…of stuff in my lifetime

The following is a stroll through the technology neolithic to the recent past and some stuff that was happening in my life at the time. I hope it refreshes a few memories.

• from 1953 - US President: Dwight D. Eisenhower.
• from 1955 - Leader of the Soviet Union: Nikita Khrushchev.
• from 1956 - Calder Hall, the UK’s first Magnox nuclear power station to be connected to the electricity grid. (Construction from 1953, final closure 2003. Lead time 3yrs, service life 44yrs)
• from 1957 - UK Prime Minister: Harold Macmillan.
• from 1957 - UK inflation (CPIH): 3.7%

In 1958 I was born in South London. The youngest of three children of a Pakistani immigrant father and a British mother.

Dad was born a 3rd/4th generation immigrant in Lahore in what was then British India. His father died of typhoid before he knew his child was on the way and his mother died of TB when he was only about six. He was brought up by his Granny and Grandad in Lahore and sent to school in Karachi with the school fees paid by the Masons. During WWII he served with the British Indian Army in Burma and was demobbed back to Karachi. He packed up and left Pakistan for the UK with his Uncle and Granny shortly after the Partition of India.

Mum was born in South London the youngest of a Presbyterian Scottish father and his second wife, a Roman Catholic Londoner.

• 1958 - NASA (US National Aeronautics and Space Administration) founded.
• 1958 - Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) ships its first products (test equipment).
• 1958 - UK Public Records Act (law for the retention and release of documents and messages relating to Government).
• 1958 - UK inflation (CPIH): 2.0%
• 1959 - Fidel Castro assumes leadership of Cuba.
• 1959 - British Motor Corporation launch the original Mini (the car that was so-named because it was small - not the current BMW range branded ‘MINI’).
• 1959 - Chapelcross, Magnox nuclear power station connected to the electricity grid. (Construction from 1955, final closure 2004. Lead time 4yrs, service life 44yrs)
• 1959 - UK inflation (CPIH): 0.3%
• 1960 - Lasers invented.
• 1960 - DEC ships its first computer, the PDP-1.
• 1960 - UK inflation (CPIH): 1.7%
• 1961 - US President: John F. Kennedy (JFK).
• 1961 - Berlin wall built.
• 1961 - Yuri Gagarin becomes first man in space.
• 1961 - UK inflation (CPIH): 3.9%
• 1962 - JFK ‘We choose to go to the Moon!’ speech.
• 1962 - October Cuban Missile Crisis.
• 1962 - Berkley, Magnox nuclear power station connected to the electricity grid. (Construction from 1957, final closure 1989. Lead time 5yrs, service life 27yrs)
• 1962 - Bradwell, Magnox nuclear power station connected to the electricity grid. (Construction from 1957, final closure 2002. Lead time 5yrs, service life 40yrs)
• 1962 - UK inflation (CPIH): 2.6%
• 1963 - Dr Who broadcast for the first time.
• 1963 - UK Prime Minister: Sir Alec Douglas-Home.
• 1963 - Murder of US President John F. Kennedy. Conspiracy theories abound.
• 1963 - US President: Lyndon B. Johnson.
• 1963 - UK inflation (CPIH): 2.2%
• 1964 - Nelson Mandela sentenced to life imprisonment for plotting to overthow the State (South Africa).
• 1964 - Leader of the Soviet Union: Leonid Brezhnev.
• 1964 - China, North Korea and Indonesia boycott the Tokyo Olympics.
• 1964 - UK Prime Minister: Harold Wilson.
• 1965 - Hunterston A, Magnox nuclear power station connected to the electricity grid. (Construction from 1957, final closure 1990. Lead time 7yrs, service life 26yrs)
• 1964 - UK inflation (CPIH): 4.5%
• 1965 - DEC releases the PDP-8.
• 1965 - Trawsfynydd, Magnox nuclear power station connected to the electricity grid. (Construction from 1959, final closure 1991. Lead time 6yrs, service life 26yrs)
• 1965 - Hinckley Point A, Magnox nuclear power station connected to the electricity grid. (Construction from 1957, final closure 2000. Lead time 8yrs, service life 35yrs)
• 1965 - Dungeness A, Magnox nuclear power station connected to the electricity grid. (Construction from 1960, final closure 2006. Lead time 5yrs, service life 41yrs)
• 1965 - UK inflation (CPIH): 4.3%
• 1966 - Publication of ‘The Moon is a Harsh Mistress’ by Robert Heinlein.
• 1966 - Indira Gandhi becomes Prime Minister of India (until 1977).
• 1966 - Star Trek broadcast for the first time.

From about age eight I sang in our church choir. Sunday morning and evening church services, Thursday evening practice and occasional weddings - for which I got paid. When my voice broke I took a year or so out and served as an altar-boy under the guidance of my father who organised and trained the altar servers (no girls allowed at that time). Among many other things I learned how to keep the thurible (incense burner) ticking over and generating smoke when required. When my voice stabilised I rejoined the choir singing bass.

• 1966 - Sizewell A, Magnox nuclear power station connected to the electricity grid. (Construction from 1961, final closure 2006. Lead time 5yrs, service life 40yrs)
• 1966 - UK inflation (CPIH): 3.4%
• 1967 - Apollo 1 disaster - all crew lost.
• 1967 - First heart transplant.
• 1967 - Torrey Canyon wrecked. 80-120,000 tonne crude oil spill contaminates coasts of UK, France, Guernsey, and Spain.
• 1967 - Oldbury, Magnox nuclear power station connected to the electricity grid. (Construction from 1962, final closure 2012. Lead time 5yrs, service life 44yrs)
• 1967 - UK inflation (CPIH): 2.4%
• 1968 - Ten year old me reads ‘The Moon is a Harsh Mistress’ and thinks that it’s a pretty good space story.
• 1968 - Nerve gas leak in Utah kills 6,000 sheep.
• 1968 - Apollo 8 around the Moon mission.
• 1968 - UK inflation (CPIH): 5.0%

“Earthrise” taken on December 24, 1968 from Apollo 8.

• 1969 - US President: Richard Nixon.
• 1969 - First flight of Concorde supersonic airliner

From age eleven I went to a small (about 400 pupils) all-boys Grammar school. Most pupils were day boys with about 20% borders, the latter group mostly from military families. I didn’t do particularly well academically until my parents found and paid for a Maths tutor to teach me on Saturday mornings; this tutor inspired me to see the relevance of Maths in almost everything. I went from near last in Maths to near top in the duration of one term.

I didn’t much like team sports but I was pleased when I was able to play squash and go sculling on the local river as part of Physical Education. I don’t think any of the pupils enjoyed cross-country running or swimming in the outdoor, unheated school pool. It wasn’t quite ‘Ripping Yarns’ though.

In a move which would not be tolerated under modern health and safety rules a few of the boys, including me, were allowed to regularly have our lunch in one of the lecture rooms equipped for teaching Physics. Among other things we experimented with the van de Graaff generator and the fluorescent light tubes and the Wilson cloud chamber and radiation sources; none of us died.

• 1969 - Apollo 11 first people land on the Moon (Commander Neil Armstrong (deceased) and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin remained on the Moon for less than 1 day. Command module pilot Michael Collins (deceased) remained in orbit).
• 1969/70 - ARPANet is born - 4 hosts.
• 1969 - UK inflation (CPIH): 4.7%
• 1970 - Apollo 13 explosion in space. ‘Successful failure’ and ‘NASA’s finest hour’.
• 1970 - DEC releases the PDP-11 (16-bit) computer range.
• 1970 - UK Prime Minister: Edward Heath.
• 1970 - USSR lands Lunokhod-1 rover on the Moon.
• 1970 - UK inflation (CPIH): 6.3%
• 1971 - UK adopts decimal currency. Farewell 12 pennies to the shilling, 20 shillings to the pound.
• 1971 - Bangladesh genocide. Up to 3,000,000 people murdered.
• 1971 - First e-mail sent.
• 1971 - Wylfa, Magnox nuclear power station connected to the electricity grid. (Construction from 1963, final closure 2015. Lead time 8yrs, service life 43yrs)
• 1971 - UK inflation (CPIH): 7.6%
• 1972 - Watergate scandal breaks. British media adopt the ‘-gate’ suffix to denote all subsequent scandals.
• 1972 - Apollo 17 last people land on the Moon (11-14 Dec. Commander Gene Cernan (deceased) and lunar module Pilot Harrison Schmitt. Command module pilot Ronald Evans (deceased) remained in orbit).
• 1972 - UK inflation (CPIH): 6.5%
• 1973 - USSR lands Lunokhod-2 rover on the Moon.
• 1973 - UK joins the European Community (Common Market).
• 1973 - Skylab launched.
• 1973 - UK inflation (CPIH): 9.5%
• 1974 - India tests a nuclear weapon.
• 1974 - US President Richard Nixon resigns after abuse of power investigation.
• 1974 - US President: Gerald Ford (former vice-President).
• 1974 - Terrorist attacks on UK city (Birmingham) public houses. 21 people murdered.
• 1974 - UK Prime Minister: Harold Wilson.
• 1974 - UK inflation (CPIH): 14.7%
• 1975 - ARPANet declared to be ‘operational’ - 57 hosts - US Defense Communications Agency takes responsibility.
• 1975 - The first ever UK-wide referendum asked ‘Do you think the UK should stay in the European Community (the Common Market)?’. Result: Yes 67.2%, No 32.8%, Turnout 64.5%. Alternatively: Yes 43.3%, No 22.4%, Can’t be bothered either way 35.5%
• 1975 - Microsoft founded.
• 1975-79 - Cambodia auto-genocide (killing fields). About 1,000,000 people murdered.

