Stephen Maddrell is one of our first set of graduates from 1975. In this article, Stephen writes about his experiences of being a student at University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, in the 1970s.

When I asked my John Bright Grammar school Latin teacher which universities to put on my UCCA form, his answer was that they were all the same so it didn’t really matter; careers advice was not good in those days.

A classmate had just passed his driving test and was driving with two others to Aberystwyth for a physics department open day. I joined them despite my mother’s fear of this young lad’s first long-distance drive on Snowdonia’s rather dangerous roads in a rather ancient Ford Anglia. I was the only boy to study at Aber from that trip but 5 other pupils came to Aber that year, quite a percentage. Aber looked similar to Llandudno so I chose Aber as there was an electronic physics degree course. It is interesting to note that my now local university Imperial College did not offer an electronics degree at the time.

So, I enrolled to study electronic physics, single honours.

As for first year accommodation it slipped my mind to apply and on arriving was hastily found a shared room in Nevada Court Mansions, or Newydd Cwrt Mawr. I shared a room with a fellow Scouser reading economics. He was a rugby fanatic with an attitude to match. Ten people lived in the flat with one shower and a bathroom you dared not use for fear of being power washed with the conveniently placed fire hose located just outside of the bathroom! So, there I spent my first year with 2 Arab postgraduates, an African chief and 5 PhD and post-doc students. It gave me a good idea of what PhD research and lifestyle was all about! Thursday night was home brew night and mine was the best!

As for dress code, students wore the same few jeans and shirts or tweed jacket as could fit in a small suitcase as nobody had a car. On the Friday of the freshers weekend home-sick students were advised to cheer up as the next train home didn’t leave till the following Monday. So, Aber was a good place to study being in splendid isolation with few distractions other than the numerous pubs and one less church. Yes, there was a poor vicar without a pub!

At this point in time there was no messaging of any type, email, mobile phones or social media to facilitate computer science innovation and research. There were pigeon holes to leave messages to lecturers and for wider communication obviously pigeons had been replaced by then by public telephones requiring hard coinage of the realm. Media was chalk, card, paper and punch cards. Cards did get accidentally shuffled on a Friday afternoon by those frequenting the pub at lunchtime! A red card in the window of the large room housing the Elliot 4130 mainframe meant it was down or simply moody, resting its diodes and transistors; once for several weeks as a most vital mechanical part had to be specially made to fix it. Good binoculars were essential to check on the mainframe status remotely from your bedroom window. Aberystwyth, then with around 2300 students, had this idea of making the first year a general year, which I suppose was a good idea. However, it meant I had a full timetable with physics with practicals, chemistry (complete with smelly and dangerous lab work), and pure maths. Frankly, it was all a continuation of my A-levels. Smelly chemicals, mind-numbing maths, and a lecture on valve amplifiers as the closest thing to electronic physics. The first year was far from inspiring, and I even contemplated transferring to Bangor University closer to home and Snowdonia. But after a chat with my physics tutor, I decided against it.

Now, let's delve into the details of the first two years of the course. During this period, a significant portion of the teaching was handled by Mike Tedd. He had recently become part of the department, having previously worked for SPL International. Notably, other employees from SPL included John Barnes, known as the designer of the Ada programming language, as well as Frank Bott, Professor Chris Price, and various other graduates of the department. Interestingly, it was Mike Tedd who played a crucial role in helping me secure my first job with that lively and diverse group of individuals after I completed my studies. SPL, founded by Ken Barnes, has an intriguing connection all the way back to Alan Turin, often regarded as the father of computing. You might find it fascinating to watch the interview with Ken Barnes, which can be found at this link: https://archivesit.org.uk/interviews/ken-barnes/.

Now, let me tell you about computer science in the first year. Mike Tedd was tasked with teaching all the first-year science students Basic programming. It was chaos! Imagine a small room with 20 noisy teletypes running interactive Basic and everyone wanting to use them. It was like the battle of the Somme in there without the mud. And Mike with pride said they only allocated 10% of the Elliot 4130 processor power for interactive Basic and this facility was an Aber university first! That was my introduction to computers, along with everyone else, but there was a red mechanical plastic computer at school! I remember my mate Raymond Crossdale, possibly the only student who failed computer science and philosophy joint honours as he never took notes, just sat back and listened when everyone else was scribbling. He did however write an innovative random sentence generator on that course with those terminals, which I suppose was the precursor to ChatGPT-4. Funny how things turn out, I actually got him a programming job years later, and he had a successful career in computing until retirement.

