Interview with Dennis Moore, National Library’s History of
ICT in Australia Oral History Project
Dennis Moore
interviewed by Penny Collings in the National Library’s History of ICT in
Australia Oral History Project. The
audio recording of which this is a transcript was made on 7-Feb-2015, and can
be found at:
[transcript prepared by
Alex Reid, November 2017; “??” indicates unsure, “3/12:44” indicates 3rd
tape, 12 mins 44 secs in].
<text in angle
brackets is the interviewer, Penny Collings>
CONTENTS:
1. Early
life.
3. CSR - ops research;
IBM650.
4. Silliac:
Bennett & Rutledge.
5. Married
Jo Jory, met in London.
6. Officer-in-Charge
Computing, UWA, 1961, IBM 1620.
7. Sep
1962, IBM 1620, idiosyncratic.
8. Social
life in the "Fertility Flats".
9. Cricket
& wine.
10. External
use of 1620.
11. Triennial
funding 1968/9 - start of regional computing centre.
12. 1964/5
purchase of PDP-6: computer marketplace, time-sharing, IBM's play (DVC
Birkett-Clews).
13. Teaching
computing, PG Diploma.
15. Loanly,
Alex Reid.
17. Sabbatical
with Control Data in Silicon Valley.
18. WA
Regional Computing Centre, Cyber73.
19. Hospital
Cybers housed at WARCC.
20. Sabbatical
in Japan.
21. Packet
switching linking several computers in WA; Bruce Kirkby.
22. Staff
recruitment.
23. Seconded
to WA Government Computing.
25. SRIA
as an independent development entity.
26. School
of Computing at Curtin University.
27. Ran
Data encryption system, Monte Sala.
28. Ran
Data sales to SWIFT, opposition to certain overseas sales from US Govt.
29. Software
Services company in Malaysia.
30. Technology
Park.
31. Curtin
School of Computing.
32. Curtin
Director of Planning.
33. SKA,
supercomputers, Pawsey.
36. WA
Information Policy Chair.
37. Year
2000 problem.
38. Misc
consulting, eg Muresk, online education.
39. DNA,
Bill Smyth, Erdos Numbers.
40. Historical
perspectives on computing.
42. University
House.
<This is an
interview with Professor Dennis Moore, who will be speaking with me as part of
the Oral Collection of the National Library of Australia. On behalf of the
Director-General of the National Library I would like to thank you for agreeing
to participate in this programme. Do you understand that the Library owns
copyright in the Interview material, and that access to this interview will
only be given in accordance with the instructions you give us in the Writer’s
Agreement?>
Yes.
<We hope you will
speak as frankly as possible, knowing that the interview material will not be
released without your authority. This interview is taking place today,
Saturday, 7-Feb-15, in Perth. It’s actually at the University of WA, who have
provided us with a very suitable space in Trinity College.>
<So, can we begin
with the early years of your life, tell us here you were born…>
OK.
I was born in country NSW, in Goulburn, before the war. We moved around to various
country towns. Taree, Campsie, Tamworth (during the war), xxx[??] during the
war. A typical country town upbringing.
We moved to the city when I was about 9 or 10. We lived in Eastwood; went to
primary school there. Normal upbringing. In fact James’ [??] upbringing in
Sydney at the time rang very true. <What was that?> Clive James’
“Unreliable Memoirs” sounded very similar. Anyway, I went to Fort Street
[Public School]. My parents were very keen on education, for the whole family,
boys and girls. They had to leave school at 14 and support their parents
through the Depression. They were both quite bright, I think, and consequently
wanted more for their children, and I was entered for and ended up with a
scholarship to King’s School, Parramatta, where I suppose I had a reasonably
successful career: I was Captain of the school, and they had a scholarship to
Cambridge (Cambridge of Durham of all places), which was established before
there was a university in Australia. I won that scholarship and went to Cambridge
and read Mathematics.
<So you were doing
programming at AMP and actuarial studies; did you do that in Assembly language
or …>
Yes
it was all Assembly Language. Those machines where quite tricky; there wasn’t
much memory space to do anything; you got up to all sorts of tricks; I mean I
used to reverse-engineer actuarial tables, putting the curves back and
polynomials, and things like that, in order to get the data into the machine.
In fact I was told, I’m not sure I believe it, by someone I met a few years
after I left there, that when they were wanting to replace the machines they
had to keep them going for a year or two longer than they wanted to because
nobody understood my programmes. I find that a bit unfair, because I’m sure my
documentation was excellent!
<OK, so you were at
the AMP for a couple of years, and then what happened?>
I
came across a job at Colonial Sugar, in operations research, and that sounded
interesting. And so I applied for that and got the job.
<was that using
computers again?>
Oh yes, the main work I
was doing was computer oriented. The main programme I worked on was a
simulation of the economics of the sugar milling industry. The quantity of
sugar in the cane, called pulp, goes up over the season, and then drops off quite
sharply. The growers, of course, want an infinitely large mill because they get
paid according to the amount of sugar in the cane, so it can all be processed
on one day, so they can get the maximum return.
The Unions want the season to be as long as possible, because then they
get people employed for longer periods.
And of course the miller just wants to make money. So the objective was
to simulate the industry, or the milling part of it and the crushing and making
sugar, and to optimise the return of the industry. So they would have a season
length that was optimal for the industry and then argue about how the money was
split up over that. After finishing that model, which was actually written in
Fortran, then I ran it on a 650 at the IBM Search Bureau, which was in Parkes
Street, Sydney. My boss then was Bob Rutledge got very excited about the
outcome of this model, as the CSR had multiple mills through Queensland and northern
NSW; he said, look, there’s too many mills, clearly, the return on investment
needs to be done a different way; I’m going to take this to the Board, to
reduce the capital, etc. At that stage,
I didn’t see him again for a while, and I left CSR to come to Western
Australia. But I met him again later,
and asked him how taking that stuff to the Board had gone: what happened was that the prices in the
Cuban Crisis completely changed the demand for sugar round the world, so it had
made all this modelling obsolete. Which
is a good lesson to me – change is just round the corner: Cuba had all their
sales to America cut.
<There are still
repercussions from that right up to today>
<While you were at
AMP and CSR, of course, there was Silliac and Sydney University, and University
of NSW…>
Yes,
I used Silliac, mainly for programming problems, so I knew, met John Bennett
and all those people there at the time. I don’t think I ever used Uticom,
though I knew the people at the University of Technology (which became
University of NSW). There was an
interesting run-in between Rutledge and Bennett. 10% of the cost of using the
computer added to the bottom and paid to the Messell-Bennett joint account, and
this infuriated Rutledge and he refused to pay it. There you go!
<What the story
behind all that, I wonder?>
Well, I’m sure they
were using it for research!
Of course, Rutledge was
Secretary of the Computer Society for years and years, and he was also
Secretary of the Australian Statistical Society, so he was very active in those
Societies.
<And John Bennett
was too, wasn’t he?>
That’s right, Bennett
and Rutledge knew each other quite well, which made having a row all the more
interesting. And of course at that time there was, what was it called (terrible
name) - ANCCAC – Australian National Committee for Computation and Automatic Control
– it couldn’t have been more long-winded, could it? It was a sort of informal, semi-formal group
made up of computing people, and that was really the forerunner of the
Australian Computer Society – people in that ultimately got together to form the
Computer Society. Bennett was involved in that, of course
<Interesting the
development of professional societies like that - getting together groups of
like-minded people to share information, papers and so on>
Yes, and that’s how
this started in Western Australia, too.
<So, 2 years at AMP
then CSR, using your mathematical skills but learning your computing
skills?>
Yes. I was writing
programs and using standard programs, you know, like linear programming,
solving various modelling problems within the organisation.
<So, what else did
you in your life during those four years?>
I
got married; I met my wife in London when I was an undergraduate; she was from
Dubbo, NSW.
<What was she doing
in London?>
Well, she and her
sister decided to get out of Dubbo as soon as they could, I think. They sort of
worked in London then they hopped on their Lambretta and toured Europe. Then
they’d come back and work in London, and then hopped back on their Lambretta
and go to other countries; they spent 2-3 years doing that. I bumped into her
in London; she picked me up, literally. I slipped off a bar stool, and she got
me to my feet – that’s the best thing that ever happened to me in my life,
actually. Wonderful woman.
<And what line of
business was she in?>
Well, she was a
secretary, she worked in a research library at one stage, and when she came
back to Australia she was at IBM, in public relations, advertising. She came
back before me. We got married a few years later. She was in Sydney too.
We got married in 1961,
the last year I was working for CSR.
<Tell me about this
major move to Western Australia>
Obviously,
I was always on the move. The opportunity to be my own boss was, I think; I was
24, in fact 23 when I got the job; the opportunity to run your own computing
centre was worth a punt; so I applied for the job, as “Officer in Charge”, with
the status of Lecturer, at the University of Western Australia. Because, this
was late 1961, in the following year they were getting an IBM 1620. The computer wasn’t coming till September
1962, and they wanted me to work on a 1620 before I came over; so I worked for
4-5 months at Lucas Heights, which had a 1620, so I did programming up there.
<Lucas Heights,
Atomic Energy, that was a very big deal at the time, wasn’t it?>
Yes, and probably still
is - it still provides medical isotopes, X-rays, and medicine wouldn’t be very
happy if it closed down.
<Lucas Heights and
the whole atomic area was a big issue, politically, academically…>
I wasn’t really
involved in any of that, anti-nuclear demos, etc; it was the time of the Cold
War. I can’t really remember anything like that in the early sixties. It was
certainly enormous in the UK, wasn’t it? Bertrand Russell, and all those
things.
<So, you were at
Lucas Heights to learn how to work with the 1620?>
It didn’t take very
long.
<It was a wonderful
opportunity at that age>
Yes, well there weren’t
many of us around. I had 4 years’ experience of computing by then and that was
a lot in those days.
