Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Leaping forward with new tech, a historic perspective with Norman Sanders
83 Plays2 years ago
There's always a biggest, latest, most controversial development happening in the world of SEO. But in the bigger scheme of digital marketing will 'threats' like AI have any impact in the long run? Will history remember the way we all felt about new SEO technologies?
In this special episode of the untitled SEO podcast we are in conversation with Norman Sanders. Norman was born in 1929 and has been at the forefront of computing for many years. He knew and worked with many early innovators in the world of computing, including Alan Turing and Shaun Wylie (the Bletchley Park Enigma code-breakers).
Norman also rubbed shoulders (and worked with) some of the 'fathers of programming', including David Wheeler (creator of FORTRAN), and the development team of COBOL at IBM.
In the 1950s Norman Sanders was hired by Boeing and was responsible for computerising the design and manufacture of aeroplanes, including the Boeing 727.
My initial plan for this podcast episode was to find out if introducing computing to the world of aviation was met in a similar way to the development of new SEO tools (like AI).
What actually happened during our time together is that Norman took us on a journey that explained and explored the early days of computing. A period in history that has had a tremendous impact not just on the world of work, but also on humanity as a whole.
This episode of the Yeseo podcast is remarkable, not because of anything we have contributed but because of the engaging and often amusing story told by our honoured guest, Norman.
We decided to leave this interview largely unedited, so about halfway through the episode, you will hear one of Norman's neighbours drop by to give Norman a football result. We left this in because we felt it was a charming example of the enthusiasm and gentle warmth of Norman throughout our time together.
P.S. Andrew has also interviewed Norman for his personal podcast, during which he went into great detail about his time working with Prime Minister Harold Wilson, and his recollections of Alan Turing.
Andrew's interview with Norman Sanders on his personal podcast
https://anchor.fm/andrewculture/episodes/Norman-Sanders---Computer-pioneer--writer-and-technology-adventurer-e1tfq8m
The IT Archive Interview with Norman Sanders
https://archivesit.org.uk/interviews/norman-sanders/
My Computing Life by Norman Sanders (book)
https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/My_Computing_Life.html?id=WLUdzgEACAAJ&redir_esc=y
Norman Sanders author page on Amazon
https://amzn.to/3Wgzdj4
This podcast has been produced by Yeseo https://yeseo.io/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Untitled SEO Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the first episode of the Untitled SEO Podcast by Yesseo. Now for this episode I interviewed a really interesting person I know called Norman. And this podcast didn't quite go in the direction I thought it would. I'm not going to say much more than that. I'll tell you what, I'm just going to shut my app and let you listen.
SEO and AI: Challenges and Opportunities
00:00:23
Speaker
Hello Norman, thank you for joining me today. Now, the reason I wanted to speak to you on this podcast is that in my world, the world of SEO, which is search engine optimization, which I'll explain in just a moment, there's a lot of people worried about AI, artificial intelligence. So I'd like your perspective and I'll explain why in just a moment.
00:00:45
Speaker
So first of all, search engine optimization is a matter of making sure people get found when Google is representing them. So that's a funny way of putting it. If you sit down and search for the theater tickets or something, for example, it's my job with SEO to make sure my clients get found first. Now, Google figures that out by looking at the quality of your website.
00:01:13
Speaker
and trying to judge how authoritative you are. So some chap operating from a back bedroom with a theatre he's made out of a cardboard box is going to struggle to sell tickets compared to the London Palladium, for example. So a lot of what Google does is try and assess how much authority you have.
00:01:37
Speaker
So one of the ways that we work is by creating really good content and helping our clients make it as clear as possible to Google that they are very authoritative. Now, one of the ways that that's happening at the moment is people are using artificial intelligence, AI, to create lots of articles and lots of web pages to try and inflate their importance.
00:02:06
Speaker
And there's a lot of arguments at the moment of people saying, well, this is no good. Machines are taking place of the human. They are taking away the creativity. They're taking away the opportunity to express yourself. And some people will think it's dishonest to use AI.
Norman's Early Career at Boeing
00:02:25
Speaker
So the reason I wanted to speak to you is that I know that in the 1950s you started working at Boeing in Seattle. Yes. And part of your role at Boeing was to bring computer assisted design into Boeing. Absolutely, yes. Okay, so first of all, could you just tell us a little bit about how that came about, how you ended up in Seattle?