When I was 17 my parents paid for driving lessons for me and when I passed my test paid the hugely increased insurance premiums to allow me to drive the family car.

A beautiful young woman just a little younger than me joined the church choir and I was delighted to be able to offer her lifts home from choir practice and church services. Eventually I summoned the courage to ask her to come to the pub with me one evening. The pub was running a raffle for some reason and I won a single (7” vinyl record) of the band Hot Chocolate performing ‘You Sexy Thing’; the lyrics are every 17 year old boy’s dream. Yes, of course we were not old enough to go to the pub.

• 1975 - UK inflation (CPIH): 19.0%
• 1976 - Concorde scheduled services start.
• 1976 - DEC releases the VAX-11 (32-bit) computer range.
• 1976 - More than 20 mostly African countries and Taiwan boycott the Montreal Olympics.
• 1976 - First Ebola outbreaks identified.
• 1976 - UK Prime Minister: James Callaghan.
• 1976 - Hunterston B, AGR nuclear power station connected to the electricity grid. (Construction from 1967, final closure 2022. Lead time 9yrs, service life 46yrs)
• 1976 - Hinckley Point B, AGR nuclear power station connected to the electricity grid. (Construction from 1967, final closure 2022. Lead time 9yrs, service life 46yrs)
• 1976 - UK inflation (CPIH): 12.0%

In 1976 I left school and decided to take a year working before going on to university (I hoped). My lovely girlfriend was a school year younger than me and I thought we could both start University at the same time and perhaps attend relatively nearby campuses and see each other from time to time. Importantly, I also needed to get better A-level grades. I managed to get a job as a Lab Technician in a chemistry lab in a pharmaceutical company. As a junior you’re bound to get the rubbish tasks to do; the worst task they gave me was evaporating down gallons and gallons of pregnant pigs’ urine. For some reason none of my colleages wanted to do it.

I bought a small 175cc motorcycle and my girlfriend and I would often go out for an enjoyable evening or weekend drive in the summer months. It was considerably less fun in the winter though. One cold evening we went to visit a pub where one of my work colleagues worked behind the bar in the evenings. It was a long drive and we were both frozen by the time we got there - and then we had to face the journey home again.

• 1977 - US President: Jimmy Carter.
• 1977 - New York City blackout of 1977.
• 1977-85 - Apple II computers for sale (yes, the same design for eight years).
• 1977 - Star Wars film released (first film, episode IV).
• 1977 - UK inflation (CPIH): 10.1%
• 1978 - First ‘test-tube baby’ born.
• 1978 - Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy broadcast on UK radio.
• 1978 - UK inflation (CPIH): 6.6%

I didn’t get good enough grades to get my choice of university place so my girlfriend and I ended up at university campuses just about as far apart as it’s possible to get in Great Britain. I didn’t do much work and dropped out after the first year. My girlfriend could certainly have continued with her course but decided university life was not for her. We returned to live in our parents’ homes and found jobs to try to build up enough cash for a deposit on a home to buy so we could marry and live together.

I got a job as a Lab Technician analysing food products. My least favourite task? Chopping up smoked eels and disolving them in nitric acid in order to analyse the mineral content. I hate the smell of smoked fish and I can assure you that nitric acid does not improve it. I didn’t stay long before I found a better paid job as a Lab Technician in a chemistry lab of a pharmaceutical company. As well as working in the lab I occasionally volunteered to take part in Phase I clinical trials to assess the company’s products. In the process I discovered that I’m not too bothered about blood samples being taken from me. Of course the ‘compensation’ money never crossed my mind.

• 1979 - Three Mile Island accident.
• 1979 - UK Prime Minister: Margaret Thatcher.
• 1979 - UK inflation (CPIH): 12.2%
• 1980 - Pac-Man arcade game released.
• 1980 - Indira Gandhi becomes Prime Minister of India again.
• 1980 - World Health Organisation declares that smallpox has been eradicated.
• 1980 - US and 64 other conutries boycott the Moscow Olympics.

In 1980 we found a flat we could just about afford the mortgage for that was also just about within commuting distance of our workplaces. The church choir did us proud singing at our wedding.

After only a few months in the flat and thanks to a very generous wedding gift from my parents-in-law we grabbed an opportunity that arose to buy (with a larger mortgage) a three bedroom house. The interest rates were terrifying.

• 1980 - UK inflation (CPIH): 9.8%
• 1981 - US President: Ronald Reagan.
• 1981 - New plague identified as AIDS.
• 1981 - Attempted murder of US President Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley, Jr.
• 1981 - IBM PC released.
• 1981 - UK inflation (CPIH): 9.1%

In the early 1980s I cut my IT teeth writing Datatrieve applications on a Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) VAX/VMS minicomputer system to catalogue the effectiveness of new chemical compounds that I and my senior colleagues in the medicinal chemistry laboratories were creating. I did this instead of watching the magnetic tapes go around while I did additional evening work as a computer backup operator.

I needed the extra income from the evening work as I had a mortgage and a young child and a sudden lack of my wife’s former income into the family budget. Partly out of interest but mostly out of necessity I was self-maintaining our family car (a 1971 Mini Mk III that my parents had very generously given us a few years before) but it was becoming obvious that the car and I were losing the battle against rust. While visiting a local car parts supplier I noticed a complete Mini body shell on a pallet in their parking area and enquired about the cost of such a thing. Bizarrely, the guys in the shop had ordered it by mistake and were going to have to pay a re-stocking fee to return it to the manufacturer. I got it at a knock-down price, undersealed it, spray waxed the voids, spray painted the outside (vermillion) and stripped down the old Mini and rebuilt it on the new shell. At the next MOT test the guy could not understand why there was no corrosion on an old Mini. The project did not have a happy ending; after less than a year I hit a slippery patch on a country road and flipped the car into a ditch. Fortunately, I did not have my family in the car at the time. I emerged remarkably unscathed but the same could not be said for the car. I did get it back on the road (I had to) but it never looked or drove the same again and its poor appearance regularly attracted attention from police officers.

When my employer consolidated some of its science functions and closed down the laboratories where I was working I was offered the great opportunity to re-train as a VMS system manager - and a rather better paid job. I then spent five happy years running VMS systems in the UK as part of a DECnet-based wide area network spanning sites in the US, Sweden, Germany, France, Japan and the UK.

My site’s 10base5 Ethernet (a single backbone coaxial cable about 1cm diameter of up to 500m length to which you connect by carefully drilling holes in it) already extended out of the computer room in order to allow us to position LAT terminal servers close to where our users needed their VT100 and similar terminals. I expanded our use of this LAN to include our two Xerox Star workstations and network them with the VAX computers in order to take advantage of the (slightly) less expensive VAX storage and to simplify backup and also to exchange documents with Xerox Star users in our US offices through our international VAXmail system. In the process I first came across the apparently trivial differing international standards and conventions covering paper sizes and date formats - and spent many frustrating hours configuring printer queues and initialisation codes for our LN03 laser printers to permit our users to select ‘Letter’ (8.5 x 11 inch) paper size for documents originating from or destined for our colleagues in the US or A4 (210 x 297mm) for most of the rest of the world. I also remember with a shudder performing one upgrade on the systems in which the package I was installing cheerfully asked if I wanted to install the British ‘dialect’ on top of the English language system.