<I understand Don
Watts interviewed you for the position>
Yes, he did indeed, at
the old Metropole Hotel, in Sydney (it’s been knocked down now). It used to
have these enormous Streetons in the lounge, absolutely gorgeous, I wonder what
ever happened to them. But, it was a six-beer interview (a standard joke I
made); Wattsie, we got along pretty well.
<So, you and your
wife came over together?>
Yes, with a baby in a
basket.
Officially, the
appointment was in the Mathematics department, academic appointment, as a but
really it wasn’t in the same building, it the Computing Centre itself was quite
independent of Mathematics.
<So, what was the
interest at UWA in the 1620, why did decide to get a computer?>
There
was demand, I suppose; there was quite a strong Crystallographic department,
headed by Ted Maslen who was one of the main forces behind getting a computer.
This is 1962, and Sydney has had one for 7 years, so it was a bit behind. Mind
you, the University only had 300 staff, it wasn’t big; Perth was less than half
a million. People forget; we’ve been through 3 mining booms since then, and
it’s a bit different now. And there were
other people, of course, statisticians and agriculture was quite strong then:
there were quite a few people doing statistical modelling. So there was pressure;
surprisingly little interest in the economics and commerce department, in fact
negative interest at times, I think.
<Which was a bit of
a surprise – you’d been already working on computers in business>
That’s right, for 4
years before that. I’m sure they saw a future in it, but hadn’t adjusted to the
times; mind you a very senior academic in commerce said that computers in
business were only a passing phase – extraordinary! But then, the head of IBM
in 1950 said there was only going to be 8 or 10 in America, In fact, the 650
was not designed by IBM; I think it was actually purchased from Univac: I’m
pretty sure that’s true. They weren’t really very active in computing.
There was a new Physics
building being built, and I was the first tenant in it. The computer was
installed in September that year, and it was all pretty straightforward: I gave
lectures on Fortran and programming, and held a lot of people’s hands. When we
started, the number of people who had used computers was relatively small, so
that I had a lot of PhD students that I had to help – they weren’t my students,
of course. And I gave lectures on how to program; I was the only staff member;
the first appointment was a key-card operator, and then it grew from there. It
grew pretty rapidly, as these things do, and soon it was going 24 hours a day,
7 days a week.
<I presume there was
a lot of competition to get onto the computer?>
Yes, you had to book
ahead; people used to operate it themselves, at night time; during the day we
had an operator, who just fed the cards into the machine. People had to come in
and debug on the machine at times, when things got really tough. A funny
machine – variable word length, a decimal machine, obviously designed for
accountancy; I think IBM were convinced accountants couldn’t understand binary
numbers! The 650 was a decimal machine, too – bi-quinary decimal: 2 bits
between 0 and 5, 2 between 6 and 10, 4 bits for 1, 2, 3.
<Where did you
live?>
We
rented an apartment, then rented a house. Then we got a University house;
they’ve all been knocked down now; there was a row of houses in Parkway, which
is right on campus, owned by the University, and they were rented out to staff.
Unfortunately, rents were too cheap, which didn’t encourage you to save money,
or didn’t encourage you to move. That was very sociable; as I said, the
University was small; they were called Fertility Flats, because all these staff
members were quite young, many small children; and they were nearly all
ex-pats: a lot of English staff and from the East. And so there were no
grandmothers, and when a grandmother visited from overseas, she became an
honorary grandmother and all the kids would gather round. But socially, it was
good: we played Bridge in each other’s houses; we had a little Ensemble – I
played the recorder (learnt from school, self-taught); there was a violinist
and that sort of thing, and we used to play once a week, which was quite pleasant. There were some interesting people there –
Elizabeth Jolley, the author; she was living there, Leonard was the Librarian –
they lived in Parkway. She used to sell materials for doing washing up and
things like that, from door to door, and she ended up broke from it: all the
people in Parkway got round and bought her goods – we had a cupboard full of
this stuff for years. I think she actually used that experience, of door to
door selling, in one of her books. She
was a nice woman; Leonard was very strange; he was in a wheel chair most of his
life: very bad arthritis and he was rather bitter, I think.
<So you had quite an
active social life in Parkway; what about the University itself?>
Socially,
you mean? There was always University House on Friday nights, which was pretty
good, because we almost had that Japanese system where if you’ve had a few
beers you’re allowed to tell the boss what you whatever you liked. Mind you,
most had no trouble telling you what they thought anyway. I played cricket, second
grade cricket, and rugby, at the time, because I was young enough I suppose. In
fact, the staff at UWA was quite young, they actually managed to raise a staff
rugby side (out of 300 staff) to play the students, so you had any number of
young people to do that. There were staff cricket matches – I assume they’re
still going; we used to play the vineyards twice a year. We’d play at the
University once a year, and then go up to the Swan Valley once a year. Jack
Mann was the principal wine maker in the Swan valley, and he used to run a
cricket team – the last person I saw to bowl underarm in a cricket match. We
always used to do very well up to lunch time, but then he used to produce his
Chablis, at half time.
<So, was wine grown
over here at that time?>
Oh, I think it had been
going for a hundred years: wine-growing has been going here for a long time.
<At the time, was
the 1620 used by external people as well as internally by the University?>
Yes,
a little bit, CSIRO was the main user at that stage, and then some engineering
departments – Main Roads, Water Board and things like that. One thing that made
computing in Western Australia, which was very important in the long term, was
that real money was charged for usage. So that means that money was not considered
wasted by the University, and everybody saw that it was equal, that it was fair
– everybody was charged the same. So when we came to expand and move in towards
a Regional Computing Centre, that mechanism was there, in place.
<That whole idea of
a computer centre like a service bureau was quite common in the early days,
wasn’t it?>
Yes,
but talking a few years later, when we were looking for much larger computers:
after the 1620 we got the PDP-6 (which is a story on its own), and then moving
up again we were looking at larger computers and the Regional Computing centre
was formed: the government was encouraging large computing centres, and I think
it might have been driven by CSIRO, and there were enormous rows between the
universities about whether this government policy was ever going to take place.
And in fact I was away in America in 1967-1968 when all this was going on. But
apparently, the Eastern States people just couldn’t cooperate at all, and they
lost Triennial funding, 3 years of funding for computing, because nobody would
agree on cooperation. Whereas, over here we had a 1-line entry in the thing, so
some money would be given to Western Australia for upgrading computing. At that
stage, funding was 50% State, 50% Commonwealth – triennial funding. Because
we’d had this cooperation going for so long, we had charging systems, and
things like that, and people outside the University started to use the PDP-6,
we were in a position that we could actually put together a package, and go to
the Premier and get approval from the State for half the money and go back to
the Commonwealth. So we ended up getting
triennial funding which the others States didn’t. <That was quite
successful, wasn’t it?> It took a bit of negotiation. <We’ll come back to
that>.
<Let’s move on to
the purchase of the PDP-6>
Quite a long,
interesting story. Well, clearly the 1620 wasn’t going to service the
University, and money was made available, through the Triennial system, to
upgrade, so we went out to tender. The front runner, so everybody thought, would
have been IBM: they were in there, they were offering 60% discounts; although,
the 1620 was bought on 60% discount; by the time this came around, the
anti-trust people in America had taken IBM and said no, you’re not allowed to
offer those discounts, because the other computer manufacturers can’t compete,
so internationally and in America they had to reduce it to 40% discount for
universities, which made it a bit more competitive. And then a few scunge people crawled out of
the woodwork. ICT was there (later ICL, when they took over all those other
British computers). I remember having a conversation with someone about all
these computer companies, and he said it’s going to be like the car industry:
in the early days there were lots and lots of car manufacturers, and they used
to give lessons on how to drive. It would be exactly the same - in 5, 6, 10
years, the number of manufacturers will dwindle.
So
there was ICT, IBM and 2 strange people – Digital Equipment from Maynard
Massachusetts, and a Canadian company called Ferranti-Packard; of course,
Ferranti was a well-known name in England, in electronics (Barry Ferranti is
not related, though he used to pretend he was! – oops! Not allowed to say that!
He was at Sydney). The Ferranti-Packard and the DEC were quite different
machines, because the DEC machine really grew out of MIT, they’re all from MIT:
of course there had been Project Mac there and online computing, etc, etc. The
PDP-6 was actually originally designed to share computing with running
equipment in laboratories and things like that. But it was a full time-sharing
machine with the appropriate hardware put in there so it would do it
efficiently, etc. The Ferranti-Packard machine actually was also a time-sharing
machine, in the sense that it ran the Toronto traffic lights at the same time
it was doing computing, and that was pretty early for that.
I had been following
MIT – you read the computer journals and things like that. I just knew that
online computing, and interacting, and servicing equipment, and so on was just
the way it was going to go. So I pushed for that. Fortunately, the salesman for
Ferranti-Packard was a bloke called Smith, who had a golden tongue, and his
presentation on the benefits of time-sharing almost had the troops, the
computer users’ group, cheering. Extraordinary! But he was actually selling the
other person’s machine, because it really just could not compete with the DEC.
<So that is what you
wanted to buy, and now you had everybody on side?>
Yes. Though IBM wasn’t
on side, they tried to get me sacked; not very pleasant: an interesting story.
This was after it was
ordered, of course: one morning the
Deputy Vice-Chancellor rang me up and said the general manager of IBM wants to
talk to the Computer Committee; I said, Oh, that’s good – I was Secretary of the
Computer Committee, I’ll book the Vice-Chancellor’s Board Room. No, no, he
said, it’s going to be in your office: I thought this was a bit strange: I
didn’t even have air-conditioning, like everybody else, and the office was
tiny, you know. So on the morning I suggested to the DVC that he sir at my
desk, and he said no, you sit at your desk; and then the committee came in, and
barely fitted, couldn’t really find room, had a room full. And Clews turns up
with Moyes, and Moyes sits down and Clews says that Mr Moyes wants to address
us; and of course, he’s in a heavy suit, it was 105 in the shade: he lasted
about 10 minutes; he talked about a lot of different things – loyalty, loyalty
to IBM, who’ve done this and done that. Then Clews said “Thank you Mr Moyes, we
shall consider your views. Good day!” I
didn’t know what was going on, it took me a while to work it out. Extraordinary
– it taught me that loyalty can go down as well as up.