00:02:52
Speaker
Yes, righto. It was a long time ago. Forgive me if I stumbled a bit. What was I doing over in Seattle? I have to take a step back here. I'm awfully sorry. You can always cut it out.
00:03:12
Speaker
When I arrived at Cambridge, I made the discovery that someone or other, his name later, had built a computer.
00:03:29
Speaker
Now, I already knew what a computer was, because before the war, I had heard on the radio, in those days, there was always a play on Saturday night called Saturday Night Theater. And I used to listen to it, and my father, we used to sit there and we used to chat about it and so forth.
00:03:56
Speaker
So this was the end of 1939, and the name of the, if I can go into a slight detail here, the name of the play, it was written by Czechoslovak, who has a funny name, and I recognize it when I see it, but I don't have it in front of me right now.
00:04:25
Speaker
I don't think so. It's something like that. Anyway, and the title of the play was Are You Are? Are You Are?
00:04:45
Speaker
not A-R-E-Y-O-U, but the letter R-U, Rossum's Universal Robots. That's where the word robot came from. And this was in 1939. And the whole idea about it was that robots, which became computers, were going to take over. And so I said to my father,
00:05:15
Speaker
Well, we've got to do something to stop this. What are we going to do?" And he said, just pull the plugs out. And I thought, oh, my father was brighter than I realized. All I got was to go around and pull the plugs out of all the robots.
00:05:32
Speaker
And so I was, at a very early age, waiting for computers to happen, and I didn't know that anything had happened until 1953. But then I discovered that there was indeed a computer, and I think you're probably sitting on it right there,
00:05:52
Speaker
But I'll find it later on. And it was made by a professor of computing at Cambridge, even though it wasn't a subject. And no one around knew what it was all about. But I did, you see. And I started telling everybody, OK,
00:06:14
Speaker
not knowing anything really. Computers are the thing of the future. But those who were taking medicine wanted to stick to medicine, became doctors and are all now retired. And it was the same with engineers, one sort and another.
00:06:30
Speaker
So it was a very lonely life knowing anything about or being Confronted with anything about computers in that time by which time now I've forgotten what the question was. Oh, how did I get to
Journey to Vancouver and First Computer Encounter
00:06:44
Speaker
Seattle? Yes Yes, and so when I when I finished at Cambridge, they wanted me to carry on and do a PhD I said no, no, no, no, no I've got to work. I've got to do things Fed up with studying
00:06:59
Speaker
But I discovered, so I sort of stood up and said, tell me where your computers are, because I'd been now my profession and was computer programmer and had been ever since.
00:07:13
Speaker
And I needed to find a company that had computers, and there weren't any. But there was one, not a company, but an organization in Canada, in Vancouver. It was the University of British Columbia. British Columbia is the most westerly part of Canada, as I'm sure you know.
00:07:41
Speaker
And so I wrote to them and I said, you know, I hear you've got a computer. I know all about computers. Not that I'm a hardware man. I know how to program them. I understand the design of them, but I couldn't translate that into hardware.
00:08:02
Speaker
So, you know, if you've got a computer and it has a language of some sort, then I'd like to come and work for you. So they said, yes, come on over. There was nobody else from any university anywhere on this planet who had a sort of degree, a postgraduate degree in computer programming. Weird, weird thing.
00:08:30
Speaker
So natural at the time. So I went to Vancouver and started setting up their computing department. I was teaching something called numerical analysis, which is that department of mathematics that you need to know about to write programs.
00:09:00
Speaker
So I got on pretty well at the University of British Columbia, but it didn't seem to have much future. It was really not accepted. It existed, but was not accepted generally by the academic staff there.
00:09:27
Speaker
A couple of Americans came up from a place called Seattle, and they were looking, they had to set up a computer conference. I'm going into detail here. Please do. Cut it all out. They were setting up a computer conference, and they heard that there was this weird Englishman living up. See, Seattle and Vancouver are very close together. You hardly know one from the other.