• 1982 - Leader of the Soviet Union: Yuri Andropov.
• 1982 - The technical term ‘internet’ is coined to describe a network of networks.
• 1982 - An MIT Acceptable Use Policy states ‘Sending electronic mail over the ARPANet for commercial profit or political purposes is both anti-social and illegal.’. Ah, those were the days.
• 1982 - UK inflation (CPIH): 5.4%
• 1983 - IBM PC/XT released.
• 1983 - First mobile phone approved for use in USA
• 1983 - Stanislav Petrov averts nuclear war by (correctly) reporting detected ICBMs as a malfunction.
• 1983 - The film ‘Wargames’ is released - “Let’s play ‘Global Thermonuclear War’”
• 1983 - Dungeness B, AGR nuclear power station connected to the electricity grid. (Construction from 1965, final closure 2021. Lead time 18yrs, service life 36yrs)
• 1983 - Hartlepool, AGR nuclear power station connected to the electricity grid. (Construction from 1968, closure due 2026. Lead time 15yrs, expected life 43yrs)
• 1983 - Heysham 1, AGR nuclear power station connected to the electricity grid. (Construction from 1970, closure due 2026. Lead time 13yrs, expected life 43yrs)
• 1983 - UK inflation (CPIH): 4.7%
• 1984 - IBM PC/AT and Apple Macintosh released.
• 1984 - 1,000 hosts on ARPANet.
• 1984 - Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi murdered by her bodyguard.
• 1984 - Leader of the Soviet Union: Konstantin Chernenko.
• 1984 - Bhopal disaster.
• 1984 - Soviet Union and 13 other countries boycott the Los Angeles Olympics.
• 1984 - Attempted murder of UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher by bomb in a UK hotel. Five murdered.
• 1984 - UK inflation (CPIH): 4.0%
• 1985 - Hole in the Ozone Layer identified.
• 1985 - Leader of the Soviet Union: Mikhail Gorbachev.
• 1985 - First Internet domain name (symbolics.com) is registered.
• 1985 - UK inflation (CPIH): 4.8%
• 1986 - Space Shuttle Challenger explodes/breaks up during launch - all crew lost.
• 1986 - First crew for the Mir space station.
• 1986 - Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
• 1986 - Compaq Deskpro 80386 PC released.
• 1986 - Richard Buckland cleared of murder using DNA fingerprinting.
• 1986 - UK inflation (CPIH): 3.7%
• 1987 - Colin Pitchfork identified and convicted of murder through mass DNA screening.
• 1987 - 10,000 hosts on ARPANet.
• 1987 - UK inflation (CPIH): 3.7%

In the late 1980s my employer started another round of consolidation and decided to merge the business and R&D IT functions. I was put under notice of redundancy. For about a year I worked very closely with colleagues running IBM 4381 systems to transfer the VMS workload to a VM/370 environment. As part of this process I introduced various REXX scripts to use RSCS to emulate and link with VAXmail and to link to the many serial attached laser printers and plotters that we had acquired in the VMS environment.

The version of SAS which was available under VM at the time could only deal with single-dimension arrays but my statistician colleagues who had been using it under VMS were used to programming using multi-dimension arrays for their datasets. In one memorable lengthy coffee-fuelled session I and a colleague created a utility program to convert multi-dimension SAS scripts to single-dimension scripts and vice versa. By the time we had transferred a significant part of the workload I think the IBMers were astonished at the load that the ‘toy’ VAX kit had been serving.

After almost a year working hard to transfer the VMS workload to VM and smooth the transition for my colleagues I was asked to decide whether to accept the redundancy package or take a newly created job at a better salary. I opted for the redundancy package and got a very pleasant surprise: during the year under notice of redundancy I’d had a pay rise and passed the 10-year milestone with the company. The redundancy formula they were applying meant I got a rather better settlement than I was expecting.

• 1988 - Terrorist bomb attack on Pan Am flight 103 over UK town (Lockerbie). 270 people murdered.
• 1988 - Cuba, Ethiopia, Nicaragua and North Korea boycott Seoul Olympics.
• 1988 - November 2, a self replicating worm affects about 10% of ARPANet (about 6,000 machines).
• 1988 - Heysham 2, AGR nuclear power station connected to the electricity grid. (Construction from 1980, closure due 2028. Lead time 8yrs, expected life 40yrs)
• 1988 - Torness, AGR nuclear power station connected to the electricity grid. (Construction from 1980, closure due 2028. Lead time 8yrs, expected life 40yrs)
• 1988 - UK inflation (CPIH): 6.0%
• 1989 - US President: George H. W. Bush.
• 1989 - 100,000 hosts on ARPANet.
• 1989 - Exxon Valdez runs aground. 37-104,000 tonne crude oil spill contaminates Alaska coast.
• 1989 - Tiananmen Square massacre.
• 1989 - Fall of the Berlin Wall.
• 1989 - Compaq Deskpro 486 PC released.
• 1989 - UK inflation (CPIH): 5.8%

In mid 1989 I joined a small international company of about 120 people which did all things ‘security’. Engineering security (design work for premises and surveillance systems), Political and Travel security (a dial-up information system, a printed monthly publication of what was going on where and why and bespoke reports), Confidential Investigations (who owns, or stole, what) and general Crisis troubleshooting (we could send a consultant almost anywhere to advise on an extreme crisis when clients did not have the expertise to manage it themselves). I joined to manage and develop the IT for this company under the guidance of the Finance Director.

At my final interview the Finance Director asked me ‘what would you want me to do as your boss?’. I was not prepared for that question. After a moment’s thought I blurted out: ‘You direct, I’ll manage.’. He looked a bit taken aback and I thought I’d blown the interview. However it seems it struck a chord with him.

When I joined, the company was providing a dial-up information system for its clients based on Videotex technology (40 characters x 24 lines per page) and was struggling to produce and distribute the printed publication on time each month. The consultants visiting our clients were using portable word processors (‘Liberators’) and thermal printers to produce initial reports on-site which were then faxed back to the office to be re-produced in their final form. The company was heavily reliant on a typing pool of ALL-IN-1 WPS-Plus word processor operators and editors to produce finished reports for the clients. In addition, the VAX computer system that all this relied on was closed down after lunch every Friday afternoon in order to complete the weekly backup. Something had to be done.

• 1990 - Nelson Mandela freed after 27yrs.
• 1990 - UK Prime Minister: John Major.
• 1990 - London telephone dialling code ‘01’ changed and split into ‘071’ (inner London) and ‘081’ (outer London). This freed up the ‘01’ prefix for future use (see 1995) as well as doubling the available numbers for London.
• 1990 - ARPANet project is wound up - long live ‘The Internet’.
• 1990 - German re-unification.
• 1990 - Microsoft Windows 3.0 released.
• 1990 - UK inflation (CPIH): 9.2%
• 1991 - World Wide Web released by CERN.

My first change was to acquire a tape drive with sufficient capacity to automate the backup and test restores. Offsite storage of the tapes (at a local bank branch) changed from a stack of 10inch tape reels in a box to a padded bag with a few Exabyte cassettes. Initially I was a bit concerned about the shelf life of the tapes - but as the company didn’t want to keep backups for more than 4 months a few experiments allayed my concerns. The mad rush on Friday morning and the afternoon siesta for everyone except the backup operator was binned.

The next step was to cut out much of the copy typing and get the analysts to write up the text for the online service in such a way that it could be easily converted to the Videotex format required. This required getting the analysts to adopt a simple convention of text highlighting options and sub-titling and creating a program to export and convert the document from the ALL-IN-1 word processing format to the Videotex marked-up text. The resulting output required minimal editing.

Shortly after I joined I found that the ‘Computing’ department were not the only ones specifying and buying IT kit. Some department heads had bought a couple of IBM PC/XTs or ATs and set their PAs up almost as internal competition to the typing pool. One was using WordPerfect, others Multimate and WordStar and one head of department ran his budget on Lotus 1-2-3 to the envy of all the others. These desktop computers were not getting backed up and the data on them was not accessible, shareable or subject to review. Occasionally someone in Computing would be asked to get some text from a consultant’s Liberator into Multimate or some other format to avoid the need to retype a lengthy report. We needed to standardise and PCs were definitely there to stay. I didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of a ‘big bang’ change so I wanted small easily achievable steps:

• Standardise the software platform for our documents. I needed a word processor software which would produce good output and be easy to learn and run both on the VAX and our PCs. A version of WPS was available for PC but it did not have great flexibility. WordPerfect had a great reputation and was available for VAX/ALL-IN-1. So I changed WPS-Plus on the VAX to WordPerfect. There was the added advantage that WordPerfect offered a cheaper cut down version called LetterPerfect which would easily run on our consultants’ and PA’s XT-class PCs. Bin Multimate and any other one-offs and buy WordPerect for all our DOS PCs. I did consider other alternatives such as Mass-11 or Word-11 but they seemed to be inferior. History seems to have erased these products from memory.

• Network the PCs together and with the VAX. DEC offered a DECnet for DOS stack. Make sure PCs can transfer documents to and from the VAX and make sure these can be backed up and restored.

• Liberator files are essentially easy to convert text files. So, provide our consultants with modem acoustic couplers (300 bits/s!) and one-time password calculators to allow transfer of files from Liberators to the ALL-IN-1 document stores using VT100 terminal emulation and Kermit file transfer through the online service dial-up modems from more or less anywhere.

