When Even further back - in the mid 70s no less

Where Surrey, Bognor Regis, Skegness & Norfolk, UK

What A Holiday reservations & bookings system for a chain of holiday camps. We called it "The Bogness Monster Company"

Task After having developed the system in a team of about 20, I fell on me and the overall project manager to deliver & implement the systems and train the users.

And it's true! We'd been sent to a God-forsaken location in the middle of winter to install a system at a holiday camp (ha!) Fortunately we didn't have to actually stay there because it was the bleak mid-winter and the camp was closed. So we roughed it in a four star hotel. If the camp had been open, we'd have stayed in the VIP chalets - sound cool & groovy - eh?

I was in my early twenties and, believe me, at that age you simply don't get up in the mornings like a normal human being - at least not after a "skin-full" (and I don't mean goats) the previous night. So, it came as a shock to my system to discover that people were actually using the system during the day and blow me! if we didn't have to go and work overnight in the vain hope that the system would be better in the morning than it was the previous day - who thinks of these things?

Anyway, we'd get a cab back to the hotel at God o'clock in the morning, have breakfast and wander up to bed - only to be woken at 9 am by the boss expecting not only an update on progress, but for it to make sense! One occasion I'd hit a memory problem and suggested we ordered an "extra dod of core" (real core, not your namby-pamby silicon, but actual ferrite cores hanging on lots of bits of copper wire). I'd just recently moved from Scotland and, being tired, used my native vocabulary. A month later we still didn't have the extra memory, so I chased it with HQ - they'd not found the part number for a "dod" of memory and wanted to know if a 1Mbyte card was an acceptable substitute. I said "OK, I suppose so" and bollocked them for not having come back to me for technical advice.
It makes more sense now than it did then, what with blobs & heaps, etc.

One morning I awoke, rubbed my eyes and peered husky/snow like out the hotel window. A bit misty, thought I. Can't see the pier. Hang on, why can I see to the horizon, but not the pier? Is this some kind of visual displacement? Nope! The pier had only gone and gotten itself blown away. No film crew present, Keith Moon's not booked in, t'was the wind.

The picture on the right tells it all. Scarily, it looks like some ancient Victorian Daguerrotype. Was I really alive and grown up in those dark days?

That was January 11, 1978.

Anyway.