Mike Tedd writes about his time with the department from the 1970s to the 1990s. This includes lecturing, being head of department, aspects of his career and his work in industry and as a Vice-Principal of the College (the University College of Wales, which is now known as Aberystwyth University).

Moving to Aberystwyth

In 1972, married for less than a year, although I liked SPL (Systems Programming Ltd) where I then worked, I was tiring of life as a consultant. Charged out at a hefty daily rate, I felt obliged to give maximum value every day to our clients. I had spent several weeks working in Newcastle and I had refused a request for a long spell in Helsinki. The thought of a return to university life was an attractive one.

The first lectureship post that came up was in Aberystwyth, effectively my wife Lucy's home town; it seemed ordained that I should apply. I was interviewed by the head of the young department, Professor Glyn Emery, and the Principal, Sir Goronwy Daniel. Curiously another interviewee also worked at SPL, having the office next to mine. I was offered the post and was happy to accept.

I certainly didn't move for the money. The salary was £2,823 pa, almost exactly two thirds of my SPL salary of £4,200. And Lucy had left her post at King's College London and had no certainty of a job in Aberystwyth. I knew that academic life, although poorly paid, would give me lots of freedom to pursue my own interests as well as responsibilities for teaching etc. That's a bargain that the universities have now reneged on, especially for junior staff.

Two things alleviated the problem. The flat I had bought two years earlier for £8,000 sold quickly for £15,500 (it's worth over £500K now in 2023). I wanted to keep a relationship with the computer industry and David Rodway, a director at SPL, was keen too, so I asked for permission to spend 50 days a year on paid consultancy (more than I did, or ever intended to do); Sir Goronwy was happy to approve this. SPL paid me a retainer of £1,000 pa and extra for any days I worked above 20 a year.

I started on Monday 2nd October 1972 having been required to attend an induction course for lecturers over the weekend before. It was a useful course and I still remember some of what I learned. Then it was straight into teaching. With only four of us teaching both the second and third years of the joint honours course, there was lots to do.

At first the department had no proper office for me to use. I was given a bedroom in Penbryn hall of residence to work in. The Physics Department controlled space in the Physics building and were very reluctant to release any space for us. They were however even more determined not to allow outsiders to have spaces in ‘their' car park, and when Computer Science was given a permit there, we were able to swop this permit for an office for me! We subsequently all moved into the Llandinam extension where the Computer Unit was based, although we continued for years to use the Maths departments' coffee room in the Physics building; meeting the mathematicians regularly was helpful in many ways.

Early computing in Aber

The first computer in Aberystwyth had been an IBM 1620. It was replaced in 1967 by an Elliott 4130, the type of machine that I mainly worked with at Elliotts in 1965 to 1968. I had led the teams that developed the 4130's Fortran compiler and its batch system which enabled jobs (presented as decks of punched cards) to be run one after another; see also Computing education history Aberystwyth University. In 1974 the Unit acquired a second 4130 which had been discarded by Heriot Watt university, together with all the documentation of the 4130 development that had survived; I was delighted to see one of my shopping lists with useful documentation on the back.

A Computer Unit had been established in 1966, led by Peter King from the Statistics Department. As well as running the computing service, the Unit ran some programming courses. Peter left at the end of 1969 to take up a chair at Birkbeck College, University of London, and was highly respected for his work on data management and other topics. In the 1960s opinion for and against measures to promote the Welsh language had become very emotive; I have heard the suggestion that this stopped him becoming a Professor and may have been a factor in his departure. The College replaced him by two posts at Professorial level – Glyn Emery to found a Computer Science department and Ifan Moelwyn-Hughes as Director of the Computer Unit.

The department I joined

The head of department, Professor Emery was a very early participant in the computer industry in the UK. He then became a lecturer at Westfield College in London (now part of Queen Mary College, University of London) before being appointed to the new Chair of Computer Science in Aberystwyth. He had written a relevant textbook and his industry experience will have been important, but he didn't have the strong academic career that would be expected today.

There were two more lecturing staff when I arrived. Brian Rudling had come from Coventry Polytechnic and had played a major role in syllabus development. Horst Holstein had transferred from Applied Mathematics.

