 and then to an increasingly senior management role at IBM UK. There was a very good social life including the programmers and great parties particularly Tim Glynn, Johnny Hempstead and Johnny Forbes. Nearby apartment one involved Ernest falling asleep in the bath, fortunately dry. I think no one turned the taps on for the poor chap. We also had a few in parties in flats where I lived and our first show shared flat was Great Mansion flat in Church Walk. That was shared with Dave Rock, Ernest Harrison and co, an involved a party where a well-known senior programmer pursued a more junior guy with a kitchen knife in hand towards the heath for allegedly chatting up former's girlfriend. We were rejected very sadly, can't think why, but Dave found a huge flat in Maida Vale where we were joined by Dave Mack.

By this time I'd more or less sussed that Leo didn't hold much future for me. The prospects for developing [a career] into systems analysis and sales were remote and the silo mentality, as I saw it, of the senior managers. I felt frustrated. So, I left to be a trainee salesman with ICL, having rejected an offer from IBM, and that was on the 1st January 1962, dropping a whole grand a year from almost grossing 1600 quid, and luncheon vouchers to 559 pounds a year, plus accommodation and food for five months at Moor Hall and in a sordid Brighton hotel and three further months as a trainee. I won't regale you with the stories of Moor Hall. Customer staff, mostly women, were in one wing, separated from another wing by a cabbage patch. 

INT: Been there

JA: Been there, done it, know what it's like. Yes well, you can imagine the cabbage patch was worn. Anyway, before I got there I discovered just how good the Lyons Fidelity Bond was. They paid me out of my then current monthly rate. It was a whopping lump of money, about three times as much as I expected. And, I suppose it was typical of the brilliant paternalistic Lyons founders. But, despite the immense insights of Mr Simmons and co, who'd really created a kind of McKinsey in-house consulting on business process re-engineering, first with Lyons, ... well culminating I suppose with the Leo One, all the applications that changed the face of Lyons. But also every sale that Leo made to an external client involved extensive business process re-engineering and that was, I think, Leo's brilliant strength emanating from John Simmons, who was sadly only met en passant, who was undoubtedly one of the brightest men ever employed in British business. And of course there were some startlingly outstanding individuals in that business as well. The likes of Doug Komish, David Caminer, Matt McClellan and others who were transformational. I suppose it would be wrong not to include Raymond Thompson, 'TRT', in that collection, who drove the business. I was never sure how much he was disciple of Simmons and how much he was a professional boss. And I don't really know anybody who can't tell me which way the scale goes. I wasn't convinced that he was a particularly good professional boss, but I saw no evidence that he was a brilliant business-process re-engineering lead either; but he was undoubtedly a very strong character indeed.

I must say ICL, ICT as it was in those days, was a much sleepier business at first. But it did gradually move into new modes. It never had the cash rate [?] of IBM nor the immense technical field capability of Univac. And I am not talking about individuals in any companies, I am talking about a massive strength, in the case of Univac, of its field technical excellence. They solved many massive problems, which were beyond those that could be solved by the likes of IBM or ICT, ICL. But none of them practised the kind of advisory on business-process re-engineering that I felt was Leo's great strength. It was left to the Accentures and the McKinzeys and so on, who by the way all made stonkingly [unexpectedly] bigger profits by so doing than any of the 'tin vendors', because that is what we had become by then.

Although the software was quite important, we were flogging tin, we were focussed on tin and I found that a bit dispiriting to be honest. But then ICT bought or acquired or was merged with, whatever the right phrases ought to be, ... English Electric acquired Leo and Marconi's computer interests, ICT bought EMI's and Ferranti's computer business including both the Ryan and Atlas lines; and design rights to the Ferranti Packard 6000, from which was developed the 1900 series. Or rather whose order code was used to form the basis of the EMI influenced line of smaller 1900s at Stevenage, and a rather different lineage of 1904s, 5s, 6s and so on at West Gordon. It wasn't really a copy of the FP6000, that was just the 1904 and 5, but the order code was preserved and the integrity of the line was left to a chap called, if I remember his name rightly, Bruce Patterson who worked in product planning for Derek Eldridge, was in charge of all aspects of compatibility. A very intelligent guy, very quietly persuasive and that's why I can't remember his name terribly well although I worked with him quite closely at various stages.

Was leaving Leo the right thing at the time I left? I think so. I'll give you one example of why I really felt that, culminating many years later, that move had been justified. Throughout my time at ICL I'd done things I'm sure I'd never have done at Leo, even as Leo had moved into other ownerships and controls and structures and so on. But the penultimate job I had, pre-penultimate job I had at ICL, I ran the sales and lobbying for European institutions. David Cameron was running the ultimately unsuccessful project in Luxembourg. Now that's contentious and I'll explain why I say that. I had moved to Brussels, asked to rescue a lack of contracts for the 2980 that had been delivered and all the people surrounding it doing all kinds of things. We really had no contractual basis for many millions of pounds of the kit and not a few people. We only had contracts for a thing called network systems control or thereabouts and that was a bit dubious to say the least. The reason I say it was ultimately unsuccessful is not a reflection on any of the people in the project team, nor of David himself. It was really a consequence of the sales enthusiasm that had driven a highly political original sale and allowed the 2980 to be delivered without a contract. So, when I got to Brussels, the original response to tender had been far exceeded already by what was being done by the project team. And, what I think the project team didn't understand, was how slimy and malign the non-friends were in the Luxembourg computer team. I think they always underestimated them, and so that team faced the impossibility of unreliable hardware. The 2980 at that stage was hideously unreliable, and not very reliable, and for that matter not very well functioned, software in the form of the operating system, and so on and so forth. But it got a moving feast and all this to achieve a leap from a simple batch processing based 145, 360, 145 to a giant 2980 using a database software which had been ported from one of the nuclear sites, Aldermaston I think, but I could be wrong. Where it had run on I think an Atlas but it may have been an Iran [?], it doesn't really matter anyway. Convert that to run on the 2980 and instantly come the memory, the electronic memory accessible online, from anywhere by anyone with authority to access the memory of every commission, decision, directive, consideration, thought process for the future. That in itself was a massive job and probably beyond even that brilliant team, but we were also doing many other things at the same time. And of course there was permanent sales pressure to sell more.