00:09:57
Speaker
so they came up on the train to to to Vancouver and came over and and source and They said to me, you know, could you give a talk about? British versus American or American versus British Computers and I said sure I didn't know anything about either of us didn't know there were any English computers other than the one we had at Cambridge and
00:10:26
Speaker
So I said, they said, well, you come down to Seattle.
A Speech that Changed Norman's Career
00:10:30
Speaker
This is answers your question. I came down because I was invited down there to give a talk. And it was a three day computer conference and I'd never been to a computer conference before. Anywhere, of course. And so they said, right, you're going on last.
00:10:52
Speaker
three days we're going to let other people speak for three days insurance companies and Engineering companies manufacturing companies and so forth but your talk is so different from all the others that we're going to put you on all by yourself right at the very end and So have yourself ready for that and I didn't really think I didn't realize that they were they were giving me the the Whatever it's called
00:11:20
Speaker
And so I sat through this for three full days. Right at the end, people were nodding off. There was a famous author of a mathematics textbook. He slept right through the entire thing.
00:11:42
Speaker
And I felt so sorry for him because it was a really boring show, the whole thing. And I thought, you know, somehow I'm going on last and I'll be the only one that anyone remembers, so it better be good. And I'd never made a speech before. It was my first speech ever. It was first of many, but I didn't know that then. And so I made a speech.
00:12:06
Speaker
And I took two computers, and they, if I may say, floating point add time. The British one, which is the one we had at Cambridge, was a few microseconds faster to add two numbers together than the fastest American one, which is called the IBM 704.
00:12:32
Speaker
at the time. The British one was the Edzac, which now they've made a reconstituted Edzac and people can see it at the science museum. So I'm told I haven't been over there to see it. But anyway, so I started talking about these two things and
00:12:57
Speaker
And I didn't realize that if you make a good speech, people laugh. They don't laugh. I don't know why they do, but they laugh because it's different to all the other speakers who've already been on that day. And this is great. So I just, for 35 minutes, just made a lot of jokes.
00:13:20
Speaker
I had everyone laughing, like, what the hell is this? This is funny. But they thought it was. And right at the end, a couple of chaps came charging through this man, a couple of hundred people there altogether came charging through and grabbed me physically and said, hey, would you like to come and work with us?
00:13:43
Speaker
I said, well, who are you? And they said, Boeing, we build airplanes. Oh, heard about me. And and they said, and we've got a computer. In fact, we have two computers, two computers. I think you've got two computers. And if you go over to England, there are none will just be going this way, except for the one I'm talking about. And
00:14:08
Speaker
I said I know nothing about aeroplanes. I don't know what wings do. I understand that wings make aeroplanes fly, so you definitely need wings if you're going to make aeroplanes. But how they do it, I've no idea. So I don't know what the mathematics of wings look like, but if you can explain that, I could
00:14:30
Speaker
work with you on whatever your problems are. And they said, okay, when would you like to join us? Join us tomorrow if you like. So I said, well, I've already got a one-off job about scheduling the oil flow from Edmonton, Alberta, which is another part of Canada. It's joined to British Columbia all the way down the middle.
00:14:59
Speaker
And I've got to go over there, but it shouldn't take me long to program their scheduling department. And so when that's finished, I can come to Seattle. I don't know how you get there or where you stay, what you do when you get there. And I know nothing about airplanes. But if you can explain to me about airplanes, I can probably add a few computer programs to what you're doing.
Transforming Boeing with CAD
00:15:28
Speaker
That's how I got to Seattle. So I went up to Edmonton, Alberta and fixed scheduling and came down and was working at Boeing. So I was working and I lived many, many years in Seattle. So when you arrived at Boeing, they were proudly telling you about their two computers. What was the first thing? What was the first job? What was your first task?
00:15:52
Speaker
Yes, that's a good question. My first job was to have a really good look at the wing. They didn't use X, Y, Z components of points in space. X was called the wing buttock line.
00:16:13
Speaker
The y was called the Something station. I can't remember. It was such a long time ago. I don't even remember exactly but anyway, they they Told me what their version of the XYZ coordinates of a pointer and they said look we've got these basic These basic drawings hand they were hand
00:16:37
Speaker
I have to tell you, after break-in, yes, on my very, very, very first day at Boeing, it was one Monday morning, and they took all the— Boeing used to take all new employees on their first day round on a show-and-tell walkie-walkie.
