I’m lost in the world of ‘information technology’, or ‘computing’, as we early practitioners used to call it. As a computer professional in the early years, I was a ‘computer programmer’, using now obsolete or declining computer languages as ‘PLAN’, ‘COBOL’ or ‘FORTRAN’ to develop and support commercial or administrative applications.

After university in a sadly academic subject that was unlikely to attract a prospective employer, I found myself in the emerging world of computer-based systems. Apparently my university learning would be useful in this new commercial computer world, especially to public sector employers.

And this computer world is likely to be unfamiliar to a present-day ‘Information Technology’ worker. In those days we had to produce our computer systems in house. We had a hierarchy of workers in the computer department. There were punch card or punched paper tape operatives to prepare information to feed into the computer.

There were computer operations staff, to feed the all the information prepared by the organisation for processing, and to manage all the complex computer devices, the mainframe which was the brains of the device, the baleful magnetic tapes that would revolve slowly on the walls, and the discs that were held in white boxes like top loading washing machines.

Outside the computer room there was a hierarchy of employees from programmer to systems analyst to manager. The programmer would produce the list of instructions for the computer in one of the organisation’s preferred computer languages, with a supporting flow chart showing the logic used to produce the program. The systems analyst would discover what the user of the system wanted, and pass this information on to a programmer in a format that could be converted into a computer program.

I was on this hierarchical journey throughout my working career through the Information Technology pathway, working through such technical nightmares as the introduction of decimal currency and the potential disaster of the millennium (which was overcome without too much difficulty, by converting a year with 2 digits to a year with 4 digits), although I was in a computer room at midnight, on December 31, 1999, with nothing to do except to note that there were no problems.

I have been away from information technology for many years now, I’ve lost all touch with the industry and I do not have a mobile phone. I’m lost in the world of artificial intelligence,, voice recognition and instant information, but I do admire the dexterity of younger people who can, and I am amazed at the bewildering availability of information, needed or not.