Forgotten Voice

Well to cut a long story short and having worked on IBM’s 1401 and 1410 systems at my previous job at Port Talbot steel works I was attracted to an advertisement in a newspaper for jobs at IBM Hursley carrying out engineering work on a model of IBM’s 360. I applied for an interview, traveled from Liverpool to Hursley and after a series of interviews my final one was with Nobby Clark.

Towards the end on the interview Nobby put his feet on his desk and asked me if I knew what dynamic storage was. I was initially stumped for an answer and decided that I would go for bust. So I put my feet on Nobby’s desk, ruminated a bit about the LEO III having a multi-tasking operating system (OS 360 was not multi-tasking initially) and that all the programs I had written had the storage they operated on as part of the program.

So I conjectured that dynamic storage was storage that could be obtained and released dynamically by programs. I had not known how relevant my answer was and did not know that Nobby was at that time PL/I F runtime library manager.

A week later I received a letter offering me a job at Hursley. So my cheek at the interview with Nobby may have got me the job and subsequently a long rewarding career at Hursley.