00:16:58
Speaker
And so that we can show you really quickly in one day what we do and how we do it. And so I went in with the other first day people and we went through some
00:17:19
Speaker
And some of these people I went around that they were they were already They knew about the airframe construction Business Somewhere or other I don't know there were several small ones So these people wanted to get into Boeing which was really the the best Best company in the world to be working for could be today. So is it a marvelous place?
00:17:47
Speaker
When we came into a room, there was no window, there was door, no windows, no furniture, and a flat, hard floor, which was probably made of concrete or something.
00:18:08
Speaker
An engineer, an enormous bloke, how tall he was, I've no idea, but because he's lying on the floor. He was lying on a sheet of paper on the floor, holding in his hand a pencil, and he had a little ruler. And he's lying on an enormous sheet of paper,
00:18:31
Speaker
making marks, making points in space, in three-dimensional space, but on a two-dimensional sheet of paper, an enormous sheet of paper. He didn't say a word. The guide on this Walkie Walkies took us in there and said, well, this is an engineer. I didn't know his name. Didn't matter.
00:18:56
Speaker
And he was probably seven feet tall or something like that. He was a big bloke just lying there, meshing points on bits of paper. And I thought, that's not going to last long. We're going to replace that way of working. I even had the idea then, didn't know how I was going to do it.
00:19:17
Speaker
But I knew I felt it my instances my instinct of I've I've been led by instinct to suit with computers all the years and it started started really off With this bloke lying on the floor and after that, you know, ten minutes of looking at him He didn't say a word to anybody he quite used to on Monday mornings and
00:19:40
Speaker
And no one said anything to him, but my brain suddenly set alight with sort of how somehow I could do his job.
00:19:56
Speaker
more accurately, faster, cheaper with a computer than it was doing with him and his fellow engineers. And I'm sure had we, he and I talked about it, he would have agreed. I'd had to explain to him then what a computer was and so forth. I'm giving you a long version of how I got to Seattle, I think.
00:20:18
Speaker
And as I don't know, this is my first job. And so I showed up for work the next day. And they said, we want you to, we want you to, to do figuratively, get inside the wing. We want you to get inside the wing.
00:20:37
Speaker
And make sure that all the points, the X, Y, Z components, as I said earlier, five minutes ago, they don't call it X, Y, Z. They wouldn't have known what I was talking about. This winged buttock line and the wing station.
00:21:00
Speaker
Anyway, your job will be to make sure that all the geometry of a wing is as accurate as it could possibly be made.
00:21:13
Speaker
And that's how I learned what airplanes were and how they flew and so forth. And it's not least the leading edge, the leading edge of an airplane has to be absolutely on. And everything on my day one in Boeing, everything was made on.
00:21:34
Speaker
All the points of the space that an airplane took up were represented on two-dimensional sheets of paper by a shaky hand input. By shaky hand means any hand at all because all hands shake, they all vibrate.
00:21:52
Speaker
And the points that they make, although not exactly the points that the aerodynamicist or the aeronautical engineer would have decreed, put it that way, they were close enough, and it was close enough to win the war.
00:22:17
Speaker
And, you know, working at Boeing, because I knew all about Boeing airplanes, because as a wartime kid, I was about, I don't know, when it finished, 15, something like that. So I knew what the bombers looked like. I made models of bombers, but models you make at home are even less accurate than...
00:22:46
Speaker
than a shaky hand of a giant man laying on the floor. You've got it there. I'm getting a bit more verbose. I haven't discussed these things with anybody for, I don't know, 65 years or something like that. The aspect of it I'm really interested in is that you walked in
00:23:08
Speaker
symbolizing new technology yes and there was the gentleman laying prostrate on the floor he was with shaky hands and pencils right and at some point i'm guessing either his bosses or you said to him
00:23:23
Speaker
Your days of laying on the floor are over. We're going to use a computer for this. And what I'm really interested in is what kind of reaction you've got. I'm trying to tie it into how we feel these days about artificial intelligence. OK, that's a really good question. That's a brilliant question. No one's ever asked me that question before. But I can tell you the answer. And it's very visible. What? A visible reaction? A visible reaction. Well, he was very big. So there's plenty of person to give a reaction.