I remember lending them half a dozen 2903s because one of their politically appointed suppliers had failed and they couldn't sign a contract but they needed them. We agreed at a high level that I had direct hotlines with Peter Eilert and by then well first Chris Wilson and then subsequently to Jeff Wilmot. And for that matter Pete Bonfield, over anything where I wanted to refer to them, nobody was ever offended when I said I'm going to raise this with .... and would raise it with them. And it was necessary, not because I was important, because the issue was important.

So I thought David had taken on the role quite brilliantly but with this enthusiasm that accepted, because of the lack of a contract, a moving target. And I'd been there from the start, I'd said  guys, you want to do this, we need a contract. You ain't going nowhere without a bloody contract, because that would have told us what our goal was. That is the weakness I think. Even without that it might have been difficult to pass the acceptance test given the unreliability of the software and the hardware and the toughness of the test.

Anyway, that's off my chest but the fact of the matter is it was a more than tough task. I'm still not permitted to discuss how I negotiated the alleged failure or the alleged pass, whichever your stance on the matter was. And I can tell you, tell you this much, the balance of opinion seems to be that we had failed on both sides of the fence, if only just, and if only for just cause. But I still can't tell you how I negotiated because I did and it was only me to negotiate, there was no other bugger who could do it. But I had surreptitious telephone calls from and to heads of chancellery of certain embassies, clandestine meetings of senior politicians, commissioners, directors general, chef-de-cabinet of unnameable commissioners and so on. And I even called in a favour because at an earlier meeting, I think very much earlier, Chris Wolfson had still been on the scene and he and Peter Ailet flew into Strasbourg for a meeting with Etienne Damignon, who was one of the senior commissioners, a brilliant diplomat from Belgium, who dressed in Savile Row suits and Jermyn Street [in London] shirts and so on, very elegant, slim guy, but he'd forgotten his cufflinks at this meeting. And when the meeting got really shitty, and I mean really shitty, and nobody on our seats seemed to know what to do. I said to Stevie, because that was his nickname, sorry to interrupt, but I've just noticed you're lacking your cufflinks, something I often do, but it happens I've got a spare pair with me. Would you do me the honour of letting me loan you a pair for the duration? How could the man not warmly say yes? And I called in that favour as well. And I also had a photograph which showed very near criminal damage being done to ICL's cause, which has since disappeared into a strongbox somewhere, can't think where. It was pretty nasty stuff, but we ended up with something that met everybody's requirements, and we almost parted good friends, because I stayed on for a little bit, but not very much longer after that. We agreed a new twin 2976, rented for five years and a day, and most importantly, the first payment occurred 366 days after the start. Can't think why. Might have been because it looked like a free year. And it was fully staffed and so on. And we also sold an upgrading of the 2980 to a dual 2982, something I'd discussed with Rob [...?] directly some weeks before I proposed it, which he agreed to, and he said he would endorse that because we ought to be able to do it on site without massive effort, and if it failed, he'd make sure there was a dual 2982 available to move down quickly, which given the nature of the 2982, I thought was a very bold gesture on his part. But anyway, we did that. And the whole lot managed, staffed and network-managed for the same five year and a day paid in the same way as complete systems.

I don't think I could have ever had the empowerment to do that within the Leo structure, as I saw it. And I loved that, not power and importance, but the freedom to take responsibility and get a good result for all parties, because my theory of life is always generate a client, not a one time customer. The fact that, not very long after I left, I suppose a couple of years, because I fell out with a guy who's now managing it. It took over from, it was Talbot and Co., Universities and Research, and it moved to Pat Morrish. I didn't have a huge amount of time for Pat Morrish, and I disagreed with some early decisions he took, which I thought were ill informed. So, I was looking for another job, and of course, I've got a family in Brussels, British School of Brussels, and they wanted to stay there. And I said, well, I'll stay if I've got a good job, and if not, you get back to the UK now, because you're on the five year exam cycle. But as it happened, Doug Comish offered me the Managing Director's job temporarily, for a year or two, at ICL Belgium. Like a bloody idiot, I took it. A Managing Director, I am most definitely not. I am a team leader, and a team can be quite big, but I'm not competent at delegating, as a Managing Director must be. Anyway, I took it. I found my successor, but I had lots of arguments with Doug and Jaap Hellebroek, who at that stage had come in ... with a bit of a reorganisation of Europe. And I was told I was coming back to the UK, so I had a few months of gardening leave. I'd got a job to go back to with Doug Comish's team. It tells you how important the job was. It had a title two lines long, and so far as I can remember, I needed permission only in triplicate, to go to the loo [toilet] and use the lavatory paper.