• New Liberators were getting difficult to acquire. So we start buying Toshiba T1000 laptops with DOS 3.3 and LetterPerfect or WordPerfect and built-in modems.

As these changes progressed our typing pool began to get cut out of the loop. I re-tasked them as a higher-end document ‘Production’ department and equipped them with high end PCs with enormous 19inch monochrome CRT screens, PostScript laser printers and desktop publishing software. These were our first GUI (GEM-based) PCs.

• 1991 - DEC and Microsoft announce a joint development partnership.
• 1991 - Dissolution of the Soviet Union. Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) established.
• 1991 - President of Russia: Boris Yeltsin.
• 1991 - Linux 0.01 kernel released - up to 0.11 by the end of the year.
• 1991 - UK inflation (CPIH): 6.5%
• 1992 - 1,000,000 hosts on the Internet.
• 1992 - Microsoft Windows 3.1 released.
• 1992 - Maastricht Treaty converting the EEC into the EU signed. UK and Denmark secure exemption from joining Euro currency.
• 1992 - UK inflation (CPIH): 3.2%
• 1993 - US President: Bill Clinton.
• 1993 - NCSA Mosaic, the first Internet browser, invented at University of Illinois.
• 1993 - World Trade Center terrorist attack. 6 people murdered.
• 1993 - Finland introduces second generation (2G) mobile phone networks. First use of SMS.
• 1993 - UK inflation (CPIH): 2.3%

It was obvious that our dial-up Videotex service for our clients was looking rather dated. Before my time with the company they had tried to improve on the experience of reading detailed reports on a 40x24 character screen and distributed a DOS Videotex terminal emulation software which could scrape multiple pages from the service and stitch them back together as full page text documents. Also, the company had made arrangements to duplicate the Videotex service and have it run from a site in New York (in addition to the UK) so that US clients didn’t face an international dial-up call charge to access the service. This had caused some complications because the US service didn’t use exactly the same Videotex hosting software as we did in the UK and the content had to be ‘tweaked’ to match. Also, any delay in converting the Videotex formats could result in the US service having out-of-date content when compared with the UK service.

We needed a single subscription service which could be accessed from wherever our clients were and without incurring international dial-up call charges (ie not just UK and USA) - and that meant either setting up banks of modems in a number of our offices or some form of third party service. We selected General Electric Information Services (GEIS) to host and deliver our content. It was much the same content as the Videotex service but now word-wrapped at a more readable 75 characters and without the extra paragraph breaks previously required to prevent a paragraph splitting over multiple Videotex pages. The change was fairly straightforward - all I needed to do was write a different mark-up program to convert the analysts’ work to the new format. I also took the opportunity to set up gateway software on the VAX systems to link the company ALL-IN-1 internal e-mail system to our GEIS environment - now our consultants around the world could log in to GEIS via a local access point and e-mail draft reports back to the office with greater reliability and without incurring extortionate call charges from their hotels.

In the early ’90s there was much in the news about terrorist attacks in the UK (particularly in major cities in England and throughout Northern Ireland) and fears of attacks in London. The company adopted a business continuity plan to cover eventualities including total loss of the London office due to fire or denial of access due to bomb damage. Under the plan an essential core of each department would operate from a temporary location and maintain communication with clients and the rest of the organisation until more permanent premises (either the original office or other office space) could be acquired. I was tasked with developing the disaster recovery component to provide IT, telephony and standby premises. I subscribed the company to a service which provided fully equipped office space, PCs, dumb terminals, telephone system, kitchen facilities, computer room space with DEC VAX equipment and engineering support. We then conducted annual exercises to test restoring services from backups and invited representatives from the various departments to verify that their required facilities were available and to review the services provided under the contract.

In late 1992 I started a push to get away from dumb terminals and the VAX platform and go to GUI-based PCs. Windows 3.1 PCs (rather than GEM) seemed to be the way to go. Network them with DEC Pathworks (the brand name for DECnet for DOS), and use Teamlinks to integrate into the VAX ALL-IN-1 document stores. Initially, I bought PCs from DEC - but realised that they were just re-branded (and re-priced) Olivettis. My budget wouldn’t stretch to a big bang change. I needed to have VAX terminals, DOS (and GEM) PCs and the new Windows PCs all working together until we could afford to complete the changeover - for a few years at least.

Our analysts had long been drawing much of their information from news-wires and newspapers. We had several ‘wires set up which would sit rattling away spitting out reams of paper which the ‘cutters’ would speed-read and cut up and distribute to the analysts. It was an important end-of-day task to make sure the machines had enough paper to get through the night. A paper-jam was a nightmare; it meant no information for the analysts. Soon we subscribed to a Reuters service in which they fed their ‘wire into a dedicated terminal which allowed the cutters to read the data on-screen and only print out items which they thought were relevant to the analysts. Although this saved a lot of paper it did introduce a log-jam in the process with the cutters sharing access to the single Reuters terminal, where previously they could literally split the stack of printed paper and each take a portion to go through. It did, however, introduce a rudimentary keyword search and highlight capability so articles mentioning an anticipated term (‘Tiananmen Square’ for example) could be rapidly found and delivered to the relevant analysts. Although it was embryonic I installed some PCs connected to the Internet (isolated from our internal network) so that analysts and consultants could use them for research and e-mail with their contacts around the world. These eventually became so popular that we had to introduce an allocation system for time on these machines.

So that clients who needed urgent assistance could contact our consultants easily, the company had introduced a tape-based out-of-hours answer phone service which triggered a pager. When the pager was activated the holder would then call in and retrieve the recorded message and act as necessary: calling the client back and triggering whatever escalation process was appropriate. The responsibility for holding the pager and checking the answer machine rotated among a few lucky staff who had little apparent need for sleep. The system had a few quirks and deficiencies: If the pager was in a radio shadow area (in an underground train for example) it would not get triggered when it eventually emerged; to address this, the holder was required to call in to check the answer phone from time to time. To improve the service I introduced a Seltek voice manager (with a battery-backed power supply) instead of the tape-based service. The device was programmed to call pre-defined phone numbers when a message arrived and to automatically escalate to call alternative numbers if a message remained ‘unread’ for too long. Instead of a pager, a mobile phone was issued to the lucky person on duty; as well as their land-line numbers being programmed into the system (“I’ll be visiting Aunty Flo this weekend. Her number is: xxxx xxxxx” - yes, only 9 digits or 10 in London).

• 1994 - Linux 1.0.0 kernel released.
• 1994 - Rwandan Genocide - 20% (620,000) of the population of Rwanda murdered.
• 1994 - Nelson Mandela elected president of South Africa.
• 1994 - UK inflation (CPIH): 2.2%
• 1995 - phONE day - all UK geographic telephone numbers changed to start with ‘01’. This frees up ‘02’, ‘03’, ‘04’, ‘05’, ‘06’ and ‘07’ prefixes for future use (see 2000). London codes change from ‘071’ and ‘081’ to ‘0171’ and ‘0181’ respectively.
• 1995 - INDeX 400 phone system launched.
• 1995 - Microsoft Windows 95 released.
• 1995 - Terrorist attack in US city (Oklahoma). 168 people murdered.
• 1995 - Coordinated terrorist Sarin nerve gas attacks on Tokyo subway. 12 people murdered.
• 1995 - Sizewell B, PWR nuclear power station connected to the electricity grid. (Construction from 1988, closure due 2035. Lead time 7yrs, expected life 40yrs)
• 1995 - UK inflation (CPIH): 3.1%
• 1996 - Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Server and Workstation released.
• 1996 - Linux 2 series kernel released.
• 1996 - UK inflation (CPIH): 2.8%
• 1997 - UK Prime Minister: Tony Blair.
• 1997 - Check Point Firewall-1 released for Windows NT 4.
• 1997 - Pathfinder sends images of Mars surface.
• 1997 - UK inflation (CPIH): 1.9%

Our consultants were taking portable PCs all over the world. To address the risk of a leak of sensitive information from stolen machines (or cloned hard disks), our consultants would use PGP to encrypt sensitive documents and periodically ‘scrub’ the free space on their disks to erase the traces of the unencrypted documents and journal files. The whole process was tedious and open for error and the legal status of PGP software in various countries around the world was confused or confusing to say the least. In the event of a theft or other loss the ‘owner’ was required to produce a report detailing all sensitive documents stored on the machine so that a risk assessment could be made. When we discovered Scramdisk (later Drivecrypt) whole hard disk encryption all our portable PCs were protected - the ‘lost machine’ report was replaced with a confirmation statement that the machine was encrypted and that the hardware boot/decryption key had not been lost at the same time.