Birkett-Clews was an
Englishman, very proper; never saw him without a coat and tie. He was a
physicist; he’d actually worked on analogue computers during the war in
range-finding, so he had some interest in computing. He was Deputy
Vice-Chancellor, originally in Physics. We went to America together to check
the PDP-6 out; I spent 3-4 days there, and all seemed to be in order. He went
down to Washington or somewhere or other to check the company out, in terms of
its abilities to meet its contracts, etc I suppose.
<So you went to
Maynard? What year was that? 1966?>
Yes, 1966 I suppose
[actually it was 1964 or 1965]. The factory was an old mill there.
<Yes, that’s where I
used to work. So that was the meeting where Moyes’ aim was to really have you
sacked?>
Yes. Apparently this
was pretty standard practice for IBM. They were pretty hard. If they didn’t get
the contract, then the concept was that the person making the recommendation
was incompetent. Hard times. But, of
course, it’s different now because in those days with large computers the
salesman got huge commissions, and so the fights can be hard, discounting,
negotiations, ... I used to negotiate;
you’re probably not allowed to do that now. But I saved the University hundreds
of thousands of pounds, dollars, just by playing two companies off against each
other. What I’m saying is that the rules are now so rigorous in universities
you can’t do that. I can see why, but perhaps that’s a loss to the world. But
computing might have changed anyway.
<Continuing the
Interview with Dennis Moore, can you tell me about the development of teaching
in computing and what that was called and what the developments were>
Originally,
the teaching was done by myself; we taught assembly language and programming;
that was informal, to get things going. Ultimately there had to be more formal
education come to WA in computing. So the first proposaI I took to the
University was for a post-graduate diploma. Because Cambridge had run a
postgrad diploma for many years, and it was called Diploma in Numerical
Analysis and Automatic Computing; of course, it was heavily numerical analysis
and mathematically oriented, as you’d expect at that time. So the University
talked about this. I just wanted to call it Diploma in Computing, but oh no, it
had to be the same as everyone else, Numerical Analysis, etc, etc – a long-winded
name. Fortunately, after a couple of
years I managed to get it changed. There are still people around who had a “Dip
NAAC”. And that took off and we used staff of the Computing Centre. They were
also very insistent about standards and they insisted that the students do
advanced Mathematics and Maths as well, which was all very well, but it didn’t
leave enough time to do the important things which was to prepare people to be
professionals. I think I must have taught the Numerical Analysis, I can’t remember
anyone else; my teaching was always pretty poor because I was always only 1
chapter ahead of the class. But we had quite reasonable staff then, quite
capable of lectures, and we did a pretty standard course, with Numerical
Analysis and stuff for a professional training - systems analysis and design,
programming, operating systems, how compilers work, etc
<So, the students:
where were they going to work?>
By then, computing had
come to Western Australia, or started to come – I can’t remember the year now;
they all seemed to find jobs – of course a good few of them left the State; I
used to employ some of them. The demand was reasonable; there weren’t huge
classes, of course
<Well, was there an
undergraduate degree introduced?>
Well, that was much
later, that the University wanted to set up an undergraduate degree. I thought
that people should be educated before they took computing courses – I preferred
people to have a degree in “X” and then do computing on top. Of course, every
undergraduate degree should have some exposure to computing, they should all be
able to program computers, and things like that, but you don’t have to have a
full degree in it, for most people. I actually suggested 2 post-graduate
diplomas – one in business and the one we already had: that was on top of a
degree, so 4 years, with a fair amount of computing at undergraduate level for
most people. But no, they wanted the standard things. There was a great deal of
hostility within the University, people competing for students; because they
thought computing would grow and start to become fashionable at this stage, and
they thought they’d lose a lot of students to it. No computing was allowed to
be taught in first year. But this had to change. We had a lot of trouble
finding someone suitable, it was hard to find them then, to teach it, and you
needed a Chair, and I certainly wasn’t interested. I mean, you’d have to be
desperate – Sorry! But I did end up running a department, but that was in a
different type of institution. What I hated was xxx[??] a different type of
institution.
Robin Stanton at ANU,
who ended up as Deputy Vice-Chancellor there – he actually applied; I
encouraged him to apply and he’d lined up a senior person in computing in
Adelaide to come too. But the University said he was too young, and they
offered him Associate Professor, which he wouldn’t accept – terrible, terrible.
Anyway, they finally got somebody. The Computing Centre was there with all this
gear, the funding was there, to get really bright young people in; the name
Computing was xxx[??]. That was the undergraduate course, outside the Computing
Centre.
<And then you had
your first PhD in Computing?>
Yes,
well that was earlier, before all this. He actually did his work using the
light pen and display. Bryon Kakulas was here, interested in lung tissues and
what not, muscular degeneration, muscular dystrophy. We were looking at an
automated way of taking slides from muscle tissue and see whether they were
degenerate or not. The computer did pattern recognition, recognition of
hexagons, xxx[??]. That was an interesting topic. Colin Jarvis, who was then
working at the Computing Centre, did that. He was the only research student I
think I had at UWA.
<But you certainly
oversaw dramatic developments in computing?>
Oh yes. At that time,
yes.
<And you were doing
some application development: where you doing things like Loanly for the
Library?>
That
was Alex Reid. He actually wrote one of the world’s first automated library
systems. The technology wasn’t quite right: instead of bar codes, there were
aluminium codes slipped into the spine of the book; but that would have had to
have changed if that system was to progress.
But it worked, the system worked! And so he had one of the first library
systems ever, I suppose. He was Deputy Director of the Regional Centre by then,
he later became Director.
The University
Computing Centre became the Regional Centre.
<And so it was
through that that the Library system was developed?>
Alex was employed by
the Computing Centre, the Regional Centre, and he did that as a project, for
the Library.
<One of the aims was
to have other libraries use that, was that right?>
Well, there were
library systems being developed everywhere in WA at one stage; I could never
get libraries to talk to each other. I recently read Dibble’s biography of
Elizabeth Jolley, and he stated in that that the State Librarian at the time
and Leonard Jolley, the University Librarian, hated each other’s guts. So that
explained why I could never get them to talk to each other.
Of course, they all
said their systems were better than the others. But now, of course, they all
buy this Israeli system, which I think dominates the market – or they did a few
years ago when I last looked, which may be now 10 or 15 years ago!.
<In those early
days, there were a lot of systems created in Australia, a lot of creativity,
but that has now faded somewhat, hasn’t it? Why do you think that is?>
Well, we had no
tradition of doing so, and no venture capital, and we have small markets. When
I was involved in raising venture capital for the encryption invention, we had
to go to New York, and in hindsight we would have been better off just leaving
Australia, because then we wouldn’t have had the trouble.
<We’ll get back to
that! So what about the WA Computer Society? Let’s just talk about that for a
while>
From
the early days, we always had a Users’ Committee, and of course we had people
from outside the University using the computer quite substantially, and we used
to meet once a month, and people would give a paper or talk about problems with
computing generally, as well; as arguing about access to computer time! So that
was a real base, and was unofficially a sort of society. And when ACS was
getting off the ground, it was growing in the Eastern States. Bob Rutledge, who
I used to work for and was Secretary, rang me and said that we think it was
time something more formal was done in WA, because we’re becoming very formal
here. So, what I did was I took the Constitution of the ACS which had just
formed, and changed it to refer to WA; so then I formed the WA Computer Society
which met once (or a few times) and then we applied to join the ACS, and then
we became the WA Branch – but that was easy because we had taken on their Articles
of Association. So that continued to meet at UWA, for quite a long time.
<So, you were chair
of the WA Branch and really got it off the ground, didn’t you? Why did you see
that as important?>
I always thought the
relationship between universities and professional societies was important;
there was always (or used to be) an awful lot of crummy computing around
(perhaps there still is!) and I just thought it could be done better – professional
qualifications, and the bulk of the people coming into computing weren’t coming
through the universities – you know, they were in-house trained; I was in-house
trained; there were a lot of people who really needed to be kept up to date,
and that still continues, of course – you need to have continuous professional
accreditation, particularly as computing hasn’t stopped changing.
<Did you fulfil that
role for some years?>
Yes, for a number of
years; but I was keen for younger people to take over sooner rather than later.
Having run a computing centre at 24, I don’t think I could object to younger
people running things.
<The ACS also ran
conferences?>
Ah yes, we had annual
conferences, annual meetings; we ran the Australian conferences occasionally,
every 7 years or thereabouts; it moved from State to State. It still runs
annual conferences – though I’m not sure about that as I haven’t heard of one
for a while. And they used to run a Journal, which they don’t any more.
<The main thing
they’re into is the whole professionalism issue. Tell me about your sabbaticals.>
There
came a time when we needed large scale computing to service the State –
probably another mining boom! (I’ve been through 3 – history repeats itself).
CSIRO at that stage had moved to Control Data, and that was the large-scale
computing in Australia, and I thought that I’d never really worked on very
large scale computers (for the time). So, I had a Sabbatical due, and I said I
wanted to go and do some research, hopefully applied research, and negotiated
with Control Data to see if there was something I could work on in industry, or
a contract they might have with a university or something, in order to get the
feel of this class of machine. They had an establishment in Stanford Technology
Park (before it became Silicon Valley), and they had a contract with Standard
and Poors to do online share manipulation (this was pretty early!), in which
you could order and sell shares through a teletype; the idea was you could
type, in English, to complete this order. I was doing some language translation
– a limited vocabulary, of course, to see how far you could go (not like I was
trying to translate English into Japanese!). It was an interesting project, and
I cut some code and designed some systems to do that, so that people could sit
down and say if the price of IBM goes above $200 then sell 2,000, and then that
could be converted into a formal instruction to the computer. That was one of
the most interesting years of my life; I used to interact with Stanford a bit,
with the computing people there; a lovely part of the world; I played cricket
all over northern California; I enjoyed it! The universities had cricket sides,
San Francisco Cricket Club is really old; Robert Service even wrote a poem
about it. I played for the MCCC – Marin County Cricket Club (I can’t say I
played for the MCC, it had an extra C!). That was very enjoyable, but you had
to travel fairly long distances to go to other universities.