INT: Was Doug Comish then International Division or European Division?

JA: He was European Division, I think, sorry. At that time, yes, I think. 

INT: He moved to International Division later.

JA: That's right. That was after I left ICL, because I came back, I think, in September to get my kids in school. And I promptly went to Portugal for a few weeks on business for the unit I was working for, on the instructions of my accountant, who said, "Get your bum out of the UK until at least this date, because then you're non-resident of the UK."

INT: Or on the tax year.

JA: Or tax year. So I duly did that, being an obedient sort of person, sometimes. In fact, more often than not, as long as it's reasonable. And, lo-and-behold, I started another job as a Managing Director. It takes me a while to learn that I'm not a good Managing Director. In fairness to myself, I took over a colour management company based in Newbury, which was being run by a drunk German and had been run by an incompetent Sales Director, acting as if Managing Director. And it was a very dysfunctional unit, but it had an absolute gem of capability. It had the ability to predict colouration effects more accurately than any other method. Largely down to working closely with a genius, who had worked for Marks and Spencer, who developed a new algorithm for defining colour space. Won't bore you with the physics of colour, but it's complicated. And it's all about getting the optimum packing. And,  he'd written a programme in conjunction with our techie person. We bought in reflectance spectra automata, which is a thing which takes, bounces pure white light off a titanium oxide sphere onto a sample, takes it back into the sphere, which is called an integrator, refocuses it onto, I think it was a CMOS [sensor], but I could be wrong. It could be some other set of sensors, which measure the light waves and thus determine the precise colour objectively rather than subjectively. And from that, in a database of what colours would be achieved by mixing dye stuffs or pigments or whatever, and applying them with whatever process, you could predict how to achieve a given colour 80% of the time, first time, which perhaps doesn't sound very much now, but in those days that was beyond everybody's wildest dreams. They all had shade cards defining their colour repertoire of between 10,000 and 20,000 cards. And no two adjacent colours have similar formulae. They've been arrived at empirically. And so you could never extrapolate, because if you've got four colours in this and four different colours in that, how do you determine what's halfway between the two? With our objective methods, we got there very accurately. And in the end, it was so good that Marks and Spencers said that they were able to have cloth dyed in Israel, cut in Israel, and made into, say, a jacket. A different piece of cloth dyed, cut, and made into waistcoat in, say, at that time Yugoslavia. And a third piece of cloth dyed and cut and made into trousers in, say, Germany, Western Germany, because it still was, I think. And you could go and buy yourself a three-piece suit in any of the stores in Paris, Brussels, UK. And if you wanted an extra waistcoat and you'd bought it in Paris, you could buy an extra waistcoat and it would match. That was something nobody else had ever been able to do. So we made a fortune by going round the world, saying to everybody, "Do you want to be able to supply M&S? You've got to use our system." But, I mean, the business was rotten. It had unhealthy structures and didn't drive its salesforce very well. It wasn't very honest with its customers. And I got that sorted pretty well. And I think we increased turnover by two, increased profits by four, and turned net debt into very positive assets and corrected a lousy asset, non-functioning, into functioning assets in 21 months. And in the process, I bought a textile machinery company from Coats Paton. The company was called Texicon, and they made specialized textile machinery-like foam application of chemicals, because in dyeing wool, you tend to make it very wet, and then you've got to dry it before you can do the next thing, and that's energy intensive. So putting it on with a foam, which requires less energy. Lots of people use what they call vacuum slots, where they pass the very wet cloth off, suck it dry, and that, of course, distorts it. But if your quality aspirations are cheap jacks, that's okay. But if you want decent quality, that's not very nice. We did some spectacular sales at the States [USA?], but I didn't enjoy my relationship with the drunk chairman, and I left.

And I bummed around for a bit, did some consulting, but I'd never have had that freedom, again, to restructure a business as I'd done. I mean, of course, I've met lots of Leo people on the way through. Rodney Hornstein, one of three very good bosses I've ever had. I didn't like the start at ICL because, I was sent up to Manchester because I'd done some pranks at Moor Hall. And Jimmy Barnes was the head of Manchester branch of, I think they were called, Major Accounts for Kenny. Now, Jimmy had possibly been a very good guy in the early days, but he was well beyond it. And they were losing hand over fist, to IBM. . I beat him at Liar's Dice [2-player bluffing game] or whatever the game was in the bar behind John Dalton Street the first time I arrived. And, I needed to make up for that. So I was sent to British Aluminium in Warrington day after day after day, week after week after week, to pull out the wires which belonged to us from the plug board that belonged to British Aluminium because they were throwing us up, out for IBM. That was pretty miserable. I need a break in a moment if that's all right.

INT: Shall we do it now?

JA: Yeah.

INT: OK. Do you want a cup of tea?

