« Dogged by guilt | Main | Procuring a few more barrings »

Punch and Debbie

Talking of generations, Backbytes is delighted to have featured in The London Times no less, which this week drew attention to the burning question of who is the UK’s oldest second-generation programmer.
“That’s ‘burning’ in the sense of damp matches”, the article says, capturing the spirit of our column.
To return to the question that everyone is asking in the Times newsroom: “I’m a 48-year old second-generation programmer, who started programming in 1977
at Norweb,” says Debbie York. “Since 1984 I have been a contractor and IT consultant, working almost exclusively on ICL and IBM mainframes.
“Punch cards were a big part of my working life right through to the late 1980s at British Rail; I even punched the cards by candlelight during the strikes in the 1970s.”
Her father, Alan Wilford, worked for ICT – later ICL – from 1955 until 1965, “programming the 1200/1201 in machine code before joining the 1900 launch team”.
“My father met my late mother in Dunlops, Manchester in the 1950s, where she operated the tabulators and the punched card driven electronic calculator.”
Indeed, Debbie herself was conceived one lunchtime… no, now we’re making it up.

October 30, 2007 in backbytes | Permalink

Comments