Mum’s computing years
At this sad time I wanted to share that my
amazing mother, Joan Frances Holt (nee Clark), died on Monday after a 8 month long struggle with arterial
disease and blood cancer. A person who was always timid, humble and never
talked much about her accomplishments. She started out life being born at
the start of the second world war, playing on the streets decimated by
incendiary bombs in Portsmouth and only recently discovered more details about
her dad who was awarded the Imperial Service Medal (ISM) for long and faithful
service in HM Dockyards following his 20 years in the army. She was married to
dad for 64 years.
Seven months after leaving school in March 1958, mum started as an
Assistant Experimental Officer (AEO) at Aldermaston. A post normally only
available to people with degrees, but mums maths was outstanding and was
referred for the job by her headmistress at Portsmouth Grammar School. She
learnt to program on the Ferranti Mk 1*, with a list of instructions with their
binary equivalents, considered an old computer even then. The Ferranti Mk 1*
had a large number of valves requiring servicing frequently that could only be
run for a short time, which took punch cards. Mum worked on the very
latest, state of the art, computer, the IBM 704 mainframe which was among only
2 in the country, the other being at Harwell, mum thought. There were 2 people
operating the machine which had several huge magnetic tapes standing in
cabinets about 6ft high, a printer, card input and output machines and a
central console. Mum was impressed to work on this. She attended a
programming course on the IBM 704 and from printouts asked to draw a graph from
the information in 2 columns. The start of modern-day analytics. She
learnt how computers were constructed and how the data was stored. The
main content of course training included programming the computer to carry out
instructions using a symbolic assembly code, to read card input and produce a
printout of results. At the end of the 2 weeks, she had to write a
program to calculate sin x. She had to use the machines to type out the
program on punched cards, which were then converted to binary by an assembler
on the computer.
In contrast, Mum and Dad both were involved in amateur
filmmaking of cine films at Harpenden Cine Society in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
Walking in the lake district and travelling in France became a regular
occurrence for her, from her 20’s
A small snapshot into a varied and extraordinary life,
always an adventurer, and above all family centric and loved so much.
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