I took the family with
me – I had 3 small children by then. I actually wanted to stay in California,
where I was; I was offered some very good jobs, but Jo said she didn’t want the
children to grow up there.
<It was a difficult
time in the USA then, wasn’t it?>
Ah yes, there were a
few bombings; you used to come home and watch the xxx[??]; San Francisco State
seemed to be always having riot at that time. Of course it was the height of
the peggy (??[1/21:25]) boom, also the Vietnam war - that was what I meant
about the violence in San Francisco. Martin Luther King was shot, Bobbly
Kennedy was shot; interesting to see these things on TV. Palo Alto of course
has something like 17,000 PhDs working there; East Palo Alto was a Negro area,
and the contrast was quite interesting. Ehen Martin Luther King got shot, there
was a huge march in Palo Alto; my wife was out shopping, not aware of what was
going on; all the shopkeepers boarded up their shops, and she got stuck in a
shop doorway while this was going on; she got rescued by the police and they
brought her home; the kids insisted that they had the siren running at one
stage! America is 5 or 6 different countries, I’ve found; but I think that the
people in that part of the country were very pleasant on the whole.
<It was a difficult
time at that time, so I can understand the reluctance to want to stay. But the
opportunities for you at that time were marvellous.>
It was the last time I
worked in the trade, really. I escaped management for a while
<So you returned to
WA, still as Director of the Computing Centre – as Professor?>
No, I was never
professor, but on professorial salary; I can’t remember when I was put on that
salary.
<There were quite a
lot of different partners in the WA Regional Computing Centre?>
Yes,
it was big Centre, and it got bigger when the hospitals came in; we had to
build another wing. We had to build this other wing when the Cybers came,
because they needed the space and also had specialised air-conditioning. And
then when the hospitals came in and put their computers in there as well, then
we had to build a wing to put the hospital staff in – that was financially
interesting, and we’ll get to that, I suppose.
Actually, the Regional
Computing Centre had an overseeing committee which was made up of government
and universities, because the bulk of the money put up, apart from the
universities, were government departments, and some of them had representatives
on this overseeing committee. I can’t remember it meeting all that often, but
I’m sure it did.
<When you bought the
Cyber system, I assume it wasn’t nearly so controversial as when you bought the
PDP-6?>
No, people knew the
CSIRO had them and so they were in Australia by then; it was a fairly standard
batch environment, and it was really there to meet the engineering grunt need;
we put remote batch terminals in various government departments, and in the
other university, in WAIT, and places like that; and around the campus – so
people could run their batch without coming to the Computing Centre.
<You said there were
some interesting financial issues?>
Yes, with buildings.
The expansion for the hospitals that the University built the building for, and
they rented it back for 30 years, and then the University owned the building.
When I was in Treasury later I was surprised the Treasury was quite happy with
that – they said it was very useful because it meant they didn’t have to get
Commonwealth Government approval for it! The University did well out of it – it
got a new building.
<When you did that
with the hospitals, was there an attempt to ease [??4/28:00] off?>
Yes,
that was sad. We had all the major hospitals working together on one computer.
And they had remote batch and accounts for government and all that sort of
thing, administration stuff. Then they wanted to take it further, and it was to
run on the Control Data machines, so Control Data said they would put in some
computers in the front of this, which can act as the interactive devices to go
into this. I sat on the Committee. What happened was that Control Data couldn’t
do it, on those machines – they wanted to use their own machines. If it had
been done on DEC servers, or something… But that caused the whole system to
collapse. It was an opportunity to do something worthwhile - the design of the
system was good, but it fell down on mechanical problems. I felt guilty,
because I was on the Committee, and I probably didn’t ask the right questions.
I knew the engineers, they were around me all the time and was assured that all
was well. An opportunity missed. But ether [??2/29:30]. But it could have
worked because of incremental development – one of my theories. Large scale
systems should, where possible, be implemented incrementally, particularly when
you don’t know the xxx[??] account. It’s a bit like xxx[??] on social
engineering. That sort of approach, often works extremely well – things have to
be done in stages. Like, if you’re going to do an all-of-government system, and
there are 10 or 20 different departments, you don’t have to do them all at
once, together; you do them one at a time. It’s mind-blowing! So if one or two
fail, you can can the project without spending too much money, and with less
pain.
<Reminds me of the
ManData system where there was going to be one large HR system for all
government departments. It wasn’t done incrementally and then it got cancelled.
Late 60s>
There was one like that
in WA and they lost a lot of money.
<I read somewhere
that you considered WA was better structured for this kind of Regional
Centre?>
Yes, well Perth was
still fairly small, but big enough for things to happen. If we’d been smaller,
there wouldn’t have been the funding; if we’d been much bigger then you can’t
talk to people, you don’t meet, you can’t get round. But a small city helps a
great deal.
<Talk about your
time in Tokyo.>
We
all make mistakes! I spent a lot of time
wondering what was going to happen next. I spend a lot of time living in the
future! I was watching the rise of the
Japanese computer industry, and I was due for another Sabbatical at some stage,
and I thought I would go an explore that and see if there was some way we could
do joint ventures, or… So I started to find out about it; I went to Japanese
classes at UWA for a couple of years, and then went to a university in Tokyo to
continue my studies, and at the same time I did a bit of consulting for Australian
(IT) companies, in terms of sitting with them through their interaction with
Japanese people; I did a bit of translation of computer manuals. I soon
discovered really that the Japanese computing representative was making claims
and things like that, and just couldn’t see – I admit I was put off by the
structure of Japanese businesses – things were very, very rigid, and it didn’t
suit my personality! I like bypassing such strictures. And so I thought, this
is not going to work, so that effort was, I suppose… But then, I lived in
another country.
The family only came at
Christmas and holidays – they were all at school, so I was away from them for a
fair while. But good intentions…
<Continuing the
interview with Dennis Moore, I’d like to continue the discussion in relation to
your development of packet-switched networks, linking various UWA computers and
government systems, as part of the WA Regional Computing Centre>
Well,
I’d always watched the development of packet switching and obviously with so
many computers growing into the networks that made up the Regional Computing
Centre, to me it was fairly obvious that packet switching was going to be a
major contributor to managing such systems. The availability of software and
services in Australia to handle these just didn’t seem exist at the time.
Fortunately, we had some very competent people at the time; a person called
Bruce Kirkby who did a large amount of work in that area. I remember meeting
with Bruce in 1970 and saying that by 1980 packet switching would be common in
Australia; he said no, he just couldn’t see it happening, because everybody
wouldn’t just cooperate – the bet was for a beer at a major restaurant in
Perth. He paid up, of course, as packet switching did come in. I also made a
bet that voice input and output would be common by 1990 – I had to pay up that
bet! There isn’t really much to say
about it – we just did it.
WA is just so large
that there was no way you could afford multiple lines and things like that from
small country towns with multiple computers.
<You seem to have
been able to employ some bright people, like Bruce Kirkby?>
The
employment prospects in Perth for doing advanced work were fairly low, so it
was an attractive place for bright young graduates, usually with Honours, in
various fields, and a lot of them did the post-graduate diploma as well – so we
could see people a long time before we offered them employment.
<It was important
for you to get a good team of people?>
Oh yes. And really to a
large extent it made the place.
<By the time you had
done all that you were beginning to consider what you might do next?>
Yes. When I returned
from Japan, the chairman of the Policy Committee then (not Clews by then) said
that we weren’t allowed to do research. I was a bit staggered, as we’d been doing
applied research, though admittedly we didn’t have time to publish much, as we
were implementing the results of our research and development. I thought that
was rather… And of course computing was changing fairly rapidly, in terms of
the growth of different machines, and I thought that it might be time for the
Regional Computing Centre even to disband a bit. I didn’t really see myself
running this dodgy university computing centre. Of course, I knew a lot of
people in government by then, and I negotiated with the Under-Treasurer about
moving into the Treasury to look after computing in government. And so I was
seconded out to government as Executive Director of Government Computing, and I
was there for a number of years.
<What does it mean
to be Executive Director of Government Computing?>
Well,
it means that you could draw together and … Fortunately, again, Perth is
reasonably small, and I knew all the people in computing in Government, and it
was really about getting coordination to get economies of scale, in purchase of
software and things like that, and cooperation; but also there were
opportunities for the development of computing systems. Well one thing I did
when I first got into the government I discovered that there was no systems
development methodology in any department, and this absolutely staggered
me. WAIT as it happens had a 1-page
systems development methodology, which I borrowed, added a few lines here and
there. I distributed that to government departments saying here is a systems
development methodology, use it until you can go out and buy something that’s
more professional and suitable. And that was such a simple thing but had a
major impact on the systems development within government. A trivial thing
perhaps, but gee it was important. For a long time WA had no standards in
systems development, but that sort of foundation is necessary.
<When you moved to
the Treasury in that role, the WA Regional Computing centre still existed,
didn’t it?>
Yes, Alex Reid took
over, and as I was seconded he was Acting Director. After a couple of years I
felt really guilty about him still being Acting Director, so I resigned and
became a public servant.
<You were still
dealing, in your new role, with WARCC?>
Yes, of course, that
was still continuing, but with the price of computers falling and specialised
computing, and departments doing their own development, there was tendency for
the number of computers, etc to grow. But they were still being linked together
with WARCC, because of access to specialist software and things like that.