JA: Yeah. I was a bit hacked off with this daily tearing wires out, no matter what the side benefits were. We won't go into those details. But I dropped a note to Jimmy, despite my flatmate Duncan, Duncan Connell, nice guy, saying to the brilliant John Starkey who ran local government north, and he was really brilliant, you know, do you want to talk to John? But I was hankering off going back to London because I'd got an engagement down there and different engagements in the north, which were much less permanent in nature. So Ken came up when I'd resigned, Kenny, and interviewed me and said, well, have you got a job to go to? And I said yes, which was doubly true because I'd got a paid job and wanted to go and work for my father, who I hated, but I'd been paid lots of dosh [money]. And for money I'll do most things.

Anyway, Ken offered me a job working with Chris Sheed, who was running the computer specialist team for major or national accounts, can't remember what it was called. And I'd met Chris briefly some other time, and he seemed like a decent guy. So I said, I'll give it a go. So I ended up working in a cubbyhole [small room], it was about as square as your sideboard is long, and there were six of us shared this as an office. It was in Chris Sheed's office, but the other five people who worked for him had right of entry, including his secretary, sometimes bringing in a typewriter. God help us. But the other guys were all much older than I, had mostly come from EMI's computer department, where there had been various kinds of business analysts. And I quite liked them, I got on well with them. Although I knew much less than they did at that time, I was still only, God help me, 21 and a bit, coming up for 22. They took me under their wing, they recognised I wasn't completely stupid and they helped me. And I enjoyed it, so I gave up thoughts of leaving for a bit. Anyway, I migrated from there and I moved into a sort of technical support role, so called, although I was really a salesman. I was the first person in ICT, still was [ICT was later incorporated in ICL], to sell myself as a salesman and my team to a customer to implement systems, because we'd managed to flog a 1500, the old RCA 301, to be AC Weybridge division in the old Brooklands area, which was near by where I was living, by then it was 1966 I think. And I lived at the foot of the runway [airport], off which took the occasional 1-11 and the never-quite-made-it TSR2 [military aircraft, cancelled before production], which was a great shame. But the VC10 used to take off from there. We'd sold them a 1500 and they wanted to buy another one, I think largely for backup reasons and prestige and stuff like that. And I said, no, we've got to learn to use that first one properly, otherwise you'll be a bad reference. They were a bit taken aback by that. So I sold myself and my team to develop this application. It was nearly a death trap, because their works costing and payroll system was full of nasties. It had grown up over goodness knows how many companies and histories that had created BAC [British Aircraft Corporation], but obviously it started out as a coachwork, because aircraft were originally wood and cotton with a few bits of metal and leather and the odd bit of glass. So the practices were weird. And there was something called gang working, which was sprung on me as a bit of a surprise. I was, oh, didn't we tell you about that? That's where I learnt about creeping specification. We were accommodated in-memory sorting, but I had to upgrade the memory. It was quite nice money getting paid for that, but my bonus at the end of all of that was £9. Anyway, we ended up selling them a second 1500, which was nice stuff. And, [was] I just about sell them an RCA 3301, which was going to be called the ICL 1600, I think. And my boss, Jim Sheldrake said, no, no, no, we've got this new toy coming called 'D'. He couldn't quite remember what it was, but by then I knew it was going to be the Ferranti Packard 6000, the [ICT or ICL] 1904.

INT: Jim Sheldrake was my first boss at ICC by the way.

