Forgotten Voice

In IBM it was normal to move from department to department every few years to prevent “early retirement” on the job. Accordingly, after a few years in Special Engineering I went to work in Mike Davis’s Graphics Workstation department reporting to Shaun Kerrigan and then later Bob Farr. Mike was one of IBM’s Wild Ducks and he had a formidable reputation. He had returned to Hursley after many years in Boca Raton in Florida where he had been the development manager for the IBM Series One mini-computer. In Florida his hobby had been fishing amongst the alligators and crocodiles. He had become acclimatised to the Florida heat and in Britain always wore a thick fur coat, even in summer.

Mike was an inspirational and hands-on engineering leader. He was often seen in the lab with a soldering iron or an oscilloscope. His hands carried the marks of long term exposure to engine grease. In meetings he would knit. He always had time to discuss and sponsor any interesting ideas you might have about work. When I volunteered to represent the lab at a cross-division meeting on Program Design Notation and Methodology, he had no hesitation in agreeing to fund the business class trip to America, my first visit to the land of the free. When he hired an Industrial Trainee, he asked me to work with the trainee on finding applications for the new-fangled Charge Coupled Devices. We designed and built a prototype for a colour document scanner well before these appeared on the market.

While continuing to work at IBM, Mike became the Engineering Director for the Watercress Line steam railway in Hampshire and for further amusement he built a large workshop in his back garden in which to collect and renovate old static steam engines. One Friday afternoon, Mike asked his IBM team to turn up at Ropley station where we spend the afternoon shovelling track ballast for an extension of the Watercress Line. I suppose it might have been a team building exercise.

On one occasion, John Akers, later to be IBM CEO, made a visit to the Hursley lab during which Mike’s team was to demonstrate a prototype graphics system. Two days ahead of the visit, the prototype was still not working and so most of the team worked 18 hours a day for a couple of days to get the system working. Fortunately the problems were resolved and the demonstration went without a hitch. After that, as a gesture of thanks, Mike invited the wives and partners of the engineers involved to come into the lab to see the demonstration. To this day, I have no idea whether such a visit was or would have been sanctioned by higher levels of management, but it was a good move from the perspective of leadership and team motivation.

On another occasion I was, with others, sent to Raleigh North Carolina to undertake Radio Frequency Inference (RFI) testing on a new monitor that was being developed to accompany the Valiant graphics workstation. At the time, the RFI testing facility at Hursley was housed in a wooden hut at the bottom of the car park south of D block. While it was clear that the monitor radiated excessively at 80MHz, the facility did not have the necessary workshop in which to conduct a proper diagnosis of the problem. A couple of monitors, a manager and a handful of engineers were duly dispatched to Raleigh and we spent the night shifts for two weeks working on the problem, generally by experimenting with the effect of placing ferrite cores on suspect wires in the monitor. Eventually the problems were brought under control and we could go home.

The office opposite mine in G block was occupied by Jack Bresenham, the investor of the patented algorithm for drawing straight lines on a raster display. This was one of the most valuable patents ever filed on behalf of IBM. While he was in Hursley, IBM decided to award Jack $20,000 to recognise his contribution. I was surrounded by a team of brilliant engineers doing interesting things and it was a privilege and a joy to come to work every day.