The department had started in 1970 as the fourth department in the School of Mathematics. In those days students studied three subjects at Part One in their first year; joint honours students then followed two of these subjects for two years; single honours students would spend a third of their second year on an ‘accessory' and the rest of the two years on the main subject. Part One courses thus played a big role in attracting students into different degrees. As most students in the School studied Pure Maths, Applied Maths and Statistics in Part One, there was an understandable reluctance for the School to allow Computer Science a full Part One course. Instead, we were allowed to give a 10-lecture course for all School first year students. This started in 1971, and we taught the elements of programming in Basic; Horst did the first year of this, then I took it on.

Most of the first year of the department had been spent planning courses to be taught on the Joint Honours degree which took its first intake in Autumn 1971. These were second year students who, having not done the 10-lecture course, were attracted by the novelty of a new degree. The 1972 intake to joint honours was smaller – learning Basic with only one batch run a day won't have been a great first experience of computing!

When I joined, most of the staff in the Maths departments were lecturing in gowns and first names were rarely used between staff and students; it was Dr This, Mr That and Miss Jones. I would lecture in a sweater or a smock; it was surely a coincidence that gowns soon disappeared. I asked everyone to call me ‘Mike'; one of our earliest students, Lamia Khaled, couldn't bring herself to do this; we compromised on ‘Mr Mike'.

The department's computer facilities

In 1972 when I joined, the only computer in Aberystwyth was the Elliott 4130. The main way to use it was to submit jobs on punched cards. Each job had control cards, program text to be compiled and data to be read; output would be on line-printer paper. Debugging programs was frustrating – jobs would fail with error reports so you would need to replace cards and try again – and it might be hours or even days between runs.

Students were only allowed to run one job per day at first. We argued vigorously in Computer Committee and eventually this was raised to two a day. Still very little! The Unit's operators oversaw the 4130 as it ran the batch jobs. As each job started the user's name would be typed on the control terminal, such as ‘M Tedd' for one of mine. The operators loved it when a job appeared from one of our students called Inan Pong.

To improve the student experience the department was very keen to have its own machine. The College, fearful of the cost of this, consulted Ewan Page, the Director of the Computer Centre in Newcastle University. He advised that a department like ours didn't need its own computer!

I'm not sure how we overcame this, but in 1973 we gained approval to spend our annual capital budget to buy a computer, and we ordered a PDP 11/40. There was a Faculty of Science body, the Science Equipment Committee, with one representative from each department, which shared out capital and recurrent funds using formulae based on student numbers and subject needs. The dominant chairman was the Dean, Professor Clarence Kidson. Professor Emery couldn't bear him so he sent me along to the meeting, where Kidson announced that he had decided that our capital grant would be halved. When I pointed out that this meant we couldn't pay for the computer on order, he brusquely decreed that the Faculty would pay for it ‘off the top'. We actually ended up with 150% of what we were expecting; the cut to our budget was restored within a year or two.

We were also allowed to recruit Ron Harper as our first Computer Officer. He taught students about the PDP 11 and programming in assembler and he supervised hands-on practical sessions.

I think the PDP 11/40 as bought had 16K or 32K words of store (32 or 64K bytes). It had removable discs, each holding just over 2M bytes of data. When I retired, I was presented with a framed disc platter with the nice wistful sentiment that it might contain some software I'd written.

The computer was added to when we could afford it. One year we spent the whole equipment budget on extra memory – just 32K bytes of core store. We also bought a Tektronix 4010 graphics terminal. This didn't have its own computer memory but images drawn on the screen remained there until the whole screen was deliberately erased. I wrote a text editor (called TEDIT of course) to use the terminal which was widely used in the department. When text was deleted, a line was drawn through it; when text was inserted, a caret symbol (like ⁁) was drawn at the insert point in the text and the new text was shown in the margin. When you were happy with the page you would refresh the whole page and the changed version would appear. Maybe I should have sued Microsoft when they later put similar functionality into MS Word.

Over the next few years, I taught a number of different units (nowadays modules). I remember teaching data structures and algorithms, system design, programming languages (including Cobol) and operating systems but my memory is very incomplete. Apart from Ron and our secretary (Valerie, followed by Maureen, then Ruth) we had no support staff; low student numbers meant I could see every student every week either individually or in pairs.