00:23:53
Speaker
No, I didn't go around making a fool of myself telling him what the future held. I thought the best thing to do about the future is bring it on. Not tell you about it, but bring it on. And I didn't know how I was going to do that yet, because to me, in those days, a computer consisted of a mainframe. A mainframe is a bloody great metal box. Well, your listeners can't see the size of this room, but a metal box.
00:24:23
Speaker
take up the whole of this room and now it would be a tiny, about the size of a fly's kneecap element in a PC. But in those days, that was it.
00:24:43
Speaker
As time went on and as all the evolution of computers, of computing, all the evolution of computing took place in companies that were building mainframe computers and leading one of those in terms of
00:25:05
Speaker
not the reverence we had of them, but of the money they were making was IBM. And then there was another one called Univac, and there were several others. There was Burroughs. There was Royal RCA. There were half a dozen American companies
00:25:28
Speaker
And there was one in Britain called Leo. It was an amazing company because it wasn't a technical company. It was Joe Lyons Corner Shop. Now, most of your listeners won't have heard of Joe Lyons, but everybody knew about it back in the 50s, right up until the 50s. It was in the first half of this century,
00:25:54
Speaker
Joe Lyons was famous for being the place you went to To cup of tea get a cup of tea and a cake in the middle of the morning in the middle of the afternoon and they say they they started by copying the Cambridge computer and
00:26:13
Speaker
They called it LEO, and that was Britain's first attempt at having a commercial company to not design, because design was made by Cambridge.
00:26:30
Speaker
Construction and paying because they had money. We didn't they paid they paid Cambridge University money and bought the the design of the thing we called the edzac and made a computer which which they called leo 1 leo and
00:26:54
Speaker
I want to make sure I'm understanding this because this scene was quite wild to me. You're saying there was a chain of tea shops? Tea shops? Tea shops. Is that what you're saying? With the tea and the cake? All over Britain. And they were one of the founding fathers of British computing. They certainly were. I've never heard that. And there wasn't a single technical person working for Joe Lyons.
00:27:21
Speaker
So that's somebody at Joe Lyons saying, I think I see the future. And that that must have seemed like quite a gamble. Yeah, yeah, I could find I could get his name because I got it. I've got background books on on all this stuff that I picked up years later. So so I can actually produce a name. So there is a name. I'm terribly sorry to him and his grandchildren. And I can't remember his name.
00:27:51
Speaker
And Cambridge needed money.
00:27:57
Speaker
Universities always need money. If you chuck money at them, they'll do marvelous things. And so this first marvelous, in my life, the first marvelous thing was building this edzac computer. And around here somewhere, I've got a book with, and the front cover is the edzac computer. It's my life with computers.
00:28:24
Speaker
What a great guess. We ought to get a plug in there because one of your several books, I'll include links in there. We include little notes each time we publish one of these and I'll include some links to your books in there. Okay, what I could do is bring you a little pile of books. I know where they are and we can do that at some stage. Then I'd be interested to share that list with everyone who's listening as well.
00:28:51
Speaker
Yeah, OK. Well, I know where they are. I could pick them up right now, if you like. Let's do it in a little while. I'm quite enjoying this. Yeah, but I'm in the middle of a story, believe it or not. I'm in the middle of a story. And the story is that the evolution of computing was all about the evolution of computers.
Revolutionizing Design at Boeing
00:29:16
Speaker
Computers being a large metal box.
00:29:19
Speaker
So led by the hardware very much. That's right. It's it's all made but but I I wrote an article I won't name it, but I wrote an article which got published along with a lot of other stuff about things to hang on to computers and I
00:29:43
Speaker
let's see, I can't remember the year now, but the thing that, one of these devices was a plotter, an ordinary plotter, and there were two companies in America, and I don't suppose there were any in Britain, that actually made plotters, and their customers were mostly sort of
00:30:13
Speaker
Whether people Sorry to interrupt you Norman just a plotter. Is that in my mind? That's Kind of an automated drawing tool. So a large exactly. Yes. Yes the distance between your hands is exactly it, you know is about a foot and a half by foot and a half and
00:30:33
Speaker
Sorry, this isn't in pictorially, but it moved a pen on paper. So you wrote your program. Okay, let me take a step back. Ah, here's a story. I've just recalled it.