JA: Good Lord. I liked him very much. He was a nice guy. Sadly, he died of an awful death from cancer, I was told, many years later. Anyway, so we switch-sold it and part of the sale was supervised by John Fotheringham, who was the science and maths bit of the National Accounts, which was then I think run by, probably, George Belcher. I think Kenny could party to see [inaudible]. Anyway, whoever. And John was trying to replace three Pegasuses, or more correctly, three Pegasi [computers]. And he sold a Bear 1905 [ICL 1900 Series], which had the computing capacity, [but] didn't have enough peripherals. But he also committed the swine to modify PERT to run without adequate disks, let alone enough tape drives. Now, PERT [Programme Evaluation and Review Technique] is all about sorting things and either you need a huge memory or you need to do tape and disk sorting. And I used to drive up every night to Stevenage where the machine was, while still doing my day job looking after BAC Aircraft, BAC Guided Weapons Division, Rolls-Royce engines, and Hawker-Siddeley Dynamics  and Aircraft, nationally. And I'd drive up there nights to assist the guys actually rewriting PERT and testing it. [I] never forgave John Fotheringham. Anyway, when they finished it, the OC [Officer Commanding?] had the good grace to agree they needed to buy a few more bits, which they did. It was all a waste of bloody time really. Later, when I resigned to double my pay, which is my sort of starting point for going, because I was hard up, Chris offered me, introduced me one day. By then Chris had moved and he was working in a corporate role. But it turned out he was working for Tubby Oldham in Marketing Development. This was before Tubby went back to running a big sales job. He ran International Division later. Anyway, I met Tubby and liked him, he liked me and I [had] worked for Chris in this marketing role for some years. And sadly I made one mistake, which was that Tubby offered me, when he moved to the International Division, he offered me the role of running the Hong Kong branch. Now, I could have done that because that's not a managing director role, but I could have expanded and learned how to acquire business in the Republic, the People's Republic of China, and elsewhere for that matter. I might have grown a very different career. But my then wife said, 'It's a long way to go for my parents'. Like a mug, I stayed. I was only 28 I think. It broke my bloody heart. Anyway, I stayed in those roles and I did various marketing and product planning and I did a god-dammit man-role for Geoff Cross, going round the place and finding out whether there was duplication and cutting it out, whichever was the worst or the least good or the least well-developed, whichever. And also fostering bright ideas. You know, some managers have a habit of sitting on very bright ideas. If you wander around enough places talking to enough people, you come up with some very bright ideas and you need to be very careful how you promote those, because you don't want to piss off the guy's boss, or his boss. You've got to let it be known that there is this bright idea with somebody senior happening upon it or asking, 'Could we do this?', whereupon the manager would say, 'Well, we have been very quietly contemplating this, Sir'. Because I was good mates with Peter Verne and Ellis and one or two other directors, I could pull that role off and that was quite nice. And at one stage, Geoff Cross came on the scene. Now, Geoff had been a bus driver's son, I think, in Birmingham before he'd gone to Univac and he'd made good as an accountant. And Univac, as I've said previously, had a brilliant technical excellence in the field. But if it had a weakness, it was in its central development. It developed good, solid products which copied other people's but made them slightly better. So most of the Univac line was a dead spit of the relevant IBM 7000 series but made better, with a better operating system, with this superb technical field capability, built very robust network systems. And we were a different kind of organisation. We had central technical excellence and that was our be-all-and-end-all. We were more like IBM than Univac, my humble opinion anyway. And so he brought in Ed Mack, who I thought was a complete idiot, to be quite honest. He was strongly opinionated. Guess how I recognise that characteristic. But he was strongly opinionated about things that really didn't matter a twopenny-damn [at all]. And he didn't understand how things developed, I don't think. Because he bearded [challenged] me one day in the lobby of ICL House and said, tell me about, I think it was B36, which if I remember rightly, if it was B36, was a piece of software that controlled 'mag' [magnetic] tapes on 1900s. Now, I knew a bit about it. I said, but why do you want me to tell you, there are other people who are better qualified than me? That apparently made me a very bad guy. Why somebody whose specialisation didn't include anything like that should need to know anything about how it worked, completely escapes me then and now. But that marked me down. So I was sent off to protective custody by Alan Bagshaw, who was one of the other very bright and capable bosses I had. He'd come from Ferranti, as I recall. The protective custody lasted until they buggered off, basically. And by then I was back into field marketing, and I did the marketing role for retail distribution, i.e. logistics, pharma, supermarket, stuff like that. And then I moved from there to Rodney Hornstein, second of the really great bosses I had, because Chris Sheed was another great boss, in my opinion. A lot of people disliked Chris, I thought he was brilliant. He was the most laid-back bugger I've ever met. But he encouraged people to work really hard, which was very effective. Anyway, Rodney was brilliant. I was his marketing guy for a while, and we were really tasked, because he was doing nationalised industries for Peter Ailett, where previously there had been retail distribution for Mike Wagg, who worked for Les Coal. Then, Mike Wagg disappeared, lots of guys expected me to get Mike Wagg's job, but it went to... gosh, I've forgotten his name, it'll come back. He's got a son who's a distinguished actor, Wallace Weaving. Wallace later went to Australia, went back to Australia, I should say. Wallace was a good boss, and he was certainly better at the job than I was. My job was talking the hard cases of Mike Pollitt and a couple of rogues, really, and my old mate Dave Austin into accepting bigger targets than they wanted, and helping them to achieve them.

The job with Rodney was similar, with the similarly hard cases round the place. Rodney's style was a bit different. In some ways, one of the things that distinguished him as such a great boss. He was more supportive pre-emptively than when you hit the problem. He was good at talking about things, and then let you go, and he'd help you solve the problem in advance, because he'd recognise problems that you might not have done. So I enjoyed that. And then, while I was there, I was obviously getting a bit bored, and I was asked if I'd like to go to Brussels by Peter Ehlitz [?], then a personnel guy. And I started to think about it, went over there, read the files, which had been stripped bare by my predecessor, which was a bad sign. But I had a mate who had access to the headquarters files, and read them there. And, I could see that it was a very, very big task to negotiate these contracts, and because we'd delivered the kit without a contract, we got a moving fee, but David Caminer was there with a lot of money, and I thought I'd give it a crack. But I've told you about that, with the ending up in failures and so on. But, did I regret that, though? Because along the way, I also went to Moscow in a delegation at the invitation of the Ministry of State Planning of the Soviet Union, which is no mean... I mean, you may disagree with the concept of central planning, and I certainly do. It led to army boots being the same left and right foot, who just allowed different sizes, crazy. But it was really.... The truth behind the mission was they wanted to try and persuade us to sell or license the rights to the multi-layer platter-board development [storage in hard drives], which had occurred somewhere in the north. I can't remember whether it was Gorton or Kidsgrove. 

INT: I think it was Kidsgrove.