<In your role as
Director of Government Computing, still involved with WARCC, what else did you
pick up?>
There
were some major projects which I thought were important for the State, one in
particular. I had some years previously been seconded for 3 months to the Lands
Department to review their computer developments, and they were really only
using computers for mapping and things like that. But I did have an evening
there, and did have discussions there with the Surveyor-General of the time
about the potential for Land Information Systems, and that roused my interest
in it. The technology wasn’t available at the time; there were many decent
graphic devices, but there was no software, so to set up a LIS would have to be
a major pioneering effort. We did a major review of computing, and published
some papers on strategy, and to set up some centres like sharing computers for
… we had networking, and large computers for the department to use; and we set
up another one for the police and justice system, and that was quite
interesting; that was a natural thing to do, because you had people out on
parole and things like that. But that in fact didn’t work in the long run – the
police were not interested in cooperating with anybody. But, getting back to
the LIS, you obviously had to do a lot of groundwork in terms of getting a LIS
out, getting it moving; and this in today’s terms would be 90 millions, I
should imagine. IBM was very good to me – they found someone who was actually
working out in Venezuela, I think; he was Australian, a surveyor, which helped
of course, but he had experience in LIS – Brian Humphries. He was a marvellous
find. So he came in and did a cost-benefit study, across government on land
information, and produced educational material to try to educate management
about how good it might be. He wrote a top-class submission. Treasury looked at
it and said that looks all right and (to cover their backsides) sent it off to
McKinseys: McKinsey rewrote the Report and gave it back to government! Because
it was pretty good.
And so the initial
finance came in. There were some problems, though, some political problems. The
Surveyor-General was not very popular with the rest of government, to say the
least. And of course you can’t have a Land Information System without the Lands
Department – I mean they do look after the xxx[??2/12:13], etc. The silly thing
was that the engineering departments were doing their own mapping, as well as
the Lands Department – I mean, that sort of thing probably was fairly common at
the time – maybe it’s common now! And they were pretty well at each other’s
throats. Finally, the engineering departments said we’ll go along with it as
long as John Morgan doesn’t have anything to do with it. How can you have a
Lands Information System without the Lands Department!? So we had to…;
fortunately, I knew John Morgan personally, so I sort of smoothed things over
occasionally on who was responsible for what.
That meant establishing a separate Centre which would be independent of
everybody. Then again, we had some luck: when we came to set up this Centre,
Sperry Univac offered us a free computer. Obviously, from a marketing
viewpoint, that was an “in” for them – if a major system was developed on their
computer then they would have a way in for future sales. So from a financial
position, that gave us a good situation, even though the machine was coming to
the end of its life, it was still a substantial gain.
And
we established a separate Centre in a government building away from all other
government departments. At the time, as we had all this spare capacity, I was
interested in the potential for opening up a hub, so we could get people in to
develop things and take them out to give them a try in industry in WA. I had
seen SRI (Stanford Research Institute), and so I called this one SRIA (Systems
Research Institute of Australia). So that was one mechanism that had to be put
into place. But the other piece of luck we had was that the Titles Office,
which was then a separate department from everybody (nowadays, LandGate looks
after titles and maps, whereas they were separate departments then), it was in
a terrible mess: manual records, from 150 years: there was one case where a
department tried to buy its own land. Neil Smythe was the Director of the
Titles Office then was very good – I’ve found that CEOs who take an interest in
computing end up with good systems – when they delegate and stay away from it.
Most of the CEOs at that time had even been in the war, so really had no
understanding of computers; so it was an educational problem.
So we got the Titles
Office in and cleaned that up – now that was not an advanced computer exercise,
it was straightforward data processing and hard slog of correcting records. For
example, the code for the Energy Commission is about 20 names in the documents:
SEC, S.E.C., State Electricity, etc. So every item had to be gone through by
hand. As it turned out, that system was very profitable: not only from the fact
of efficiency, but also it was discovered that there was a great deal of land
tax being avoided. So it alerted the Treasury to see that here we had a winner;
we had to have that information computerised. I found out later that they
didn’t pursue back land tax – just made them pay back tax for one year; the
reason they gave was a political one – they didn’t want to have to admit that
their systems had been so lousy!
So the Land Information
System as I said was integral; the other bit of luck we had was that small
graphics computers started to come on the market, though still fairly
expensive; some software started to come on the market. We attracted a major
Californian software company to Perth (ESRI?) to set up its regional office
here. In order to get departments to cooperate together in the education we set
up an Urban Working Group where we would take people from the utilities, and
local government, etc in and show them what a LIS could do for them; and we had
a Rural Group with Agriculture, Forestry and people like that. That was all
going at SRIA, and so it built from there. The bulk of the next task was to get
the Lands Department Cadastre system in and we got stuck into that and did
that: the Cadastre system is the legal boundaries, so that was automated,
computerised. It grew from there, and the system continued, and was sold
internationally, to a large extent.
<Can you give us
some examples of the problems it was used to address?>
It was more
educational; they were working with the same sort of materials. LIS is more
than just looking after who owns the land – it’s modelling: where forests are,
where to place stuff, catchment areas are, and so on. Having all that
information available allows people to do research and development and plan;
and the same with geology, of course. It impacts everything that’s important in
WA – it really was important stuff. In Mining and Agriculture. You get these
people working together – it was a way of educating people, but in their own
environment, using a sample of their own data, their real data that they could
put on top. So that the Agriculture people could produce maps of where things
were, etc, and make decisions accordingly.
<Of course, this
wasn’t limited to WA, was it?>
No, Land Information
Systems had quite a big impact internationally, on selling systems and whatnot.
I also actually also consulted to the Sarawak government on their LIS, and the
tender for that included stuff from WA. So it did have a commercial impact as
well as the value to government.
<Just going back a
bit, when you became Director of Government Computing in the Treasury, that was
a new position, was it?>
They had a thing called
Government Computing (called whatever it was) and the Director of that had just
retired. But all they were interested in was running the government accounts,
accounting systems, and that was within Treasury for that purpose. So my
appointment was to broaden it a lot, and move government computing forward as a
whole
<Now WALIS was quite
a significant system, wasn’t it? I’d heard of it over East, and you didn’t hear
much about such things then>
I remember an IBM
executive later told me that they used to send people over here to see how it
was done. But it was really just done by getting people to cooperate. Also
being in Treasury helps, having access to the Premier and Treasurer – the money
flows from the centre.
<The discipline of
Geographic Information Systems, GIS, that’s taught in universities, did that
start around this time, was it related in any way?>
No, that was much
later. The LIS courses in WA started after I introduced them at Curtin much
later. There were none that I know of. I don’t think there are many now,
actually. The one at Curtin has certainly gone from strength to strength.
<What do they teach
in that?>
Well,
that’s a long story. The preamble to that is when I started up a new school of
Computing at Curtin, the decision had to be made about what sort of research
directions would characterise the school. That really deserves a discussion
about the nature of Institutes of Technology, before they were ruined by
becoming universities. It related to what was done that was relevant to the
State and what could be done in the State, and with limited resources, and with
still a small population LIS were so central to so much. I went and looked at
Agriculture and Mining, which is what this State is all about, plus Fisheries,
there was a nascent ship-building industry in WA; all that engineering seemed
to be just too far away from computing, in the sense that the engineers really
should be able to handle it, and the geologists and people like that. And so,
to me, Land Information was just so important across the whole State. It seemed
to me an obvious thing we could do, and I had experience in it, so I decided to
introduce courses, a series of lectures, in Land Information, and then it grew
from there.
<While you were
Director of Government Computing, there were other projects I presume you were
involved in?>
Yes, I thought I saw a
need for a Records Management System within Government, and I was also always
quite keen to get some industry into WA. So I negotiated with Roger Allen of
Computer Power that he might like to build a Records Management System, rather
than us build it in-house. So if we contracted them to do it, that might help
them to set up in WA, and market it nationally, and that was a condition of the
contract; the other condition was that every government department that used it
had to have it free. So that worked, and it was marketed internationally. So
Computer Power came to Perth. Computer Power was going to be funded [??3/27:00]
for a lot of software houses. It was called RMS (Records Management System). I
don’t know the size of the sales, but …
The
other thing we got off the ground at that stage was the RanData and encryption
systems which was developed at SRIA. Monte Sala was working at the Space
Station. He was a Dalmatian who had spent his early teens conscripted by Tito
to fight the Germans for him. John Ross, who is now Professor of Psychology at
UWA described him as an intuitive electronic genius, and he was. He didn’t have
a degree but had some sort of technical qualification. He was remarkable. He
was the person did a lot of work in Psychology building equipment and things
like that, interfacing with computers. He was at UWA when that happened.
At this stage, with all
this networking happening and organised, I always had a bit of concern about
security, and sharing networks and how traumatic this has all become. So I thought
there was an opportunity to develop something – again, to stimulate WA industry
– by the development of a relatively low-cost encryptor. It didn’t have to be
super strong, but good enough quality that someone would have to work hard on
it. So Monte Sala took that on, and worked at SRIA who gave him access to their
computers and so on. He did manage it, in fact, developed an encryptor. A
couple of notable businessmen were found who helped us raise venture capital in
New York which was an adventure in itself: spending 2 weeks in New York, you
get done over in no uncertain terms. Monte, of course, was a fairly excitable
gentleman. Actually, it was quite interesting: we were being done over by two
people, both with higher degrees in electronic engineering as well as in law –
those sort of people, pretty high-powered. You don’t meet with people like that
very often in your life. And they were doing us over, representing the venture
capitalists: I think it was Standard and Poors, or something like that. At one
stage they announced that one of the features that Monte was using in his
encryption for communication purposes was a system patented by IBM for space
travel – flying distances in space. Monte turned white, because he was under
the impression, perhaps, that his device was no longer valid, so he disappeared
from the room, and I went and got him out of the toilet 10 minutes later. I
reassured him that they said it wouldn’t impact the patent at all
<It must have been
very distressing for him!>
Yes. Anyway, RanData
was formed, with the development being done through SRIA (while I was still
Director of Government Computing). I was representing the Government when I
went with Monte to New York: the fact that I was there was important from the
point of view of the people who were investing: having the Government involved
gave the impression that these people were dinkum, you know, genuine. I didn’t
know this at the time – shows how naive I can be! (turned out to be a necessary
ingredient).