00:31:00
Speaker
We were running out of printers. The American computer manufacturers felt that they must have larger and faster printers because people were doing more and more computing, mostly over in the United States, much more than in Britain, I have to say.
00:31:23
Speaker
It has to be printed. And so I was constantly having to go to the headquarters of Boeing, which is another different part of Seattle. And there's a lot of rivalry between different organizations, as there always are in a large organization.
00:31:43
Speaker
and one of these was between me and the financial people and I had to all the time explain what computers were and why we needed them and why they cost so much money and all that sort of thing and so
00:32:10
Speaker
And when you looked at the heaps of paper that were printed every day, you know, your mind boggled. What on earth do they do with all these printed numbers? They were printing thousands and thousands of numbers in places where five years earlier there had been none whatsoever.
00:32:32
Speaker
So I had a chap called Art Dietrich. I hope he's still alive, and here's this somehow. He's a Swiss, lives in Seattle. And when a new idea came up, you know, put it onto old art, he'll find out what to do about it and so forth. So I said to Arthur,
00:32:54
Speaker
I'll go around and ask the engineers what they do with these thousands or millions of data points printed out on sheets of paper. It's how you could find a number in hidden. The best place to hide a tree is in a forest and the best place to hide a number is on a printout. That was my feeling at the time. Nothing's changed.
00:33:24
Speaker
And he came back in a couple of weeks and said, I'll tell you Norman, what they do, they plot these, they go through the numbers and they plot them.
00:33:36
Speaker
And I said, well, why don't we have the computer plot them? Well, there are no plotters attached to computers. I said, well, let's do it. So we found a couple of plotter makers, one on the top right-hand corner of America and one in the bottom left-hand corner, and went over and had a chat with them and so forth. And we chose one and electro
00:34:07
Speaker
electronics or something over in Long Branch, New Jersey, the top right-hand corner of America. And they told me how the plotter worked. So I sat down and wrote a program that went, so it could go automatically from a calculation program on the computer
00:34:31
Speaker
to a plotter program, and I gave it the very clever title, this program, plot one. So the first plotting, I say the first plotting program that was ever made on this planet was one I made some Friday morning, Saturday morning, I suppose it was, for the plotter at Boeing.
00:35:00
Speaker
And so we bought the program.
00:35:07
Speaker
And the plotter maker, they bought the program. No, he didn't buy the program. I wrote the program. The plotter makers, they bought that program from us so that they could sell computer-generated plotting, hopefully to customers, and they got lots.
00:35:32
Speaker
So I set up a little cupboard, I suppose it was, a small office, put the plotter in the office. I hired a chap off the streets of Seattle. I can't remember his name or why him, but anyway, I needed someone to
00:35:56
Speaker
changed the sheets of paper and his role was to, first thing in the morning, put a sheet of paper on the glass top of this plotter and press a certain button, stand back and this plotter used to plot.
00:36:17
Speaker
And after a few weeks, the reputation of computing took an enormous leap because there in computing we were doing something that had never been done before. We got the computer actually to plot the results of something.
00:36:45
Speaker
and it was it was fast and it was accurate and all the rest of it and after a couple of days of this I walked into the into the into the office to see how things were going and there were half a dozen
00:37:00
Speaker
senior engineering managers, and these are guys who during the war had been working day after day, night after night, working drawing lines with shaky hands and so forth, and measuring them and so forth, and building bombers to bomb Germany.
00:37:22
Speaker
And they were amazing. We're just standing there. No one was saying anything. They were just watching a machine do what they had spent a career doing except that it was doing it fast. Sorry? Well, they spent a career doing laying on the floor. That's right. Yeah, I hadn't thought of that. Of course, a lot of them, if they were seven feet tall, that's what they were doing. And that's a good point to make.
00:37:49
Speaker
But I sort of walked through, and I didn't even say, good afternoon, gentlemen. I just walked through and stood there watching, not knowing what to say afterwards. I realized what to say, you know, to just reinforce what they were looking at. And they were looking at automatic plotting.