JA: Was it? Okay. Whatever. It was great technology, and it was a big step forward from less integrated ways of connecting, at least for the time. But it was NATO-embargoed, of course, and so I went there and I teased them a bit. And we had Ralph Land ... was there as our host, introducer, and translator. Nice guy, Ralph, very bright. His brother Frank is a very capable guy as well. I greatly like Frank, and I knew him when I was briefly secretary of the Leo Society for a bit. But on that trip, it was wonderful. We had this complete freedom to discuss anything we thought was okay. We were very circumspect. We were royally entertained. And I was humbled to learn afterwards that a couple of guys took us to the secondary ballet in Moscow, the Bolshoi, which has to be big. It was closed, so we went to this more modern version of Snow... What am I trying to say? I was going to say Snow White, but it wasn't Snow White. Swan Lake. That's what I was trying to think of. Where did I get Snow from? Oh, I know the white dresses, yes. And that was interesting. It was in this modern ballet in this very ancient, grand old theatre. And in the interval, we were ushered up to the Mezzanine where there was a huge....

INT: What year were you in?

JA: Late 70s. So I was 30-something, 37. It was not long before I went to.... Or was it as late as that?

INT: There was a guy called Tony Neville who was in Moscow for a time. It was probably after that.

JA: He wasn't around. Anyway, I think it was late 70s, but I stand to be corrected. 

INT: No, it sounds about right. That's the era of the multi-layer platters.

JA: Yeah. Okay, that dates it better than anything else does, I guess. There's a huge spread laid out, magnificent feast of all the wonderful Russian titbits and vodkas. Because not just one vodka, not just one brandy, and not just one champagne made in Georgia and so on. And we feasted like kings and we went back and watched the rest of the ballet, which was very interesting. And we thanked our host profusely and went home and Ralph explained that what happens is that those guys were told to entertain us, and it was an honour. So it came out of their pay packets. This wasn't expensive really. They had to buy the bloody tickets as well. I found that astonishing. But there was no way of getting back to them and saying, "have 50 bucks [US dollars]" or something. We did take dollars and we went to the foreigner's shop to buy things. But I had that and I went to California with another party to negotiate with Standard Computer Corporation. Now, ACD Haley was head of planning in those days, so that was post the English Electric merger, but not very long after because it didn't last very long. And Standard Computer had invented or designed and built an emulator of the IBM 70-44, which was a lot faster and a lot cheaper. But they didn't have an operating system and funnily enough, IBM wouldn't let them have one because they hadn't reached the consent decree. So they hit on the idea of porting George III [an ICL operating system]. They romanced Arthur Humphreys, ACD Humphreys. I don't know how, but they did and he sent this party over. We had MNL [initial of a person], Ian Forest, Debbie Caminer and sundry others, all sent out to California to meet these people. And yes, one of them was a Hungarian and the yes, he did go into the swivel doors behind you and came out in front and so on. He was quite amazing. And it was an interesting proposition. They were going to populate the United States with 70-44 service bureaus running George III because of its time-sharing ability, as well as its true multi-programming capability. They were going to make a killing [profit]. All we had to do was help them to port. We couldn't quite see that we could afford the risk of diverting scarce operating system resources. And we certainly didn't want to give it to them to port because hey, what happens to your intellectual property? So, it was a bind. We did love that they had developed a particular kind of threaded core storage, which was fast and cheap for its day. And we said we would maybe license that from them. And they said we'd have a problem there, which I guess was code for they had nicked [stolen] it from somebody else in the jug and 'borrowed' it. They were an engaging bunch, but there was no business. But I enjoyed, again, the responsibility of doing that sort of thing and exploring complex ideas, because the marketing idea was bewitching. Because there was no reason why, given enough money, we shouldn't have done the same thing. But our board would never have countenanced that kind of degree of risk.

And there were lots of things of that sort, like a meeting with a company I'm not allowed to mention, offering them licensing rights to the peripheral interface for disk drives for the 1900 series, and any future product so they could supply plug-compatible disk drives cheaper than, make us look cheaper than IBM. But they weren't interested. They just wanted to OEM [Original Equipment Manufacturer]. We hit the wrong target, I think. And I wasn't allowed to go and talk to the right target. But things like that were very exciting, because ICL was a more exciting company in that sense than Leo, and looked like growing to be, because that wonderful, paternalistic, familial business with its brilliant adoption of very bright guys to business-reorganised to make this unbelievable story of a bakery in bloody Hammersmith, supplying the nation overnight. Who would ever conceive of doing a thing like that? But it was the sheer genius that enabled it. And of course, it couldn't survive the mass production, the very specialised production, that's the characteristic of such foodstuffs now. But it was an amazing, amazing adventure that I had. But it meant that it was too stuffy for me. Maybe I was wrong, but I think it was the right decision.

Anyway, after .... Before leaving, where was I? I've left ICL, I ran the colour management company. And I bummed around for a bit as a consultant, advising various people, acting as temporary manager and so on, which was quite good fun. And then I got offered a job at an outfit called Portfolio Leasing, which is a subsidiary of US Leasing, who ... was starting up in the UK to sell operating leases. So that's leases that are off balance sheet, but then newly introducing a standard called SSAP 21, which I did happen to know a little bit about, from my business background. And their proposition was not that they would sell a lease to an ordinary client, but would buy bundles, and finance bundles, for operating lease vendors of computer systems. And photographic equipment like Fuji installed photographic machines and so on. And they looked at me to run the computer division, which I duly did. And we got off the ground fairly quickly. We managed .... Of course, we were taking a credit risk in the end user, not in the seller-bundle. And we were making an informed judgment about the second hand value of the bits we were printing. But it was a crazy world. It was artificial. It was based on, which I hadn't realised when I joined them, the valuation by a company whose name I've forgotten now. It has now disappeared, IDC I think, who valued the projected value of things like IBM disk drives three and four years out. Based on the German price list, which in those days was about 30% higher than anywhere else in Europe. Because when I first went to Germany in 1971, you got about 12 Deutsche Marks to the pound, maybe 13, if you were lucky. By the time I'm talking about, you were getting two Deutsche Marks to the pound. So Germany had high prices apparently. Well, the problem was, you bought the disk drives in Germany, you've got to sell them elsewhere. And prices of technology are not predictable, although all these guys in IDC thought they were. And they wrote long papers to that end. But it was all complete stuff that comes out of a bull's rear end. And it was ill founded. And there were lots of scams going on, the likes of Atlantic Computers who wrote atrocious leases, which naive people signed. We had very good quality leases. I recognised the strength of the leasing business per se, but I completely disliked this reliance on IDC's projections, these artificial pricings. So that business folded and I did a bit of bumming around again.