I was keen that students should gain a year's experience working in industry before the final year of their studies. Several students did this in the late 1970s; indeed a few spent a year at SPL, including Chris Price who became head of the department 13 years later. The industrial year later became a compulsory part of several of our degree schemes.

Another initiative that started in 1979 was the Microelectronics and Computing degree (MEC) which was jointly taught my ourselves and Physics. At peak this course accounted for more than half the student numbers in Physics which probably saved the Physics department from the fate of Chemistry, which closed in Aberystwyth when its student numbers dropped too low.

Taking leave

By 1979 I was feeling in need of new challenges and a change of environment. At the same time SPL, for whom I continued to do interesting pieces of work, were setting up a research department in Abingdon. I applied to take two years ‘job leave' which was granted. I recommended my good friend Frank Bott as a very suitable replacement and that happened; indeed Aberystwyth was pleased to be able to keep him when I returned. He went on to succeed me as head of department in 1990.

I had a demanding and exciting period in Abingdon. The computer language Ada had just been defined for the US Department of Defense which wanted a good language to meet most of their project needs. John Barnes at SPL was a leading figure in this effort. Ada went on to be used in other countries, particularly for critical applications like air-traffic control. Associated with the Ada language was interest in creating software to support designers and programmers of important software systems – programming support environments “PSE”s or “IPSE”s (Integrated Programming Support Environments). With MoD funding, SPL and two other companies formed a consortium to work on the initial designs for a UK APSE (Ada Programming Support Environment).

Returning to the department

I returned to the department in October 1981. I had ceased full-time employment at SPL at the end of August with the intention of taking some holiday, but in practice I spent a profitable September working solidly. The period living in Oxford had been very pleasant, and it was sad to part with my company car, a splendid Audi. However, the attractions of returning to Wales to bring up our family there were very clear.

Software engineering

Over the years my relationship with SPL expanded with major advantages for the department. Several industrial year students gained a year's experience there, other lecturers gained experience working there for periods, and people like Frank and Chris Price joined the department after working there.

The early 1980s saw the exciting period when the Software Engineering research group got going. My SPL involvement in Ada and PSEs expanded to involve others in the department, notably Frank and Fred Long (who spent 1981-2 on leave at SPL). The relationship with SPL blossomed into research collaboration. Ada UK and Ada Europe were two groups set up to coordinate efforts and exchange expertise on Ada and PSEs. Fred and I were active in both, with Ada Europe taking us to Brussels several times. The European Commission (CEC) was setting up collaborative research programmes about this time and were keen to promote the use of Ada.

Under the CEC's Multi-Annual Data Processing Programme there was a project where SPL collaborated with two Italian companies to study how Ada could be used to program networks of microprocessors. I was involved with an SPL hat on and edited the resulting book. I remember the Italians being very impressed with Britain's victory in the Falklands war in 1982, and still have the Italian coffee maker that they gave me.

Then came the CEC's large Esprit programme which started in 1983 and ran to 1998 in five phases. For much of the 1980s, I was involved with Esprit in several ways: helping to write planning documents, evaluating proposals, selection committees and later monitoring some projects. This took me to Brussels many more times; the enjoyment of finding nice hotels and restaurants wore off, but then I had to be there for two solid weeks and I had an enjoyable weekend visiting places new for me, including Waterloo.

The Alvey Programme was a British government sponsored research programme in information technology that ran from 1983 to 1988, with a total budget of over £300M. One of its main themes was Software Engineering. The programme funded several projects to research and develop IPSE technology. One large project, Eclipse, involved three companies and three universities, including ourselves, to design and develop an IPSE; this ran from 1984 to 1988. Eclipse eventually became a commercial product.

Within the activity of PSE research interest developed in defining tool support interfaces (TSIs) which the tools would run on. Such interfaces provide a level which can be implemented on different operating systems, hence helping portability. As well, the interface can build in functionality, such as handling structured data, easing the way tools interact with each other as well as making them easier to develop.

There were two main TSI initiatives. In Europe, a consortium led by Groupe Bull was also keen to develop a TSI, called PCTE. They were funded by the Esprit programme from 1984 to 1986 and I was asked by the CEC to monitor and review the PCTE project and later a follow-on project, PACT, developing tools on PCTE. This took me to Paris quite often and I became quite involved with technical discussions. It was no coincidence that the Eclipse project later adopted PCTE to support its tools. PCTE became an ECMA standard.

