The Dawn of Personal Computers

As a student I had a holiday job as a "figure clerk" for Tesco, probably one of the last jobs which could be described by the original use of the word meaning "one who computes". Mainly we manually added up stock counts from stores across the country to get the total value of stock held. We did have desk calculators but much of the calculation was done entirely mentally as it was quicker. For a student it was a bit of a plum job, Tesco used lots of students but most worked as clerks in departments known to be rather strict (timed breaks, permission needed to go to the toilet etc.), however mine was very pleasant.

One of the occasional tasks was to receive punch cards from external companies and take them to the computer room. The founder of Tesco was noted as being rather tight and the goods lift had come from some other much older building, it had wire doors and did not actually stop at the computer suite floor. As a result we had to manhandle the many boxes of cards down a set of stairs. We found that throwing them to each other was the quickest way, until we dropped one, hopefully the order was not too important.

My father worked at Tesco (which was how I got the plum position), after work I used to go to his office to wait for a lift home and played on his collection of personal computers.

He had originally spent 30 years in the Royal Marines, his last role moving the Marines Pay and Records onto computer, for which he was sent on an NCC systems analyst course. After retiring from the marines he joined Tesco and after a few job moves became "Computer Services Manager" - the head of IT's general purpose sidekick. The head of IT was very into tech (as we would say now) and as a result my Father had a good collection of personal computers. My favourite was one called a RAIR black box, which ran CP/M.

My father then did even more with the early personal computers. Encouraged by IBM, who amongst other things flew in Bill Gates to see them they set up a Tesco business in the early 1980s which my Father ran, initially importing 110v IBM PCs from the USA, then selling UK manufactured ones, to other UK businesses. Eventually Tesco worked out it did not quite fit with their view of retail, and they sold the business.

My own use of personal computers for work started in the mid 1980s. In the early 80s all our user documentation had been manually typed by secretaries and photocopied as needed, but around 1985 we gained a couple of "superbrain" PCs and our secretaries, plus temps and summer students moved all the user documentation onto Wordstar. The gain being that it was much easier to maintain. Gradually we changed to writing user documentation directly onto the personal computers (unfortunately losing the secretaries ability to write in good readable English). As one of the project leaders in the late 1980s I did have my own desktop PC, used mainly for design documentation and spreadsheets, with a terminal emulator to avoid the need for a separate terminal for development. Also a few customers had modems and with these we could usefully log directly onto their systems to help support them.

In the late 90s we moved the documentation yet again, onto expensive sun graphics workstations which amongst other things ran true WYSIWYG typesetting tools (and had the processing power needed to run it, which at the time personal computers did not). It took windows 3.1, developed in 1992 and later applications such as Word 97 before personal computers gradually become the powerful general purpose business tools that we now all take for granted.