And then I got offered a job setting up the financing arm for Data General, in the UK and Ireland. Data General was, I mean it's disappeared, the scene now and lots of people don't really realise how pivotal a role it had. It was the first spinoff from Digital Equipment Corporation. It was run, it was set up by ego driven, 'I can do it better than digital'. 'I'm more agile, I'll build better product', etc. And it was perfectly true, they did. Ed DiCastro and his team were quite spectacularly clever. And they built proprietary systems, they built proprietary 12, 16 bit and ultimately 24 bit machines I think. No, 16 they stopped at, the MV series. And later they went into the Unix market with ... using a chip developed by some unlikely outfit called Motorola, based on an instruction set developed for Data General by Control Data. Now, Control Data built really big computational boxes. So what the hell Data General was doing going to them for a commercial data processor, I don't know. It was a RISC [Reduced Instruction Set Computer] computer [instruction] set and there were people in Cambridge who eventually became, god the name's gone, [INT: Arm]. Yes, that's it, thank you. 

INT: They're called Acorn originally.

JA: Yeah, the team that was setting that up [ARM] would have been a much better source of a good quality 16 bit instruction set [inaudible]. So the boxes were expensive and tedious. But my job really wasn't flogging operating leases, because I wasn't the salesman; there were lots of salesmen. It was helping salesmen to transition from hands-around-the-throat, look I've demoed it, why don't you sign the bloody thing; into a trusted purveyor with an offering between well, here's your capital cost, alternative, here are your operating expenses on the basis of a lease of how long do you want to lock us in for, 3 or 4 years, whatever. And I got to about 25% penetration of ... the most significant one that I loved doing best. Their best salesman by far was, and remains, a chap called Stan Calderwood who's still at Power [inaudible] to this day. He was trying to sell to Courage [Brewery] who were in the model of transitioning from Data General to somebody else. And it was taking more time than they thought and they wanted to rent a couple of these MV boxes for respectively one year and two years. Now these were new boxes and that was, to say the least risky, with prices plummeting. But Data General unlike most businesses had an overt refurbishing and reselling business, run in the UK and Ireland by a chap called Roger Hicks, still a good friend of mine. And he would underwrite a resale value, that I could finance. So it made the lease look good and of course, I had left Data General by then, but I showed Stanley 'Stan' Calderwood how to proposition this, so it was very attractive. So instead of selling at a deep discount, Stan got the commission on virtually this price unheard of in Data General. And of course when they came to renew later on it was, well no, we've sold it to somebody else Gov [Governor] because you said you only wanted it for a year. So I had to plead and that meant the price, well ok we'll leave the price the same, etc. So it worked very well for Courage, it worked brilliantly for Data General but they were headed for the toilet.

By this time the then Managing Director of a chap called Mike Harrison who had joined Data General out of IBM, where it had been in the service bureaus side of the business, I think. He was quite spectacularly interesting as a boss. He joined Oracle as UK and Ireland MD [Managing Director] and he was quite keen to get me on board because he saw what I did to the achieved net sale price up a bit. And that's good for the local General Manager. And there was a competition and ironically I was one of two, the other one being my previous boss from Portfolio Leasing but, he didn't know how to sell and he didn't know anything about computers, and I knew a bit about both, so I got the job and that was fabulous. That was again the same process as Data General, convert from grab-the-throat-sign-up, give-me-a-demo-mate, into a trusted supplier, taking a slice of the annual budget, rather than grabbing the capital cost. And it was spectacularly successful. I negotiated 80% by value of all the finance sector deals done by Oracle. Made them a fortune in the process, but had a lot of fun. We had some very interesting dealings with government including my old firm ICL, which by then was I think it was Fujitsu by then. And do you remember the Post Office counters business where Social Security [welfare benefits] was going to be paid out through these computer terminals and such. It was a crazy idea when you could just give people bank accounts; but who am I, a humble citizen, to quarrel with the decisions of august civil servants in consultation with mighty titans of industry at Fujitsu and the like; let alone draw a male [inaudible] heaven forfend. Anyway, it was one meeting, and my remit was not finance, he was negotiating. We had a meeting with Fujitsu and one of their techies said well I don't know why you want all this money, we've only got four threads concurrently on the pyramid or whatever ... one of these toy machines. I said well if that's true, go buy SQL Server, be perfect for you. What are we doing wasting our time here gents? SQL Server, four threads, cost you about thruppence [three pence], I would imagine. And when you've been fired for grotesque failure, don't expect me to come and help you. Or are we talking seriously here people? There weren't many people in Oracle who would dare do that. But it was the kind of stuff I'd been encouraged to do at ICL, and of course they backed off and we got the contract at relatively close to list price, and we stuck it to them when they got chucked out, because we weren't party to the chucking out, we hadn't advised them to do it that way. Anyway, we had a lot of fun and we operated across the board pretty much and arranged a lot of finance, making a lot of money in the process. But then Oracle became very California-ied, in that when I joined Oracle UK was run by various people but reported to Geoff Squires, who I'd known when many years before, I participated as a marketing guy in retail, in creating the first point of sale system that anybody from ICL succeeded in getting sold, with a chap called Mike McBurney as the salesman to Walco. Walco was a horizontal department store, so a bit like a Woolworths, if anybody remembers Woolworths; one floor, the basic precept, but ranges of furniture and clothing and so on. They were due to open a branch somewhere around Merseyside, I forget exactly where, and we had the deadline of getting this kit working by then, which we'd bought in from Anker [Werker?] in Germany. No reason supposed we couldn't make it work, we needed a project team and Geoff Squires was sat round the table, because he was part of the retail distribution team, and I kind of looked at him and said "Geoff, that sounds like it's a bit up your street". I think it nearly cost the poor guy his marriage. It certainly cost a lot of other people much grief, because it was whipping [?] out time. But we got it working. So Geoff Squires had written, because he'd left ICL and formed a consultancy for somebody, which had all kinds of business process re-engineering and techies.

