My inspiration in life

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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