In the second year, things improved. I survived the chemistry practicals with all my limbs intact, so I dropped that despite being asked to stay on. Yes, an actual conversation with a member of the chemistry department, but too late, ha! Physics now had electronic courses, and there was a brilliant mature lecturer, let’s call him Dr Digital, but his real name was Dr Maude. He was a digital electronic wizard, king of the Texas Instruments TTL 7400 integrated circuit series! Yes, I was finally learning about modern electronics. He helped me with my computer science project. But aside from that, the rest of the physics course was still filled with theoretical and abstract physics and no one able to explain general relativity.

Thanks to Mike’s programming taster in the first year, I had the option to switch to a joint computer science and electronic physics course. I had a serious conversation with Mike about it, yes career advice! Mike advised me to speak with Robert Ash, who started the same joint course the previous year. Robert was in the same year as David Price the Aber Computer Department guru. Robert was the first person to do this course, and I became the second, along with David Wynn Jones, who had a head twice the size of mine. Quite a competitor! He always wore a tweed jacket and tie and went home to Brum every weekend. I think they canceled the joint option the following year due to lack of interest, or they renamed it to protect the innocent. (The Joint with electronic physics eventually became the MEC course.)

Now, let’s get to the nitty-gritty of my second year. Mike Tedd taught a significant portion of it. He had joined the department a year earlier, having worked for SPL International along with John Barnes the Ada language designer and Frank Bott another member of the department. Mike actually helped me land my first job with that merry band of eccentrics upon leaving. As it turns out, I declined an accelerated career position with the BBC, where I did my physics industry placement in the second year. Bad decision. The BBC did warn me in their offer letter that they had few computers at the time ! Oh yes, two months into my first job I received an invitation to interview from the NHS who I had applied for a medical physics career 2 months earlier; I declined that.

In our tutorials, Mike confessed that he often wrote the course material the evening before delivering it. But his lectures were interesting, practical, and his notes were still wet ink fresh compared to the yellowing notes of physics lecturers. Our first programming project was to write a population projection simulation program for the island of Ynysnowhere; Who would dominate, the Anglo Saxons or Celts? The second project was the Ruritanian post office stamp problem, again written in Algol 60. Surprisingly, I impressed Mike by designing an algorithm different from his and the rest of the class, and it actually worked. Text books were “A Primer of Algol 60 programming” by E W Dijkstra with delightful quotes to start each chapter. For input/output a limerick:

There was a young lady from Thrace
Whose corsets grew too tight to lace.
Her mother said, Nelly,
There’s more in your belly.
Than ever went in through your face

Because Knuth was Mike’s hero, we had to buy “The Art of Computer Programming” volume 2 of many, by Donald Ervin Knuth. The book’s sub-title was “Sorting and Searching”, no mention of Google! We had a few FORTRAN 4 lectures with just a handout from Mike to help. Cobol only got two lectures, probably because Mike disliked it, just too commercial I guess. He was a fan of Snobol, an interpretive language I have never come across outside of Aber. Recursion was fun and so little code! I remember his enthusiasm for queuing theory and using some Russian mathematician’s five equations for a queuing theory programming assignment in Algol 68. My program simulated the Newydd Cwrt Mawr students’ union bar with those equations to determine the time it took to buy a pint of Banks brown brew. Of course, I had to test the theory against the practical with several not so dry runs. Strangely, I never came across those equations again!

Brian Rudling, who I believe was pivotal in setting up the department, gave some of the lectures and kindly provided us with copies of his lecture notes in advance to Ray’s delight! He was a great chap who often stood at the back of the class, gazing out of the window at the sea on sunny days. He once shared his love for the freedom of his job, mentioning how he could go boating whenever he felt like it. It was a lecture on work-life balance, and I must say, the computer science staff seemed content and happy, which rubbed off on the students. We addressed the computer science staff by their first names, unlike in physics, where it was all about Dr and Professor, and in chemistry, plain Sir, with a bow and forelock-tugging.

Horst Holstein worked tirelessly into the late hours in a pleasant corner room, teaching numerical analysis in the department. Since I switched courses in part to avoid more pure maths, his course was quite challenging. I still remember him gleefully exclaiming “Eigenvalues” as he twisted and broke a fresh stick of chalk. His techniques came in handy when I was attempting to predict stock movements for a bank using Canonical Variate analysis with Kalman filtering. Obviously, it never worked but Horst’s assignments gave me the confidence to persevere. Persevering with Horst’s equations at Aber was also good practice for resolving the serious inter-computer data integration problems of the synthetic aperture radar of the electronic ground support environment for the European Space agency’s European Remote Sensing satellite (ERS1). At the time this problem was as serious as the IQ problem-solving in the ESA documentary. The problem was simply the compatibility of endianness between the ESA’s Space Research and Technology Centre, and Marconi Space System computers. One line of code sorted that, even simpler than “Hello World”! The data from this project is now used to study climate change.