The
outcome was that RanData was formed as a company, with venture capital from
this venture capital company, and built and marketed their encryptors. They had
one very big client – the SWIFT international banking network. That was a huge
sale – they were flying high then. But then, the politics of it just got too
much. The American Government just wouldn’t let them be sold into certain
places and things like that. Monte was pulled off a plane – he was taking an
encryptor to Pakistan, to the army there, for their Telex system – that sort of
thing. And finally they wouldn’t let us sell into Indonesia. For the time, it
was too strong [encryption]. According to Monte, you had to build an encryptor
that could beat the market but not the CIA!
There
was a change in government here in WA. There was politicisation of the Public
Service to a large degree, and I just couldn’t get access to the right people.
I had been active in the Liberal Party 10 years before. I got word from a staff
member of mine, who was in the Labor Party, that they were going to get out all
those who had been associated with the Liberal Party, so I got out and became
the manager of a software house in Malaysia: in the general software services
industry, which developed software for industry and commerce. In the first year
I was based in Kuala Lumpur, and in the second year I spent all my time on the
Sarawak LIS project, in Kuching. I landed the contract through that company.
This was that period
where interest in LIS had started. Canadians had been fairly early on in LIS.
Kuching was quite a small place that that time, it was a separate State, of
course. East Malaysia and the Peninsular are actually quite different countries
– like WA and the East! It was Mining
and Forestry; the Chinese were running the Public Service, whereas it was all Bumiputera
in Peninsular Malaysia – it was quite different.
So I lived in Kuching
for nearly a year; my wife was with me, but the children by then were at
university, and they came and visited occasionally. A very beautiful country;
Kuching is a lovely town, I enjoyed that.
I was consulting to
them on a LIS, and they went to tender, and their system, from all reports, is
doing quite well. It’s changed around [??3/37:00].
Then I returned to
Perth, and while I was looking round to see what to do next, Monte said come
and give me a hand. RanData was doing well by then. I had some fancy title,
with Research in it, but I was really a technical marketing person, I suppose,
was the best way to describe it, for just a year. And that wasn’t really me, I
don’t think. In that role, I addressed conferences and that sort of thing:
although marketing wasn’t really me, it used a lot of my skills. It wasn’t
marketing in the sense of selling contracts – it wasn’t marketing at all, but
that’s what it felt like, to some extent.
<I read an article
by Brian Toohey in the Sydney Morning Herald about that whole encryption device
and the sale of it to Pakistan, or wherever …>
Indonesia. He was rather savage, I thought.
<He made a lot of
pointed remarks about the role of the Americans not allowing sale of that
device while at the same time they didn’t allow Australians to do certain
things with systems the Americans had sold them. Is that right?>
Yes.
<I notice that there
have been 3 Dennis Moore Orations given since your retirement, I have copies,
one given by Craig Valli>
<So, after your work
in Malaysia in 1984-5 and your time as Research Director at RanData in 1985/6,
I’d like to explore where you went next, but before we get to that perhaps you
can start with how the whole Technology Park started and developed>
I
worked on Stanford Industrial Park in the 60s, and was most impressed with the
relationship with between the university and the technology park. There were
some pretty major electronic discoveries on that Park.
So, when I came back to
Australia it was something I thought that it was something that should happen
here. I used to have a drink with Don
Watts at University House, and we’d talk about such things and he had a similar
interest – this was while we were both still at UWA. I was at Treasury when Watts became Director
of WAIT (which is now Curtin). Opposite
Curtin, there was a large tract of Government land which was an old pine
forest. And I rang Don Watts and said this looks like an opportunity for a
technology park – we’d been talking about it for 15 years. Unfortunately, the Treasury was always
interested in money, and the land was earmarked for sale for residential
development. So Watts started a committee to form a drive, and I put in my bid
to Treasury. It was all touch and go. I think Mal Bryce was very active – he
was in Labor who were then still in opposition.
Finally, I suggested, why don’t we… Oh, there was another problem: The Under-Treasurer was a very very smart
man, here’s no doubt about it, a very very competent public servant. xxx[??4/2:44]
Unfortunately, there was a book published about that time called something like
“The Failure of Technology Parks”. Of course, he had read it. So that was a bit
of a hiccup. So finally I suggested why don’t we take half the land for a
Technology Park, and reserve the rest for residential, and if it doesn’t work
at least you’ve got half the land. So, he went along with that xxx[??4/3:14] –
that’s how it happened. It’s been successful. Labor came into power, Mal Bryce was given
responsibility for technology and he made the rest of the land available; and
the school, across the road, where CSIRO is now, later became part of
Technology Park. UWA were not impressed <that such a Park would be up where
Curtin is?> Yes. People came to see me to put pressure on me that it should
be on land near UWA. I said, that’s 5, 6, 7 kilometres, you want it close. There was some government land that could be
possibly used; UWA would not prefer Curtin to have it there. But it had to be
right next to the university, that’s the whole point, so people could have that
interaction. In practice, it certainly does work
<that was 1982, that
the land was given; and then the Labor party and Mal Bryce came along, that was
1983, and gave you the whole lot>
Well, gave it to
Technology Park, which was running it by then.
<What about your own
career, from 1986?>
Well,
Curtin was teaching computing, in the Business School. They’d had a department of Maths &
Computing and computing was growing pretty rapidly. The idea was to split out a department of
Computing from Mathematics, and they wanted someone to head that up. This is
when it was still WAIT. Don Watts invited me to apply, and finally after some
toing and froing I was appointed Head of School cambeth[5:55] (I think it was
called), which was professorial salary – appropriate to a non-university
institution. So I formed a new school.
<this was in 1987.
So you were the foundation head of computing, a new school – what was it
called?>
The School of
Computing.
Universities are
appalling bad places at times. The
management of the Division of Engineering & Science was driven by formula.
The most pernicious part of the formula was that one third of the money was
based on the number of students. This didn’t help a new school, because even if
you double the number of students every year, you’re only getting a third of
your budget increased. You’re just underfinanced all the time. Nobody is
interested in helping you out; because, as the School expands, more money comes
into the Division, but they’re getting the money, not the School. So, I wasn’t
getting very far with that, so one of things I had to do was to wear out shoe
leather recruiting overseas students, from SE Asia, which I knew pretty well,
of course. Because you got more money for them. But that took up a fair bit of
time. I introduced new courses, building up the School.
<what sort of new
courses did you introduce?>
Just standard computing
science courses, for a start, and a Post-Graduate Diploma.
I actually thought of
WAIT then as an institute of technology, like in Germany where they’re called
“fachhochschulen” where you concentrate of developing professionals, and where
you do research it’s applied research; Curtin always offered Masters and PhDs,
but you had to do them through the Open xxx[??4/8:32]. I don’t think the German
system still applies, where you can only do Masters, but I can’t see any reason
why a technologically based university can’t give PhDs. But I thought that
would be how Curtin would continue, and that’s the sort of courses and skills I
thought should be produced. I actually think universities are about the
students, and not anything else. It’s staggering - I gave all students a Maths
and English course when they came in: they’d all passed Maths and English at
the end of high school, but about 15-20% of them had to be sent off to remedial
Maths and English. You can’t produce professionals who can’t read or write. Now
there are so many more than that – you have 50-60%. Not everybody has to go to
university, or the same sort of university. That’s one of the problems with the
Dawkins reforms – the fact that places like Curtin over the years became
totally skewed trying to imitate the other universities, because of the
research funding mechanisms. Curtin has been running around trying to get a Law
school and a Medical school. So, where have our institutes of technology gone?
And at the same time this emphasis on universities has neglected technical
education. So as we all know, it’s very hard to find a tradesman. From Menzies
onwards, technical education has been neglected, relative to universities.
Anyway, that’s one of my hobbyhorses!
It was very hard to
recruit staff at that time. There was a great expansion of computing about
then. In fact there was a federal government enquiry into staff in computing
schools. I had some contacts in the UK, and managed to recruit some very good
people. And from the graduating students. Probably the most intelligent person
I ever employed was from Bangladesh - she hadn’t finished her PhD, but I
employed her and gave her a year off to finish it. You can’t miss people like
that. She was a very good communicator. She was into robotics and control systems.
She had a year at Curtin and left there to go to Deakin. She was very good. So,
you can find good people if you’re prepared to take risks, and help them get
what they want.
<you were looking
for people who were specifically qualified in computing as distinct from
Mathematics, or Physics, or…?>
For sure. I think this
lady was actually originally an engineer, and she was doing her PhD under the
DVC(Research) at UWA (Robyn Owens).
I could tell you a lot
about Curtin! Well, the other major
thing apart from the above, we had some introductory courses, which were
probably a bit low level – would have been sneered at in traditional computer
science departments. I insisted that everybody learned to type. We didn’t teach
them typing, but gave them computer-driven courses and told them you have to
use them. We insisted that they learn how to use all the standard packages,
like Word and spreadsheets – these are the professional things that people
expect them to have. Traditional computer science departments would say Oh, you
should teach yourself these things. But if you do that, you only learn a
subset, and so when you become a professional, you never learn more than that.
It only took up 1 unit in 24 or so. The other thing we emphasised were
presentation skills. In fact, I had students come back to me and say those were
the things that served them so well in getting jobs, starting out, building
confidence. So that was a different approach. But that comes back to my
philosophy of building professionals. On the other hand, you can’t neglect
research, so looking around we were discussing what core research that the
School could become known for. I looked at mining and agriculture, but I think
in the end they were probably too hard, and the young engineers would have
become a bit upset in time. But Land Information was very computing oriented,
and covered everything in the State – that seemed to be a no-brainer that this
could become a core that the School could become known for. As well as
producing standard computing people. And this could become a research centre of
some sort. I managed to find a Canadian who had experience and academic
qualifications in Land Information Systems, and he established a core
department through a series of lectures in Land Information Systems. That
continued to grow over the years. The tragedy, I think, was that when I left
the School, it was taken over by a computer scientist, who believed in
traditional computer science. They stopped all the professional training,
because that cost money, and they gave the Land Information System work to the
surveyors (the teaching about it and research as well). Now, it’s gone from
strength to strength – Surveying is in enormous decline in terms of what’s
needed, because you’ve got GPS, and it’s so automated that now it is Land
Information Systems, I suppose. Now it’s a separate centre at Curtin with
enormous grants and international reputation.