1996 saw us taking a fresh look at the GEIS information service. A number of our clients had begun asking if we could deliver the service over the Internet instead of only via dial-up. If I recall correctly, GE were able to provide an Internet gateway into their system but we thought their offer was ridiculously expensive. It also meant that the clients would still need GE’s proprietary software to access the service. However, a purely Internet-based online-only service was not desirable either. Most clients did not have Internet access to the desk (we didn’t either) and so a locally cached copy was essential and most still needed to use dial-up. We retained the services of a consultancy to write a branded PC application to synchronise a local copy of our content from our subscription web site either over the Internet or over dial-up. Again, I re-wrote and extended the mark-up programs to generate HTML web-pages instead of GEIS format pages. These pages were then hosted on an internal Windows NT 4.0 web server for review before being synched to the Internet facing server hosted by the third party. Wow that client sync software was a pain! We kept getting requests to change the file formats or naming conventions to suit this or that client. Eventually I discovered Tennyson Maxwell’s Teleport Pro and we recommended this to our clients instead.

The integration of a Windows NT 4 internal web server into our network had required us to change from DECnet/LanManager to TCP/IP in our LAN and gave the opportunity finally to complete the move away from the VAX as the document storage platform. I exported the document stores from ALL-IN-1 to Windows NT shares and Teamlinks, Pathworks and the VAXes were consigned to company history. The final few dumb terminals were replaced with Windows 95 PCs. The ACL permissions in VMS and Windows NT were very similar so setting up access rights was fairly straightforward. For many years thereafter our consultants still referred to the NT shares as ‘Drawers’ after the ALL-IN-1/Teamlinks filing cabinet nomenclature.

As part of the project to provide a service for clients over the Internet it was essential that our analysts and consultants should have easy access too. I also needed to replace the GEIS service for our consultants’ internal e-mail and file transfer. In 1997 I installed the company’s first Check Point Firewall-1 (running on Windows NT 4) and Internet facing e-mail servers. Initially, I also installed Websense to control what sort of web sites my colleagues could go to. Fairly rapidly it became clear that our consultants and analysts needed to visit some web sites which would be completely inappropriate in other organisations. Extreme politics and hate crime were the first categories to go; some of my analyst colleagues were writing about the consequences of war in Kosovo and Burundi so blocking access to web pages that had violent subject matter was less than useful. Eventually the only sort of content we were blocking was porn - and then some of my investigator colleagues were commissioned to do some work for an adult products company… I turned off Websense for good and replaced it with an Acceptable Use Policy.

Having brought Internet and external e-mail to desk in the head office it was time to do the same for our other offices around the world and to integrate them more closely so that resources could be shared more efficiently. I introduced a specification for Internet connectivity and Windows NT based Check Point firewalls in each office and visited most of our then existing offices to physically set them up and configure them. Some trips were more frustrating than others with some service providers promising “just in time” delivery but then announcing delays such that my travel arrangements had to be changed at the last moment. Fortunately the company was well used to making and changing travel arrangements for our consultants at very short notice so my needs were easily accommodated. By introducing the same technology into all our offices it became possible to open up VPN tunnels between them and so introduce access to shared resources worldwide.

Although inter-site VPN connectivity was a huge benefit to the company, mobile VPN fundamentally changed the way our consultants worked. By gaining Internet access from wherever in the world they were working and establishing a VPN tunnel to one of our office sites our consultants were able to access the same company information resources that they would have had in the office. Of course, access was slower than in the office as most mobile Internet access was via dialup to services such as PSInet and CompuServe. As technology progressed the standard equipment for our consultants eventually included built-in 56kbps modems (about 1/20th Mbps). However, hotels and conference facilities seemed slow to accommodate this sort of connectivity. Hard-wired telephone connections and nearly extortionate call rates tended to inhibit connectivity - but our travelling consultants were not to be stopped and changed venues if they found it too difficult to connect.

The success and consequent expansion of the company was placing a strain on our phone system and switchboard operators. We had too few extensions for all our people and the sheer volume of incoming calls through the switchboard meant that sometimes callers were kept waiting a bit too long. We needed more phones/extensions and Direct Dialling Inwards (DDI). After reviewing various options I recommended that the company buy an SDX INDeX 200 phone system which could be expanded as and when the company grew further. A DASS2 (30 channel) line with 300 DDI numbers allowed for far more extensions and concurrent calls than any predicted company growth could require. One major advantage was that the INDeX could be integrated with our existing Seltek voice manager (expanded) to provide voice mail for everyone. The continued use of the familiar Seltek meant that configuring escalations for unchecked voice mail was readily understood and easy to implement. By including analogue extension cassettes in the INDeX I was also able to quickly provide more fax lines for various departments. To help allocate call costs we installed a dedicated call logger.

Buying separate WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 (for those that needed a spreadsheet application) licences for each additional PC that we bought was becoming difficult to manage. We had bought multi-seat WP licences as we moved from the dumb-terminal to networked PC environment but as the company grew we were buying licences a few at a time. The lack of integration between the wordprocessor and spreadsheet applications was also rather irritating. WordPerfect seemed to be becoming less popular than MS Word; our analysts were receiving more of their information in MS Word document format and many of our clients were requesting our reports in that format too. I looked at utilities to convert documents from WordPerfect to Word format but was not impressed. We considered moving to the Borland Office suite; our finance team were certainly not impressed with the capabilities of Quattro Pro compared with Lotus 1-2-3 but they were a little happier to consider Excel. In 1998 we decided to change over to Microsoft Office. We replaced our last few DOS/Windows 3.1 PCs with Windows 95 and bought MS Office 97 ‘competitive upgrade’ licences (based on our WordPerfect and Lotus licences) in order to reduce the cost of the change.

• 1998 - India and Pakistan test nuclear weapons.
• 1998 - Compaq buy DEC for US$9bn.
• 1998 - Terrorist attack in UK town (Omagh). 29 people murdered.
• 1998 - Google inc formed.
• 1998 - US President Bill Clinton impeached (sent for trial in the Senate) on a charge of ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’.
• 1998 - UK inflation (CPIH): 1.9%
• 1999 - Launch of the Euro european currency.
• 1999 - Y2k fears and hype.
• 1999 - President of Russia: Vladimir Putin.
• 1999 - First WiFi standards 802.11a and 802.11b ratified by IEEE.
• 1999 - UK inflation (CPIH): 1.5%
• 2000 - Microsoft Windows 2000 released.
• 2000 - ILOVEYOU virus affects millions of computers.
• 2000 - ‘Big Number Change’. Many UK telephone area codes for large cities changed to use ‘02x’ prefixes. Inner and outer London telephone area codes re-combined from ‘0171’ and ‘0181’ to ‘020’ with either a 7 or 8 added in front of the existing 7 digit local numbers thus increasing available numbers fivefold (see 2005). ie ‘020 7xxx xxxx’ instead of ‘0171 xxx xxxx’ and ‘020 8xxx xxxx’ instead of ‘0181 xxx xxxx’. NB not ‘0207’ and ‘0208’ area codes.
• 2000 - First crew for the International Space Station.
• 2000 - UK inflation (CPIH): 1.2%

As we approached the year 2000 we began to get bombarded with requests from our clients asking what we were doing to make sure we were ‘Y2k compliant’. Note that the question was not typically ‘confirm you are ready.’ but ‘what are you doing to be ready?’. There were any number of consultancies springing up purporting to help their clients through this process. We retained the services of a single independent consultant who wrote up reports on our progress in completing our inventory for systems and associated software/firmware levels and our supplier lists. We then handed on the joy of the question to each of our suppliers and documented their responses. There was a small amount of work ensuing to patch some systems up to date but in the majority of cases we simply received written assurances that our systems would not fail. Having recently completed our change to MS Office we already had a very accurate software/version inventory for our PCs and so the much easier task of auditing the status of our servers including such things as our firewalls, the INDeX phone system, Seltek voice manager, fax machines etc etc took very little time. We packaged up our reports and handed them up the chain to our clients. 1 Jan 2000 dawned and all our systems behaved perfectly. Around the world planes were not falling out of the sky, cash machines were still dispensing cash to revellers and the nuclear arsenals did not self-launch. Very little happened except that everyone now knew in great detail what systems and software they had.

Of course, many organisations using old custom written software systems had had a much tougher time preparing for Y2k. Old code had had to be audited to confirm it was ready and any weaknesses identified and fixed. But any system dealing with pensions or similar concepts had been getting ready for years - as soon as someone entered details for a person with a date of birth after 1 Jan 1935 with an expected retirement age of 65 they could trigger any incipient Y2k weaknesses.

My feeling of smug superiority over the Y2k issue was rudely punctured in early April 2000 when we ran our regular monthly report from our phone system call log. It was blank - no calls had been logged. It had incorrectly calculated the year 2000 as NOT a leap year and had been unable to interpret any date since 28 Feb 2000. We tried to contact the supplier of the call logger software; they’d gone out of business during March.

