First Job: CAP-CPP
Back from the independence of living in University accommodation at York, to sharing a bedroom with my younger brother at my parents home. From Hayes it was a forty minute bus journey to the nearest tube station, and another forty minutes to Central London, or a ninety minute bus ride to Richmond. These were the two main office of CAP, the body shop I was working for. It didn't take me long to decide to buy a Honda CB125S motorcycle, while my parents were on holiday, and cut the time to just over twenty minutes to my induction course in Richmond. £3,300 was a good starting salary in 1978, and I made good use of it.
CAP taught me COBOL, how to write flow charts, Jackson Structured Programming, and put me on a project writing a reinsurance system for Prudential in Holborn. We were using MicroCOBOL, an operating system and language devised by CAP, developing using various homebrew micros and a couple of PDP-11/03s, for a project to be delivered on an IBM Series/1. Amazingly it all worked, although I did end up writing a print spooler and various other operating system utilities along the way.
Nine months later, it was clear that COBOL programming and I didn't get along together. So CAP put me on an assembler course (for 360/370 machines), and then transferred me to CPP, the division based back in Richmond that sold software packages for IBM mainframes. They were losing over a period of time the rights to sell Boole & Babbage's line of performance monitoring products, and ADR's product line including Librarian and Vollie (if you weren't there, there is no point in explaining what these products did, it would be totally meaningless for modern systems). We were developing a couple of performance monitoring products for IBM's DOS/VS and VSE operating systems.
Time wasn't on their side. The loss of the other products was costing CPP a lot, and they had bought a Magnusson mainframe to buoy up our development efforts. At the same time, they were looking for new products to sell. The one that I remember best was SAS. In came a borrowed graphics terminal, a crazy new idea at the time, something the size of an industrial freezer. On this device they brought up a map of the USA, and coloured in a few states. This was amazing technology for the time; curiously enough, the demo was still the same one they used when I came across SAS again ten years later.
The net result was that a few people left CPP to set up Boole & Babbage's new distributor, the European Software Company, a large chunk left to set up ADR UK, and a small core team set up SAS Institute UK. A few remaining people (mainly the development team) and the hardware were sold to a curious former Swiss company called Computer Associates, now based in New York. They offered me more money than I was earning (then £6,500), but I didn't feel comfortable, so I turned it down.