The staff dress code of the department was mixed. Mike wore a Fisherman’s smock and looked as though he could board a trawler at any point in a lecture. Brian had the appearance and manner of Jools Holland the jazz piano player. Mark possibly wanting to look a little older and dignified being the new boy on the block sported a rather unusual goatee style beard which he has to this day; (he had to keep it following a skiing accident). Horst was always immaculately turned out in a pressed suit, shirt and tie. The prof when occasionally spotted always wore a black polo necked top and a dog lead to match.

Some of the numerical analysis course notes were written by Brian as it was thought of as classical computer science at the time and was not optional! Brian later taught more digestible courses like interactive computer graphics that I enjoyed in the third and final year and was useful to me when programming the Calcomp IGS500 interactive computer system prototype in LA three years later. It is interesting to note that I remember that single honours computer science was not an option as the university thought there was simply insufficient relevant knowledge to justify a degree in that subject at the time.

The final year brought more courses from Mike, including systems programming and more Algol 68 the now enhanced block structured language, far more elegant than the dominant Fortran. PL1 was mentioned but as it was IBM’s well … Mike mentioned the Intel 8080 processor, which was just born around that time, but it was only a passing mention on the last page of my notes, as was ARPNET, yes the precursor to the internet. Mike wasn’t a fan of IBM, always referring to their salesmen as “snakes in the grass” and jokingly calling them “IBM and the seven dwarfs”. At that point, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), a new company and not one of the dwarfs had introduced the 16-bit successor to the 12-bit PDP 8, the PDP11. The department managed to scrape together enough funds to buy one, and they hired a bright young chap to take care of it. Yes, the department finally had a computer of its own! Before we could use its 18 switches to load our first ones and zeros programs, we had to pass a driving test on how to use it with the computer technician as the driving instructor. The operating system was DEC’s DOS-11, and there was an assembler language and an assembler and linker so we didn’t have to program in one’s and zero. The small instruction set manual was printed on coarse toilet paper. We were each given a copy to keep!

Mark Lee had joined the department by then and taught an interesting course on artificial intelligence. I was excited about attending those lectures, but I was pulled aside and advised/told to do a project instead since I was pursuing electronic physics. I didn’t have much choice, so Mark became my supervisor, and Dr Digital assisted me in the electronic physics lab. One late evening, when I was working on my project, Mike walked into the computer room and caught me dismantling their beloved computer to find out which integrated circuits were used, as I needed to build my interface board with the same type! I was amazed a few years ago visiting Aber when Mark handed me an evolved diagram of my project that he had found in his bin that day while clearing out his office! It all worked out in the end, but I’ll never forget the moment I first laid eyes on that piece of equipment he had somehow acquired for my project. It had a massive severed cable with multiple cores and little documentation.

As for computer facilities, the department now had access to a CDC 7600 supercomputer via an ICL 2900 in the Manchester regional computer center; using that we wrote programs in Fortran and Algol 68 using punch cards. The third year also included more compulsory numerical analysis with Horst. We plotted the thermal distribution of a heated metal bar by using Gause-Seidel iteration with SOR, yes with fantastic successive over-relaxation, hardly relaxing! The graphical result printed in characters form on a line printer courtesy of the Elliot 4130. I could not work out at the time why numerical analysis was regarded as so important by our cognoscenti and illuminati mentors.

Oh, I did mention two other members of the department – Professor Emery and his spaniel. In our two years, he gave us just two lectures on compiler design, and to be honest, even after a career in computing I and possibly John Barnes has no clue what he was talking about with his compiler tokens. On my last day, he asked me about my plans after leaving, and when I said I didn’t know, he recommended continuing my education in the United States. Unfortunately, the spaniel beckoned him away at that point and that was the end of his involvement in my career. It’s a shame because Bill Gates was just starting Microsoft back then, and Steve Wozniak was busy with Steve Jobs pre Apple. I once asked Steve Wozniak who influenced him the most in his career, and he said his second-grade science teacher. So, teachers and their impact can be quite remarkable.

I was offered an MSc place to stay in both the computer science and physics departments. Funding however was a problem at the time from the Science Research Council. The subject would have been simulation software for integrated circuit design and testing. I decided to return to education when I finally knew what my passion was for and obviously I had the experience of my PhD flat mates in my first year to judge what university research was really like. Not pursuing a PhD was a bad idea in retrospect. I never did find my passion to research, and generally big ideas come to those no older than 25, a poignant lesson to the reader.

And as for future syllabus for future Aber computer scientists, obviously numerical analysis has to be a must study! Languages and technologies come and go but Numerical Analysis is here to stay, Yes the bedrock of our AI future! Obviously, Brian and Horst knew that all along, Yes 50 years ago!

I hope you found this glimpse into my university experience amusing. Although my time at Aberystwyth University had its ups and downs, it was a formative period that shaped my career in computing and its 17 projects.

Stephen Maddrell, 2023