Buying Microsoft Office 97 bundled with each additional PC we bought (but not with replacement PCs) was working reasonably OK but from time to time a PC that was bought as a replacement (without a licence) would get diverted at the last moment for use by a new joiner (and thus need a licence). Allocating the software component and the hardware components from a single purchase to different departments required ridiculous paperwork to keep things straight. Also, the looming release of Office 2000 was getting a bit worrying. I could see that when Office 2000 came out, IT would face another increased workload to support multiple platforms, convert documents between the two versions and come under pressure to upgrade and train everyone with the new software - all from existing resources. I needed to convince my directors that additional spending would be required. I don’t know which genius came up with the idea of no downgrade rights in a software licence, but whoever it was made MS a fortune; I knew it would not be legitimate to buy Office 2000 licences for new joiners but give them Office 97 until the rest of the company was ready to upgrade.

As anticipated, the introduction of MS Office 2000 caused some problems almost immediately with the first users of the software forgetting their training and saving documents in the newer format so that users of the older version could not access them. Upgrading the Office 97 licences a few at a time was hopelessly inefficient and expensive (per licence) but upgrading en-mass needed significant provision in the annual budget bidding wars. It was obvious that without paying software licence maintenance the problem was going to be repeated as each new version of software came out. However, the company executives needed convincing that an additional 25-33% (of the original licence cost) per annum for software maintenance was good value for money… a tough sell when I didn’t quite believe it myself. However, all of the alternative scenarios looked worse.

Having survived Y2k and with a very up-to-date hardware and software inventory I turned my attention to our information security documentation. The company had had an information security policy document (and various other separate policies like lost document procedures etc) from before I joined but the main policy document was itself considered to be a confidential, limited circulation document. Department heads received and signed for individually numbered copies and were then responsible for implementing the policy within their departments. As less senior staff were not even allowed to see the document it was difficult to ensure they followed its provisions. Also, being over a decade since its inception, it needed to be updated; the whole approach needed to be updated.

For a starting point I looked at the provisions in BS7799-2. Essentially, our document was an attempt to draw together and codify what we were already doing as far as information security was concerned and to cross refer to the provisions in the standard to help justify rules like not plugging non-company managed kit into the LAN. Where there were provisions in BS7799-2 for which we did not already have a policy in place we drew together a team to discuss and define that policy element in our document. After a couple of initial drafts, the document was approved by the executive committee of the company and included in the company Policy and Procedures Manual. It was made available to all staff and an introduction to it was included in all subsequent employee induction training. In order to allow some considered flexibility I included a policy statement that any ‘rule’ could be set aside or overridden by an officer of the company by issuing a written statement to that effect to the executive committee. That option was never exercised.

In 2000 the company decided to set up a ‘contact centre’ manned by security experts with a wide range of skills. The centre would operate 24 x 365+ from our offices in London. Clients would subscribe to the service and their staff could call in if they needed any security related advice (often related to travel in unfamiliar places). In particular, members of client companies could call in and get a briefing before committing to travel arrangements and so try to avoid problems arising.

To support the contact centre I expanded our phone system to include ‘agent’ phones arranged in a ‘longest waiting’ hunt group. An incoming call on the contact centre lines would be directed to one of the contact centre phones and the details of the incoming caller would pop up on the associated PC screen before the agent answered the call so that the client could be greeted appropriately. Because clients could be calling from anywhere in the world at any time we could not rely on Caller Line Identification so we opted to issue different telephone numbers to each client organisation. We initially bought a block of 200 numbers for this purpose but the project was highly successful and we soon ran out and had to obtain more. The contact centre recouped its setup costs and began to make profit in its first year.

With the release of Microsoft Windows 2000 I started a project to create a single directory of all our users and PCs worldwide. For each of our offices where we had a Windows NT PDC server and a VPN connection with the rest of the company we installed a Windows 2000 server and made the site a separate Active Directory domain within the overall company forest. As the project proceeded and new servers were required in our various sites new domains were added to our forest until every user was defined in one of the domains. With the release of Windows 2003 and the associated Active Directory changes we began consolidating the multiple domains into a single world-wide domain with users and PCs divided into geographical Organizational Units.

• 2001 - US President: George W. Bush.
• 2001 - September 11 coordinated terrorist attacks in US. Nearly 3,000 people murdered.
• 2001 - Third generation (3G) mobile phone networks introduced. Mobile Internet access.
• 2001 - UK inflation (CPIH): 1.4%
• 2002 - Compaq and Hewlett-Packard merge. The new company is called… Hewlett-Packard.
• 2002 - UK inflation (CPIH): 1.7%

In 2002 after much internal debate I signed the company up for Microsoft’s Upgrade Advantage software maintenance program - on the very last day that it was available to us. After that date upgrade licences would not be available unless the original licence was covered by their maintenance program. Without software maintenance if we wanted to move up to the next version of some MS software then we would have to buy new licences for everyone. It was very tempting to take that risk and to budget to replace all the licences every few years but the finance folk hated the idea of a huge spike in my budget every 3 or 4 years. To be fair, the licensing program did make licence maintenance much easier but the cost of providing for future upgrades and less immediately obviously necessary software licences such as Windows, Exchange and SQL Server access licences as part of the purchase of each new PC introduced a running complaint from various department heads saying they could buy PCs with ‘all the necessary software’ from retail outlets far cheaper than through IT.

In 2002 Check Point released a version of their firewall software that could run on a stripped-down and hardened version of Linux which they called SecurePlatform; and which rapidly became known as SPlat. Because SPlat was distributed at no additional cost we no longer needed to install the firewall and VPN on top of Windows NT or 2000 and pay for the necessary licences. However, SPlat did not support such a wide range of hardware as Windows NT/2000 did and we had a little difficulty buying hardware ‘old’ enough to run it on.

By 2003 the continued growth of the company was being hampered by a lack of office space in our London office. The company decided to move into a more modern and recently refurbished office nearer the traditional financial district. One of the attractions of the selected building was that it had standby electricity generators in the basement. Plans were drawn up and the office space adapted to our requirements and structured network/phone cabling installed to Cat 6 pseudo-standard. I specified 4 ports per workspace and had to fight hard to keep this ‘extravagance’. Most desk furniture was to be replaced as part of the move and so most of it was in place before we moved out of the old office. We planned to make the move over the New Year period 2003-04 to minimise disruption to the business and to close down most of the London office for a week.

A few weeks before the planned move date we got a bombshell from one of our telephone service providers. They told us they had discovered a problem and could not install a required telephone bearer into the new office in time for our move - they were adamant that they could not do it as they would need to schedule partial road closures to install additional cable near the new office. We approached one of our other providers and they managed to install a temporary leased line between the old office frame room and the new office so that we could redirect the other provider’s lines to the new office until they could get their act together. A bit of an expensive bodge - but it kept us on target for the move. Clearly the cable capacity was there - but not with the right supplier. We also bought a very small INDeX phone system and pre-installed it in the new office so that we could switch the contact centre phone lines with minimal interruption. In the event, we shut down, packed, moved and recommissioned the servers, firewalls, telephone system, faxes etc in one day. Our contact centre operated in ‘phone only’ mode for about 3 hours with two teams on duty - one at the old office and one at the new.

The company continued to expand and after just over a year in the new London office we had begun to cram more desks than originally designed into some areas. Fortunately we had spare capacity in the cabling system.

• 2003 - Space Shuttle Columbia explodes/breaks up during re-entry - all crew lost.
• 2003 - Invasion of Iraq - to disarm it of weapons of mass destruction.
• 2003 - MySpace service released.
• 2003 - UK inflation (CPIH): 1.3%
• 2004 - March 11 coordinated terrorist bombings on Madrid, Spain public transport. 191 people murdered.
• 2004 - Facebook service released.
• 2004 - Graphene isolated.
• 2004 - Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami kills 230,000 people.
• 2004 - UK inflation (CPIH): 1.8%

As part of the planning for the move into the new office the company had to update the business continuity plan. Considering emerging terrorist threats the new office building was too close to the standby site for comfort. For the updated DR component of the plan I was asked to obtain standby office space outside the capital. Our DR subscription service supplier had facilities all over the country and we changed our subscription to use facilities about 20 miles (32 km) outside the Greater London area. The change introduced additional problems in diverting our essential telephone numbers (especially for the contact centre) to the standby site. To help provide DR service for our contact centre we permanently installed a server and the small INDeX phone system and the necessary telephone bearers into the new DR site.

