electronic old men i have met

In the early-mid 90s my dad ran a PC repair business, which I get the impression he spun up in advance of knowing much about PCs and more or less learned on the job. I remember that when he hit a PC he really couldn’t do anything with, he’d hit up a guy called Jim, whose understanding of computers was more on a “get some wire and solder the ends to random points on the motherboard and it works again” level. Seemed less “computer wizard”, more traditional wizard.

When I worked in a PC repair place 15 years later, never having soldered anything, a properly-old man came in one day and spent some time staring at a PC we had built whose case was clear perspex, and I asked if I could help him. He said he was just browsing out of interest, because he used to build computers too. I said, oh yeah? He said, yes, the last one I built was the Ferranti Pegasus.

I wish I remembered more about this dude, but he didn’t stay long – he told me a bit about how they worked and the sorts of things you’d have to repair. Pegasuses were being built from 1956 to 1959, and according to the wiki page, it was mostly developed by three dudes. It’s hard to know which I met, if any – could have been some even-less-sung contributor – but this would have been 2008, and not all of them were still around. The wiki says it was “Ferranti’s most popular valve computer, with 38 units being sold”. One of the designers, Christopher Strachey, has won my favour with this quote: “The necessity for optimum programming (favoured by Alan Turing) was to be minimised, “because it tended to become a time-wasting intellectual hobby of the programmers““. If I had a buck.

Another electronic old man I once met introduced himself to me as R.G. Napier when he saw me on the street wearing a Space Invaders shirt in 2015. He said he wrote “the port” of Space Invaders to the BBC Microcomputer, although there were very many ports and I can’t find his one (even though very helpful videos exist). I got a photo with him.

Electronic old men like this are a dying breed, I deem. You don’t have to be anywhere near this electronic anymore to do all the cool shit anyone cares about. I wish I had spent more time pickin’ the brain of the Ferranti dude who made the rock think.