At the same time, it
caused a hole in computer science; well, it changed computer science and that
was unsustainable – to take professional training and try to turn it into
traditional computer science. The students aren’t there. I used to ask the
students when they first came in, are you here to get a professional degree and
to go out and work, or are you here to get a fancy education – I didn’t say it
quite like that – one person in 80 would be looking for a professional degree
or professional training, those sort of numbers. The difference was, did they
want a general education or a professional education? Or did they see
themselves as fancy research workers? You can’t compete with the brighter
students who want that sort of training from you. So we gave them what they
wanted, so they could achieve, have good careers, and so on.
The School was quite
large by the time I left. We had quite a bit of research funding, which came
with the people. The University wanted to raise its research profile, so I told
the Vice-Chancellory that I’d go and find some real computer scientists, not
that we didn’t already have any. Terry Caelli came over from ANU (or wherever
he was) and brought a number of PhD students with him, so that sounded like we
were going to have an instant jump – and that’s what the University wanted –
they wanted to pursue, to compete, and that’s how you get money from Canberra,
and that’s how you get your listing in the Shanghai research index. And they
changed the courses as well, on the assumption that the students were
super-bright. Though I think that numbers dropped quite rapidly.
<in ~2000, the numbers
dropped everywhere, of course; but you were concerned that there was less
emphasis on professionalism, and more on pure research?>.
Yes.
At that stage I left the School and became Director of Planning for the
University in the Vice-Chancellory. I thought it was time for somebody with a
different mindset to come in, and some of the staff wanted it too. Svetha
Venkatesh came to me with the courses they ran at MIT and said shouldn’t we be
teaching these? I said can’t you imagine what kind of students MIT get? It all
depends on what kind of students you can get and what their interests are.
<so, how is it going
now at Curtin?>
Well, it’s no longer a
School; it’s part of a department of engineering and computing. At Curtin they have software engineering and
computing taught also in the business school, and that’s still going. Computing
is still going too, but in terms of size and effort I think it has diminished.
<what’s the market
like here in WA for graduates in computer science?>
Well, I think it’s
picking up everywhere, actually.
<related to that,
can you talk about the Pawsey computer centre, supercomputing, the Square
Kilometre Array, and the computer education side?>
I
didn’t really have much to do with the SKA.
The driving force at Curtin was Merv Lynch in Physics, who was very
active in radioastronomy type work and things like that. Actually, I was retired from Curtin, doing
some odd consultancies, and I was hired to write a submission to the State Government
for a Centre which would have as one of its main functions support for and
getting involved in the SKA and sadly the Liberal Party not interested –
nothing new here. It was interesting to watch.
Supercomputers: yes,
again I was interested but mainly on the periphery. DEC gave me a largish parallel computer,
which we used to teach parallel computing. It was quite a significant grant,
and I thought parallel computing would be quite important; but there was no-one
available to teach it so I taught it myself. This was in the Curtin Computing
School. But again, that didn’t last. Parallel computing was really overtaken by
masses of small computers. Things have changed in the industry.
<and so, do you
think there is any relationship between the universities and the development of
the SKA?>
Oh, yes, my cooperation
now. The computer is a joint venture
between the universities, and the government, that is Pawsey. And CSIRO. Half of the SKA is in South
Africa. The SKA seems to be going pretty
well – it brought massive computing power to WA
<I sort of made the
assumption that the universities in WA would be interested in some of their
students to have the opportunity to work in that environment, or is that just
not relevant?>
I don’t know, I’d
assume it - I’m not close enough to it to know. It sounds pretty isolated as research tool.
<so it’s more likely
to be used by all sorts of astronomers?>
Yes, you might get
honours students working on projects and the like. I’m sure that’s happening, I can’t imagine
it’s not happening.
<Moving back to
1996, when you became Director of Planning at Curtin: what sort of work did you do then?>
I wrote the
University’s first Strategic Plan, which is a bit xxx[??]. Actually, I wrote a
strategic plan when I first went to Curtin, for the School, which I gave to the
Director of xxx[??]. I got no response in 3 months so I went and asked him
about it. He said it was very interesting. A strategic Plan doesn’t seem to be
part of the university tradition, or it certainly wasn’t – it probably hasn’t
altered, not too much anyway.
So,
that was one thing that I did. Other things like starting a TV station, Channel
31, for the University. It was, what
shall I call it, Community TV stuff.
Curtin has always and still runs a radio station. And I had imagined then that with the Arts
Department it would be hard to expect that Curtin would be interested in
producing things for it and advertising on it.
Actually, finally ECU,
which has a very strong drama programme put their hands up and we’ll grab this.
But ultimately it went the way of all community TV – I don’t think there’s much
left of them.
I
also raised money for a joint project in Esperance, which is quite a long way
away, with the high school and the TAFE down there, to try and help people
study at Curtin from a distance. To support that, raise money for that. I had
to look after all the submissions for bids, which was interesting – got an idea
of what bureaucracies are like! Centralising – now we have a [??4/28:50] soviet
system in the university. Everything seems to be ending up uniform, because
you’ve got to do this and do that to get the money, and you’ve got to publish
in these journals and … - there’s too much – there’s no autonomy in the
university, they’ve become very bureaucratic.
They used to be once, a hundred years ago, independent institutions –
there have been big changes.
<from
1995 to 1999, you were also the chair of the WA Information Policy for the
State Government>
Yes, that was, again,
an overseeing role, of coordination & review of where computing was
going. At that time, of course, the Year
2000 issue was on the horizon. Actually,
I was not as worried as most people.
Actually,
I had had experience with a 1900 problem.
If you have a 2-digit birth date, on punched cards, with birth year, and
if you were born in 1956 you couldn’t tell if that was a 101 year old person or
a 1 year old person. This was in 1955.
So, that was exactly the same as the Year 2000 problem, but in the punched card
era; that was resolved by paying out life insurance when people turned 100, so
there was no 1900 problem. I just
couldn’t believe it – programmers used to sit around and discuss things, and I
remember having a conversation about our problem, what was going to happen in
the year 2000; this was in the late 1950’s. And I said, Oh yes, they’ll have a
problem; but if they’re still using our programs they deserve to bomb.
So, although I wasn’t
game to say at the time, don’t panic – you’ve got a few years. People were using it as an excuse to buy new
systems and all sorts of things. But you couldn’t say Relax, at all, so we had
to put rules down and make sure their all systems were all compliant, etc, etc.
But everybody seemed to get through it OK.
<everyone was on
tenterhooks, but it all just passed pretty calmly. Did you retire from Curtin?>
Yes,
in 1999. After I retired I did some consulting for a time. I helped the wife in
her second hand bookshop, which I enjoyed immensely, and did some odd bits of
consulting, without xxx[??4/33:10].
For Curtin, I reviewed
the Muresk Institute, which is an agriculture institute, run by Curtin. Apparently, I was meant to put in a Report
that it should be canned, but I didn’t know that! So I put in the Report that
it should keep going ahead. I couldn’t
find grounds – their publication rate was just as good as the Commerce &
Business School. I just couldn’t believe
that agriculture wasn’t an important part of Western Australia. There was no real equivalent; there were a few problems, I think not too
many of the staff were running around farms on the side. There wasn’t a
resident Director up there (on the way towards York). I think it should have
bene maintained. They had occasional
problems with students, but it was an important part of Western Australia, I
thought. There was a desire, of course, to be seen as moving away from a
technical college – it was WAIT, then Curtin University of Technology, now just
Curtin University (it dropped the “of Technology”). So, they were all pretty
upset, I think, when I said keep it going. But then they found some ways of
ignoring my Report – they had a Committee of Review a few years later. It was
handed over to the Tafe sector, or one of the government sectors, and gives
degrees through Charles Sturt University. So it’s still going; there are people running around, from the
industry, interested in keeping it going, going strongly.
There’s vast areas
under agriculture in WA, the wheat crop is still very important, and you’ve got
market gardens and so on.
<did you look at
opportunities for online education?>
They didn’t get what
they wanted. I actually looked into it
at that time, around 2000, not that long ago.
At the time, the review of successful online courses showed they were nearly
all post-grad courses, not post grad in the university sense, but employed
people doing advanced courses. I also
was a bit reluctant to be gung-ho on online courses, because I didn’t think the
time was ripe for them to start in a massive way. So perhaps I didn’t anticipate. Also, I feel I’m a bit worried about people
not going to universities and meeting other people and talking and meeting
their future wives, and having arguments, and so on. So, I don’t know where it will go, what will
happen to universities if online, now that they’ve got all lectures online and
things like that – will people just stop going to classes? And then will we have a university? It’s interesting, isn’t it? What kind of people does that produce?
<I think one of the
ideas is to have students read the lecture material and become au fait with
that, and then come in for discussions, tutorials, rather than all online>
Yes, I don’t mind that.
But throwing the baby out with the bathwater is not on.
<what about the
Australian Centre for eScience?>
That was the proposal
which included the telescope, and CSIRO and Curtin Uni, and iVEC was the
large-scale computing centre, which would be the base for the Square Kilometre
Array. That was very interesting, actually, to put that together. And it came off, as you know. And seems to be going OK.
<will government
funding continue in this day & age, for that kind of venture, because it
requires a lot of money?>
Of course, a lot of
this money is not Australian – we happen to live in the Southern Hemisphere and
a lot of people in the Northern Hemisphere have more money, and they want to
look South, to look out the other way.
<any other key
events, particularly work related to computing?>
One
computing area which I tried to get going in Perth back then was string
analysis – DNA strings and those sorts of strings. By chance, a Canadian, Bill Smyth, came to
Western Australia – I think he was pursuing a young lady at the time (while I
was at Curtin, in the School of Computing).