• 2005 - New tranche of additional London telephone numbers released: 020 3xxx xxxx. The point of the 1990, 1995 and 2000 London area telephone number changes finally becomes clear.
• 2005 - US Energy Policy Act defines daylight saving time changes for the USA to take effect March 2007.
• 2005 - July 7 coordinated terrorist bombings on London, UK public transport. 52 people murdered.
• 2005 - UK inflation (CPIH): 2.1%
• 2006 - Fidel Castro transfers leadership of Cuba to his brother Raúl (after 47 years).
• 2006 - November Microsoft releases Daylight Saving Time patches for various software - ~4 months before the change.
• 2006 - UK inflation (CPIH): 2.9%

We had conducted technical DR tests about once a year since the early 1990’s but in mid-2006 the company conducted a comprehensive test of the London Business Continuity plan. The exercise involved shutting down the London office for a day and running the business from the DR centre and from individual’s homes via remote access. The tested scenario was denial of access to the office building. Most staff were supposed to be unaware of the exact date and were to be diverted to marshalling centres on arrival at the office and core teams dispatched to the DR centre. It was probably the worst-kept secret in the company’s history but we did learn valuable lessons about our state of readiness. In particular some of our finance systems were a bit harder to restore than we had thought and as a result the finance core team were not able to complete their part of the test within the day.

In late 2006 with only about 4 months to go before the change, Microsoft released a number of patches for servers and PCs to implement the change to the US daylight saving time rules which were defined in mid-2005. Under the revised rules US daylight saving time was to start earlier and end later in the year than in previous years.

Although they probably deliberately delayed the release until after the end of DST 2006, the patches were released far too late. Any existing calendar appointments scheduled for a time between 11 March and 1 April or between 28 October and 4 November 2007 had already been stored in Microsoft computer systems with the wrong DST conversion. Microsoft also released a number of software tools to try to identify such appointments and give users a chance to manually correct them. People using features of Microsoft Outlook to send and receive appointment requests for times within these periods (often with people in other timezones) had no way of knowing if the other party was using correctly patched software or not and so whether their system would reserve the correct time or not. For three weeks from Sunday, 11 March 2007 (and to a lesser extent for a week from 28 October) people in the US turned up unexpectedly an hour early or late for meetings or telephone conference calls; far worse disruption than Y2K.

Towards the end of 2007 the company decided to separate the role of Director of IT away from the Finance Directorship and appointed a CIO (Chief Information Officer). The CIO significantly ramped up the software development and implementation side of the IT function and fought for a significant increase in overall IT staff numbers.

• 2007 - UK Prime Minister: Gordon Brown.
• 2007 - US implements new Daylight Saving Time rules (defined in 2005). Chaos reigns.
• 2007 - UK inflation (CPIH): 2.3%
• 2008 - Global financial crisis - Stock markets fall, many banks nearly collapse. 4 years of global recession begin.
• 2008 - President of Russia: Dmitry Medvedev (Vladimir Putin becomes Prime Minister).
• 2008 - UK Climate Change Act commits UK to reduce ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions by 80% by 2050
• 2008 - UK inflation (CPIH): 3.0%

In March 2008 I was diagnosed with Type II Diabetes. My lifestyle of skipping breakfast and lunch and eating and drinking in the evenings and taking almost no exercise was apparently really bad for me. Who would have thought? I was prescribed Metformin to improve insulin responsiveness, Ramipril to reduce blood pressure and Simvastatin to reduce ‘cholesterol’. I dutifully changed my diet and started walking as exercise. I bought a bike and cycled to the train station instead of taking the car. However, not all went well; I began to suffer muscle and tendon pains. Over the next year or so my mobility got so bad that I couldn’t tuck my shirt into the back of my trousers or extend my arm to shake hands with someone. My doctor ran some tests and told me that my blood results showed no evidence of inflammation and that he didn’t think my pain was related to the statin; he suggested that I took a one week holiday from the statin to see if it improved. It didn’t improve but it caused me to realise that my doctor was not concerned about me abruptly stopping taking the statin if I wanted to do a more realistic, longer experiment on myself.

In mid-2008 the (nearly) unimaginable happened. On a Sunday morning a water main burst near our London office and took out a local electricity sub-station. The whole area was without power. To add to our trouble the building maintenance staff were unable to get the standby generators in the basement working. The company invoked its Business Continuity plan. IT and the 24 hour contact centre staff deployed to the DR site. We diverted phone lines and restored backups on the standby servers, PCs etc in time for the arrival of the departmental core teams. The plan worked. The company operated out of the DR centre for a week but rather ironically the finance core team did not deploy to the DR centre until mid-week… although important, they had no urgent work at the time of the incident. By the end of the week stable power had been restored to the main office so IT staff reversed the process and merged the changed data back into the original systems. In the post-incident review we discovered that several clients who had been in contact with the company during the week had not realised we were working in DR mode until they were informed after the event - and they were very impressed. One manager reported that his department productivity had increased during the week - but I think his report was given tongue-in-cheek. One fly in the ointment: many staff had found the commute to and from the DR site very challenging.

The CIO commissioned a review of the company IT services to be carried out by an external consultancy that he had worked with in a previous employment. The consultants did not visit our offices outside the UK but conducted phone interviews with various staff throughout the world. Part of their recommendations included adopting a new ‘managed network’ to include site-to-site, remote access and site-to-Internet services instead of our current in-house managed VPN, RAS and Internet access based on Check Point technology. After a lengthy RFI/RFP process overseen by the external consultants a major MPLS network provider was appointed to provide services to the company. They were appointed despite the fact that they could not operate in some of the more ‘difficult’ parts of the world where we had offices and they could not provide the same encrypted service in the People’s Republic of China and certain other countries as in the majority of the rest of the world. As a result the company ended up with a hybrid network with some offices served by the in-house managed Check Point network and the majority of offices served by the new service provider. It was a mess.

For the offices served by the new network, access to the web for news gathering and research was funnelled through off-site gateways which resulted in significantly increased latency and peculiar search results - for example a researcher in our Sydney office accessing the Sydney Morning Herald website might be routed via Singapore and so would experience latency of the network round trip or they might find Google results from www.google.sg instead of from www.google.com.au. To add insult to injury the ‘managed service’ for Internet access was based on an out-of-date version of Check Point firewall for which we had to define in detail any changes we wanted, but had to request the service provider’s staff to implement. Similarly, with the remote access service, IT staff had to define and submit requests for additions and deletions but still provide first- and second-line telephone support for remote access difficulties.

• 2009 - US President: Barack Obama.
• 2009 - Fourth generation (4G) mobile network begins (in Sweden).
• 2009 - UK inflation (CPIH): 2.1%
• 2010 - US army Private Manning releases classified and sensitive information to WikiLeaks.
• 2010 - UK Prime Minister: David Cameron (coalition government). Deputy PM: Nick Clegg.
• 2010 - UK inflation (CPIH): 3.1%

For a few years our phone system maintainer had been warning us that our INDeX phone system was becoming more difficult to support. Few new parts or optional feature licences were available and the knowledge to re-configure the system was becoming similarly rare among engineering staff. So in 2010 our external consultants guided us through an RFI/RFP process and eventually recommended that we should buy a particular IP telephony system and have it configured, commissioned and managed for us by the same company that was providing the managed network service. I objected but was overruled. A colleague in IT was tasked with working with the service provider to implement the new phone system but was pulled from the task just after the equipment began to be delivered because he was needed for a more important project. I got lumbered with delivering the project.

To replicate and to try to improve on the functionality of our standby phone system the new design included a secondary system complete with voice mail to be installed in the DR site and that would take over in the event of the primary system becoming unavailable. When I was assigned to the project it seemed stalled and it became obvious to me that the managed service provider had bitten off more than they could chew. It seemed they had never configured such a complex, geographically dispersed redundant system. I held regular meetings with their project management team which seemed to cover the same ground time and again for months. Eventually a team from the phone system manufacturer was brought in to the project and real progress was made. On go-live everything worked, of course, with the managed service provider and manufacturer providing configuration support for any last minute tweaks.

After the initial go-live support ended we found that the managed service for the new phone system was considerably less responsive than the in-house support for the INDeX had been; for example staff could no longer request an emergency short-term change to a pick-up group without incurring and accounting for an extra cost. Worse than that, our in-house support technicians did not save any time as specifying and requesting such a change from the service provider took longer than performing it had done in most cases. Of course, I recognise that similar costs for the INDeX had always been there, hidden in the costs of the general running of the system. Suffice to say that the annual cost of the maintenance and managed service for the new phone system was about five times the cost associated with the old one and about the same as two of our full-time first-/second-line support technicians. Madness.

In about 2011, having read a number of articles about statin related pain I decided to stop taking the statin for an extended period. Rather than explain my rather vague reasoning to ‘diabetes nurse’, I just stopped taking them but continued receiving them on my repeat prescription. After a few months the pain that had been nagging me for the past few years evaporated and my mobility improved. I didn’t try the obvious next experiment of re-starting the statin to see what would happen. Who knows? Maybe it was coincidental.