In the US, a group called KIT/KITIA was set up, chaired by Tricia Oberndorf of the US Navy, to develop CAIS, a TSI particularly for APSEs. The first version of CAIS was primitive so a high-powered working group was set up to develop a second version, CAIS 2. I was one of two UK representatives on this group with the MoD paying my expenses. From 1986 to 1988, we met for a week every three months in the US, always in a nice place at that time of year – San Diego in January set one up for the year! CAIS became a DoD standard.

In Aberystwyth we gained experience of both PCTE and CAIS in two projects: KITE (funded by the MoD, 1985-88) and Sapphire (funded by the CEC 1986-1989) in which we were part of a consortium with UK and French companies.

Another EU initiative that I was involved with was a working group looking at the possibility of standardisation of the languages used to program industrial robots. This ran for several years, with meetings in various places. I don't remember it achieving very much.

ARISE was another large project with companies from six countries, funded by the CEC's RACE programme. It concerned software environments emphasising the reuse of software, especially in the telecommunications field. Edel Sherratt, by then a lecturer in the department, and I were the Aberystwyth grant holders, but my involvement was minimal.

Becoming department head

There was a dramatic development in late 1983. Professor Emery had a dog called Flikker. They walked up the hill from his house, Sandmarsh Cottage in Queen's Road, which kept them both fit. She was quite a nice dog, albeit very smelly, but was the source of some problems. The porters were very reluctant to clean his room; our secretary Valerie refused to look after the dog's water bowl. One day the dog bit a porter and then things moved very quickly. The porter was rushed to hospital. The Principal summoned Professor Emery and reminded him that dogs were not allowed on the campus. Professor Emery applied for early retirement. The committee that dealt with this was consulted by telephone and accepted the application. All done in one day, I believe!

By the time his retirement took effect in summer 1984, the post had been advertised, interviews conducted, and an external candidate appointed. As he couldn't arrive before the end of the year, I was asked to become acting Head of Department. When months later the appointee decided not to take up the post, I was asked to continue as acting head until a permanent appointment could be made. In June 1985 the new round of interviews were held. I had applied again and this time I was interviewed. I was very pleased to hear the same afternoon that I would become the Professor of Computer Science and would be Head of Department for five years.

My period as Head

The department I took over was in pretty good shape, although much smaller than it became, of course. Professor Emery's early emphasis on course development and teaching quality was still with us. Staff morale was pretty high with everyone pulling their weight and encouraging their colleagues. Mark Lee's AI research was prospering with major research grants. The Software Engineering group was also getting quite active and successful in gaining funding. These grants meant extra staff and extra computing facilities.

I was pleased to continue Professor Emery's custom of a weekly one-hour meeting of the teaching staff; I used to hand-write the minutes myself and circulate them immediately – quite a useful weapon to ensure actions are acted upon.

Until my time as head the department had not had its own coffee room. The then Principal was opposed to our having one, whereas I felt that the informal relations between staff were very important. So I arranged for a room to be built, a hidden half of a laboratory, and equipped with suitable furniture and a good coffee machine. Expanded, I believe the room still exists.

A very welcome boost to the department came from the University Grants Committee in 1986 or 1987. The UGC announced an extra payment of £1200 a year for every full-time-equivalent computer science student. Frank and I rapidly put together a plan to spend this money on extra lecturers, support staff, etc. The Principal, Gareth Owen, generously let us spend all the extra money as we had planned. It would have been quite within his right to take part of the extra grant as a contribution to College overheads. Thanks to these extra resources, growing student numbers and increasing research activity, the department grew steadily while I was head, roughly doubling in size over the six years.

A charming incident was the appearance of an anonymous cartoon on the notice board. It combined my then full beard and my usual smocks as well as the pun on my name. The cartoonist, Jan Pinkava, appeared in my office to apologise for any offence caused. I assured him that the opposite was true. Later Jan, working for Pixar, won an Oscar for an animated film. The students used the cartoon to decorate smocks they were having made, with the caption “Hug a Software Engineer today”. While I was head the department grew substantially, both in students and in staff. Research activity increased greatly. Staff morale remained high. Indeed, one remarkable fact was that, for the whole 20 years that the department has existed, Glyn Emery was the only lecturer or above to leave the department.