INT: I thought you said there was a pyramid type of a consultancy, where each person that joined would spawn their own little business. 

JA: That's it. 

INT: Techie I think we were called.

JA: And he happened across Oracle because of a project, one of his guys went to California and came back and said "It's great". So Geoff became first the agent and then he set up Oracle Europe; they'd previously gotten off in Denmark for God's sake. I mean how naive was Ellison in those days? If only I had a penny for every hundred million dollars he's earned. So Geoff was basically in charge and he ran the business the way he knew it, across the globe outside the Americas. Gradually Ellison built a team in the States that imposed centralisation of ideas. I'd innovated what were called fixed-term licensing agreements. So instead of a licence in perpetuity we would sell on three, four or five years, annual payments inclusive of service fees and licence fees, fixed term licence, sometimes with agreed renewals and so on. That was picked up and run-with in the States but had to be done Larry's way. Everything had to be done Larry's way. But the one good thing about Larry was if you said "That's a piss-poor idea Larry, this is a better one". And you [had] got a good argument, you always won. He thought his was the best idea, until somebody showed him the alternative.

A bit like that guy, everybody thinks he's an idiot. He runs Tesla and all kinds of other stuff. 

INT: Elon Musk.

JA: That's the one. I mean he's just the same apparently, what my pals tell me. I was once woken up at four in the night by Geoff's assistant, no not Geoff's assistant, Larry Ellison's assistant, a lady called Safra Katz,  who's currently CEO, saying "Larry's consented your proposal". I didn't say 'I should think so', because his idea was we'd get $80,000 and we're going to get £2.3 million for the same licensing deal as Larry's original idea. Anyway, yeah, those kind of things happened and it got worse and worse and worse and eventually I'd had enough.

I went to a content management company, with my third very good boss, Alan Lang, which was interesting but doomed to failure. I then went to SAP [German company, enterprise resource planning] where I was going to be the commercial director just like I'd been at Oracle by the time I'd finished. But I hated them as much as they hated me and that's where I quit and took up a combination of collecting debts for small businesses using the same legal means as applying for [inaudible], vigorously to a kneecap and it worked a charm and they really loved it because they got their money. I didn't charge much for that. Basically a success fee. And I also started writing software license and service agreements for small businesses. The apogee of which was I created from Monday about 10 o'clock till Thursday about 4 o'clock in the afternoon the first ever software license and services agreement, covering the provision of an application as a service for a company, which went into the very-demanding client on Friday morning at 9 o'clock. I refused to go. I said don't worry, they'll sign. They read it twice and said "best contract we've ever seen"; [and] signed it. My client was very happy. 

INT: You've been going just over two hours actually John, well nearly two hours.

JA: I'm pretty much done.

INT: We should wind it up I think. You've got a few words you just want to say in finalisation? Is there something you might have missed?

JA: I don't think there's much. I mean I've done a lot with my life. Less than I might have done, more than I might have expected. From [age] 60 to 78 I did quite a lot of consulting. I was a parish councillor, parish council chairman, district councillor, district council planning committee member. I produced a reorganisation plan for a district council. And then I stopped work completely when I was 75. I did a guy a favour when I was 77, until I was 78. Wrote a series of contracts for an insurance startup. And then I quit because I've got bored. I like what I now do.

INT: Okay well thank you very much John. "This interview with John Andrews has been recorded by the Leo Computers Society. And the Society would like to thank you very much for your time and reminiscences. The interview and the transcript form part of an oral history project to document 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 of the Society. The copyright of this interview in recorded form and in transcript remains the property of the Leo Computer Society". Thank you. 

Provenance :
Transferred from Frank Land's Dropbox to Lisa McGerty

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