Work in progress

• 2011 - Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.
• 2011 - The second UK-wide referendum asked ‘At present, the UK uses the “first past the post” system to elect MPs to the House of Commons. Should the “alternative vote” system be used instead?’. Result: No 67.9%, Yes 32.1%, Turnout 42.2%. Alternatively: No 28.7%, Yes 13.5%, Can’t be bothered either way 57.8%.
• 2011 - Linux 3 series kernel released.
• 2011 - UK inflation (CPIH): 3.7%
• 2012 - Fourth generation (4G) mobile phone networks introduced.
• 2012 - President of Russia: Vladimir Putin (Dmitry Medvedev becomes Prime Minister).
• 2012 - UK inflation (CPIH): 2.4%
• 2013 - Edward Snowden releases classified NSA (US National Security Agency) information to selected journalists.
• 2013 - China’s ‘Jade Rabbit’ rover begins exploring the Moon (Chang’e-3 mission).
• 2013 - UK inflation (CPIH): 1.9%

At my 2013 diabetes annual review my ‘cholesterol’ was high. Wus that I am, I avoided confrontation and gave some assurances about modifying my diet further; something I had no intention of doing. When the 2014 review came around and my ‘cholesterol’ was still high I told diabetes nurse that I had stopped takng the statin; she offered me an alternative cholesterol-lowering drug which I refused. I’m not sure, but I wondered if the pain I experienced was not so much directly due to the statin but due to artificially lowering my ‘cholesterol’; let’s consider this an experiment.

In 2013, after 24 years with my employer, I was made redundant - strictly speaking, of course, my job was made redundant. I was not surprised; the new layer of management seemed to have been narrowing my responsibilities for the past few years and brought in ‘help’ for me which was no help and was not under my supervision. They gave me a pay-off in exchange for which I agreed not to take them to an employment tribunal. Over the 24 years I had accepted shares in the company instead of annual bonuses and been awarded share options conditional on profits; I owned 0.5% of the company shares. The company was incorporated as a ‘closed’ company so I had to offer my shares for sale to other shareholders when I left. Good job I did, their next share valuation took a bit of a dive.

• 2014 - A number of unauthorised, intimate pictures of celebrities begin circulating in social media. iCloud ‘hack’ reported in the media but most likely just poor password management.
• 2014 - The European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft Rosetta (launched 2004) makes rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
• 2014 - A referendum in Scotland asked ‘Should Scotland be an independent country?’ Result: No 55.3%, Yes 44.7%, Turnout 84.6%. Alternatively: No 46.8%, Yes 37.8%, Can’t be bothered either way 15.4%.
• 2014 - UK inflation (CPIH): 0.7%
• 2015 - UK Prime Minister: David Cameron (majority government).
• 2015 - Linux 4 series kernel released
• 2015 - SpaceX lands Falcon9 rocket first stage vertically.
• 2015 - UK inflation (CPIH): 0.5%
• 2016 - The third UK-wide referendum asked ‘Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?’ (similar question to first UK-wide referendum in 1975, 41 years earlier). Result: Leave 51.9%, Remain 48.1%, Turnout 72.2%. Alternatively: Leave 37.5%, Remain 34.7%, Can’t be bothered either way 27.8% (possibly including a few ‘uhm what’s the EU?’ types).
• 2016 - UK Prime Minister: Theresa May.
• 2016 - UK inflation (CPIH): 1.8%
• 2017 - US President: Donald Trump.
• 2017 - UK invokes ‘Article 50’ process to leave the EU. Date set for 29 March 2019
• 2017 - Terrorist bomb attack in UK city (Manchester). 22 people murdered, many injured.
• 2017 - UK inflation (CPIH): 2.7%
• 2018 - Unusually cold weather dubbed ‘the Beast from the East’ hits Britain with up to 50cm snow (big wow) in March.

Because I’m old I get sent a bowel cancer screening kit through the post. Aparently the NHS sends these to people 60-74 years old. I wonder if I should submit a sample to the test. I discover that mortality statistics and diagnosed cause of death stats are available to the general public and begin to question whether bowel cancer screening is a good idea… It isn’t. The introduction of bowel cancer screening does not coincide with an improvement in all-cause mortality. Bowel cancer as a diagnosed cause of death was improving up to and a bit after the introduction of screening but the rate of improvement slowed down or stoppped after screening was introduced.

My sudden interest in mortality stats cause me to look at the statistics that are published weekly, monthly and annually by ONS and I begin to look at them in some detail. Among many other things I discover that the UK began to offer anti-‘flu vaccines to all over-65s in 2000. However, there is no observable effect on death rates for that age group as a result. I’m younger than that but I’ve been being offered them because of T2 diabetes. I decide to stop taking them.

• 2018 - Cosmologist Stephen Hawking dies.
• 2018 - Fifth generation (5G) mobile phone networks introduced.
• 2018 - UK inflation (CPIH): 2.0%
• 2019 - Linux 5 series kernel released
• 2019 - UK requests 2 time extensions to ‘Article 50’ process. EU and UK government agree a withdrawal ‘deal’ but UK Parliament rejects it three times.
• 2019 - Net Zero signed (by Christopher Skidmore) into UK law by amending The Climate Change Act 2008 to require 100% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Seriously - no more CO2 or other greenhouse gasses - at all.
• 2019 - UK Prime Minister: Boris Johnson. Defection of a number of MPs from two main political parties due to differences over UK leaving EU. Hung Parliament.
• 2019 - General election returns Boris Johnson as PM with a Conservative 80 seat majority in Commons.
• 2019 - US President Donald Trump impeached (sent for trial in the Senate) on charges of ‘abuse of power’ and ‘obstructing Congress’.
• 2019 - UK inflation (CPIH): 1.4%
• 2020 - Having reached a withdrawal agreement the UK leaves EU on 31 Jan and begins 11 month transition period. Formal trade negotiations with the EU and non-EU states can now start.
• 2020 - First commercial flight of SpaceX ‘taxi service’ (Crew Dragon) to International Space Station.
• 2020 - The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) returns samples to Earth collected from asteroid Ryugu by their spacecraft Hyabusa2 in 2019.
• 2020 - SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19, Coronavirus) epidemics kill 86,240 people in England and Wales (Covid mentioned on death certificate); actually ‘only’ 61,832 more any-cause deaths than would be expected from long-term trend. Many more elsewhere in worldwide pandemic.
• 2020 - UK inflation (CPIH): 0.8%
• 2021 - UK/EU transition period ends. Most of UK leaves EU Customs Union. Northern Ireland remains.
• 2021 - Various Coronavirus vaccines given emergency approval for use in various countries (before completeing phase III clinical trials).
• 2021 - US President: Joe Biden.
• 2021 - I agree to take my first two shots of AstraZeneca anti-Covid-19 vaccine. Sick as a dog both times. I consider this to be taking a risk so that if there’s anything wrong with the jabs they’ll discover it before jabbing my kids or grand-kids.
• 2021 - Former US President Donald Trump impeached for a second time on a charge of ‘incitement of insurrection’. No other US President has been impeached twice.
• 2021 - Perseverance rover lands and begins to explore on Mars; first flight of a drone on Mars.
• 2021 - SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19, Coronavirus) epidemics kill 74,522 people in England and Wales (Covid mentioned on death certificate); actually only 35,988 more any-cause deaths than would be expected from long-term trend. Many more elsewhere in worldwide pandemic.
• 2021 - UK inflation (CPIH): 4.8%
• 2022 - Russia invades Ukraine - war in Europe again.
• 2022 - UK Prime Minister: Liz Truss after Boris Johnson resigns. Initial ‘mini budget’ causes money market turmoil - but little change to UK economy.
• 2022 - UK Prime Minister: Rishi Sunak after Liz Truss resigns after only 44 days.
• 2022 - 14 Dec. 50 years since Apollo 17 left the moon (last people to walk on the Moon. Commander Gene Cernan (deceased) and lunar module Pilot Harrison Schmitt. Command module pilot Ronald Evans (deceased) remained in orbit).
• 2022 - SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19, Coronavirus) epidemics kill 33,884 people in England and Wales (Covid mentioned on death certificate); but only 18,272 more any-cause deaths than would be expected from long-term trend. Many more elsewhere in worldwide pandemic.
• 2022 - UK inflation (CPIH): 9.2%
• 2023 - Germany shuts down its last nuclear power plants but has to continue burning coal to generate power. That’s Green for you.
• 2023 - UK inflation (CPIH): 4.2%
• 2024 - Boeing Starliner makes debut crewed trip to ISS for 8 day mission. Technical issues delay return trip. (Maybe crew stuck on ISS until SpaceX can give them a ride home in 2025!)
• 2024 - UK Prime Minster Sir Keir (Starmer). UK General election, Labour majority of 214 seats in Commons.
• 2025 - US President: Donald Trump?