University management

In 1990 I was asked to become one of the Vice-Principals of the College and Frank took over as Head of Department. In those days senior academics took on these roles (equivalent to Pro-Vice-Chancellor today) for three years. The VPs still had some departmental activity but carried a lot of administrative responsibility, including chairing or membership of many committees, and were involved in most of the issues affecting the College. It was very demanding – I remember starting February once with my diary for that month completely full! Most evenings I would need to spend time preparing for the next day's challenges.

It was pretty satisfying though. One would go home most days feeling that problems had been solved and something achieved. The VP's authority meant that you could resolve trivial things like a squabble over the use of fridges in Biology as well as addressing more strategic issues. I oversaw the introduction of a modular scheme across the whole College. This was quite controversial as degree structures varied from department to department, so I was very pleased when after a year's work the scheme was adopted unanimously by Senate. For a short period while the Principal's wife, Jane Morgan, was very ill, I was in charge and I had to suspend a member of staff for serious misconduct.

Back to the department – other activities - retirement

As VP, I had to give priority to College matters over departmental ones. When I finished my term as VP in 1993, I found it difficult to readjust. I suspect that many VPs experienced the same and I applaud the current practice that VPs are more permanent. I became even more busy with external activities with a number of other bodies. In 1993, I was asked to join the new Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) which was set up to oversee both the Joint Academic Network (JANET) which connected UK universities to each other and the world and also the new emphasis on information services to be supported on JANET. As well as the main committee I was involved in JISC sub-committees: the Advisory Committee on Networking (ACN) overseeing JANET; the Follett Implementation working party (FIGIT) defining strategy for information services; and later the Committee for Electronic Information (CEI) which oversaw the development of such services. This was all very exciting, leading to major benefits for UK universities which are still developing today. It involved many trips, mostly to London where we usually met in Centre Point, one of the first skyscrapers in London. I remember one day when the man bringing our lunch was red-faced and apologetic – the lifts had been halted for high winds and he had carried everything up 24 floors.

For many years Newcastle Computer Science had held gatherings of CSci professors to their “International Seminars on the Teaching of Computing Science”. See homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/brian.randell/Seminars. They involved talks by very eminent figures from the computing world, often at the cutting face of CSci research, and not much about teaching per se. I was privileged to attend several of them. In September 1993 the theme was ‘Information' and one of the speakers was Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. At that point few had heard of the Web; indeed it had only entered the public domain in April that year. I became excited about the Web and on return I circulated a hand-written (for emphasis) memo to colleagues about its importance. This was a period when few websites existed, browsers were primitive and search engines were barely imagined.

My interest in the possibilities of the Internet and the implications for Wales developed over the next few years. In October 1995 I gave a presentation to the St David's Forum, a group of very important Welsh people, for example the controller of BBC Wales; they were barely aware of this coming world so were very interested. I was very involved in the Llwybr/Pathway project, funded by the EU's Objective One programme, which had various initiatives funding projects to advance the information society in Wales. One thread of this subsidised the availability of broadband in 10 smaller towns in Wales. As a result, Aberystwyth had broadband before much of Bristol, and I made a point of being the first home subscriber in Aberystwyth!

I had become Chairman of the Welsh Advisory Committee for Telecommunications (WACT), a role that lasted for many years. WACT had a statutory role advising the regulator OFTEL and I had regular meetings with the Director General of OFTEL. With my WACT hat on I gave evidence to the Welsh Affairs Committee of the House of Commons and to the Economic Development Committee of the Welsh Assembly. I was a pretty lone voice advocating issues like the need for a Universal Service Obligation for broadband and for BT's network infrastructure to be separated from its retail operations; both have now happened, after my time.

All this outside activity made me want to reduce my involvement in the university; the generous terms available at the time were also a factor; so I applied for early retirement. I became formally retired in 1998 when I was only 55. If anything, I became even busier with consulting and investing as well as many pro bono activities.
I continued to lecture part-time for a few years, on Professional Issues and on the Information Society. With less direct involvement with students – classes of 120+ few of whom I could name – I found this less satisfying, although the student feedback remained very positive. Also, I have never been happy to do things less well than I could do if I put more into them. I thus decided to stop lecturing and get on with life after the department.

Mike Tedd, 2023