He was interested in this field – he had a very interesting career,
actually – he had been one of those geniuses who had a degree at 16, etc, etc,
but never gone on to a PhD, had wandered off into computing, in the United
Nations, roamed the world. He was now back at universities, in a senior
position in a Canadian university, and this was his field. I found him very interesting, and a very
interesting field, and obviously of significance in the modern world, DNA. So I started to work with him, as I thought
it would be nice, interesting things to work with some staff members and try
and get some units going at Curtin. The
going was difficult, in the sense that it was positive that we’d get him to
come out here regularly and he then introduced me to Costas Iliopoulos, he was
a person I called a “Greek Pom”, at Kings College, very well known in the
field, and still active - all these people are active. He’s in his 70’s and still has 5 PhD
students. And they used to come out
regularly to Curtin, and I was able to do a little bit of work with him, when I
had the time, and published. Bill
actually turned out to be Curtin’s first PhD, because he’d never done a
PhD; in the North American system the
last thing you wanted to do was go back and do some coursework when he was in
the middle of publishing n papers a year in his field. Anyway, Louis Caccetta in Maths at Curtin, he
was a very competent mathematician, agreed to supervise him in this particular
area. So he became Curtin’s first PhD,
in computing, even though he was supervised by a mathematician.
<was he resident in
Australia then?>
No, never; actually he is a fairly wealthy man, I think,
because he owns properties. He owns an
apartment here which he keeps empty all year except when he visits. Perhaps all those years in the United Nations
had their benefits. They are regular
visitors still, and they come out to visit me when they come out to work here,
occasionally, which is good, and I enjoyed it.
But this was something I couldn’t get any other staff interested in –
unless you can get staff interested it’s not a valid field to focus on. There’s still some activity at Murdoch in
this area, apparently.
<so because he was
doing his PhD, you had a little cross-disciplinary group pursuing that, at the
time?>
Yes.
Interesting,.. Actually Caccetta – are you
familiar with the Erdős Number? Erdős
is a famous 20th century mathematician, probably one of the greatest
mathematicians, you know one of the 10 greatest mathematicians. Now, Erdős travels around (I don’t think
he does it any more), stayed with people and wrote papers with them – that was
his way of doing things. Well, Lou
Caccetta had Erdős stay with him and published with him. If you publish with Erdős, you have an Erdős
Number of 1; if you publish with someone
who has published with Erdős, you get an Erdős Number of 2; and then Erdős Number 3… So Lou Caccetta is Erdős Number 1, Bill
Smyth is Erdős Number 2, and because I’d published with Smyth I’m Erdős
Number 3 – which makes the whole thing so ridiculous, because I’m just not “up
there”.
<as an IT Director
in several organisations, can you comment on how computing has changed over the
time you’ve been involved in it?>
Well
continuously, of course. The impact of
Moore’s Law, of course. It’s not just
the technology, but its impact in all levels of life, I think is the biggest
change. I mean, originally, computing
was almost restricted to xxx[??4/46:00] or running a company or managing, or
pressing engineering software. Now
there’s been an enormous amount of integration – not necessarily linked systems
but telecommunications – the fact that you can access so much
simultaneously. And also the use of
computers by non-professionals – it’s almost ubiquitous, it must be. There was a time when the computer
professional – well, you had two members – the key punch operators, data entry
people and you had computing people. Secretaries have disappeared to a large
extent, in many organisations, during that time. So I think that’s the biggest change, I
think. Was there anything specific area
you were thinking of?
<I’m interested in
the kinds of systems that governments and other organisations are implementing
these days, compared to previously>
Hmmmm. An interesting question. The main government systems you hear about
today are the ones that have failed, they’re the ones that get reported. Some systems have been build, but eHealth,
for example, has never managed to make it.
I remember Eurosami [??] tried 20 years ago, and I’m not quite sure why
they haven’t progressed as much as people would have thought they would.
<you were interested
in security, and the definition of privacy>
In fact before I was in
government here, I got the State government here, when I chaired a Committee,
to put together a Privacy Policy for the State Government. At that time it was quite fashionable – the
UK had just put out a Privacy Statement – this would have been fairly early on
in the 70’s, I should imagine. So, my
interest in privacy and security started that long ago, because data can be
pretty dangerous. I got my interest in
security through working with government, and through RanData; and of course,
that’s one of the biggest problems with computing at the moment, I think, is
the lack of security – everything seems to be spilled so easily, viruses
abound, and I’m not sure much progress is being made, really. You know, they seem to stamp out one thing
and another thing pops up.
<I’d like you to
reflect on the way you got things done: what are the key ingredients in getting
things done?>
Well, the most
important thing, of course, is key people, good people, good staff, and getting
them to work in cooperation. Success
leads to success, of course; people become confident when you put up something
outrageous, if you’ve done something that could have appeared to be outrageous,
because you’re asking them to cooperate with people they’d never thought about
cooperating with. If you’ve had success
before that always helps. And to keep on
top of it. And you’ve got good people to
keep an eye on it, at some level of detail, and you can insist that there’s
some way of monitoring what’s going on.
I think that the failure of integrating the online health systems in
Western Australia, when I was Chair of the Committee, I didn’t do that and it
taught me that, to keep my eye more closely on things; but you can get lost in
the detail, of course. So you have to make a judgement about how close you go
without interfering too much is the important thing. But I think that 90% of the time it comes
down to people.
<one of your PhD students
in the early days said that what he appreciated was that you allowed innovative
work to take place, that you took initiatives that were not necessarily safe to
enable him to achieve that>
That’s true. But it could also have been ignorance! <he didn’t think it was ignorance at
all> Youthful enthusiasm!
That’s what staggered
me when I was told I wasn’t allowed to do research (as Computing Director at
UWA). As a person who had been through
that system, who had interface devices to the computer – we’d developed them,
worked out how to do them. He rang his
Physics (sounds like Physics, or Engineering), why we couldn’t keep doing that
sort of stuff.
Another matter: Terry
Woodings told me the other day, he was amazed that we didn’t have rows, between
the Computing Centre and Computer Science, when it got started. Everywhere he’d been there’d always been an
enormous amount of friction between the Computing Centre and Computer Science,
when they were separate entities. It
never occurred to me, I didn’t know about it. I’ve been reflecting on that, and
I think one of the reasons must be that we allowed people to do unusual things,
and also that we always had enough computer power – I think that rationing
creates a lot of problems. So perhaps
Computer Science wanted more than they were given, and didn’t have the
freedom. Later, of course, they had
their own machines, so that sort of issue would go away. Actually, large university computing centres
probably don’t exist much anymore, do they?
<computing is now
centrally controlled, rather than from within computer science – they sometimes
find that a bit frustrating>
I remember a professor
of Physics, he was coming back from the Eastern States, he said that it was
quite remarkable – all the other places had problems with computing resources
that we don’t.
<of course,
computing resources in the 60’s were very expensive; now it’s changed so
dramatically – it’s people who are expensive>
Yes, a personal with a
PC can do so much these days, more than a big computer of those days.
<someone else said
that you were fiercely admired, focused on your aims and took leadership upon
yourself; you would know what had to be done>
Goodness! Well, isn’t that nice! I can’t disagree!
<did you have any
big battles on the way?>
Oh yes, I had
fallings-out with staff occasionally, but not much. For a day or two – I can’t remember any
long-running, vicious academic novel type…
No C. P. Snow.
<so, it’s been a
good journey, then?>
I
think so – I kept terrible hours, I couldn’t have done it without my wife, who
accepted it all, let me wander round the world – she brought up the children –
they’ve turned out all right, thanks to her
<she ran the
bookshop, as well?>
Well, after. When the kids left, and when she started to
do things like charity work, that wasn’t enough, she ended up buying out a
bookshop. She was a natural at it, did
very well, and really loved it and refused to give it up. She gave it up finally when she had a stroke
– she was still working till she was 73 or 74.
Just before she died she told me, did we really have to sell the
bookshop, we could have muddled through – I get emotional after 10 years,
that’s how much she wanted it.
<now that is your
main activity?>
Yes. I can’t imagine not working. After Jo died, I didn’t know want to do; she
had trained me how to run a bookshop, so I started another one. And it’s been running now 5 years, and it
keeps me off the street, and it’s a very entertaining business – you meet lots
of interesting people, from all walks of life; most people that buy books are
very pleasant. So I have long chats; you
get the odd nutter, otherwise it’s very good.
<you’ve been
recognised in various ways, through the ACS?>
I find it a little bit
embarrassing, but there’s no deadheads [??].
Yes, the Oration, it’s very nice of them. The Dennis Moore Oration is held annually at
University Club at UWA.
I
was President of the old University House; the University Club is very much
up-market on that. I was President when
the government introduced the 0.08% alcohol limit (now 0.05). Bar sales fell off a lot, so we needed to
have more members, and so the reform I pushed through was to allow non-academic
staff to become members. Of course, all
my staff use to drink there anyway, programmers were all non-academic, but I
would sign them in as an academic. So it
was all very silly anyway. But it was
welcomed by everybody. But it was very
hard to get a quorum for some of these things.
The one advantage I found in running a Committee meeting was that you
could count in octal, so 8 is 10! Once I
got into trouble with the University: we built a new dining room, and the
Under-Treasurer at that time was Ken Townsing had been very good to University House
– they were the days when the State was responsible for all recurrent funding,
so he chaired various committees, and on the Council, and he was very
supportive of University House. So when
we built this new dining room, I said let’s name it after him. The House Committee said, yes, that’s a very
good idea, so we invited him, had a dinner for him, thanked him for his
support. But apparently, the Senate has
all naming rights, so that was very naughty, but it was a very good name. It stayed, they couldn’t do anything about
it. Of course, it’s been knocked down
now. This new building is magnificent –
it’s part of the corporatisation of the University, it’s now a place where they
can bring businessmen for lunches and whatever.
Image is important. But it’s not
just about the University, it’s about the funding, the change in funding, and
all that sort of thing. Whereas the old
University House was a bit of fun.
<I’d like to thank
you, Dennis Moore, on behalf of this Oral History project>
It’s been a pleasure