00:38:08
Speaker
And when you see it the first time, because everyone sees it today, but when you see it the first time, it's an incredible experience to see. And then you could make, and I had the idea of making a Mickey Mouse, if you programmed a cartoon of Mickey Mouse,
00:38:37
Speaker
put that in, it would come out plotted. And I had the idea of customers. It couldn't be our customers because we couldn't go into business with Walt Disney. But the plotter makers could, and I guess they did. I don't know what's happened.
00:39:01
Speaker
But there was an enormous breakthrough with computing. Firstly, it meant that we didn't have to do all that printing. And finally, at last, I discovered something that was easy to explain to them, because half my life in those early days was explaining to the people with the company's money.
00:39:28
Speaker
What computers are doing for them and okay, you didn't have to use the word computer you could just say automatic plotter or something and they knew what you were talking about and This is something that it just happened. I didn't I didn't I didn't predict so were you as surprised as anybody else that How much that changed Boeing?
00:39:54
Speaker
I mean, how long did it take for the change to really change overnight overnight? Yeah, because knowing like Ford Motorcar Company, they spent an enormous amount of time that people aren't aware of, I suppose, in in their design office.
00:40:22
Speaker
with shaky pencils. And with shaky pencils. And then my next step was, OK, if we can draw it, we could cut it. We need an automatic cutting machine. And that we got. So nowadays that would be called CMC.
00:40:41
Speaker
I call it CAD, computer-aided design. And CAM, computer-aided manufacturing. I wrote it all up years and years ago, but I didn't call it computer-aided design, I called it design automation. And somewhere in this house there's a bent copy of this paper. It's the automation, sorry, I keep remembering that this is meant to be a
00:41:11
Speaker
It's sort of a computer and science based podcast. I've just been listening to your story, but the automation aspect of it I find really interesting. Was there sort of a kickback from anyone? What I'm trying to place this with in my mind, and I apologize if I'm miles off, is the Luddites with the mills.
00:41:31
Speaker
You know, when the mills started to automate processes, there was a fairly significant kickback against that from people who didn't like the manufacture progress. Did you experience that at Boeing? No, we didn't have Luddites at Boeing. We didn't have Luddites.
00:41:49
Speaker
on board everyone was on board once they saw this there was nothing to say you know you know by a dozen of them right away like and uh and that it was a an unacknowledged revolution i suppose
00:42:07
Speaker
Unacknowledged revolution. So I might have seen me picking my phone up. I'm making notes as we go along. I'm just going to write that unacknowledged revolution. Yes, I'd never thought of it before. I'm thinking about these things now in the safety and comfort of my music room.
00:42:26
Speaker
Brilliant. I'm going to wrap this up about here. No doubt we'll speak again. I'm trying to type and speak at the same time and that's a struggle. So to summarize, you went into a Canada in America in search of computers and ended up, I dare say, being one of the first people to connect a computer to a printer. I'm going to call it a printer. I know it was a plotter,
00:42:54
Speaker
Oh, no, but you don't call it a, don't call a plot a printer. See, now I'm being a, not a Luddite, but... No, no, no, but I mean, printers, printers became enormous things. And to see thousands of numbers being printed per minute or per second on a printer in those days,
00:43:18
Speaker
I suppose there's very little printing going on. It's the computer controlling movements of things in hospitals.
00:43:30
Speaker
Yeah, I think printers now, I guess, are the final output. Yes. Rather than when you're talking about computers, if I understand it correctly, they were a part of the calculation. That's right. Yes, I think that's the big change. I hadn't thought of it that way before, but that's the case. Well, I've got to be honest, the conversation that
00:43:55
Speaker
I was expecting to have, although Norman, for the list of Norman I haven't known each other a little while, a few years, and I can never quite predict which direction a conversation with you will go, and I was expecting this to be a conversation about
00:44:11
Speaker
people who might resist technology being overcome in the end. But what's quite brilliant about this story is that when people saw the technology, there was no battle. There was no discussion. They just stood there. These are guys who are always talking and shouting.
00:44:33
Speaker
building airplanes, it's a highly verbal thing. They scream and shout and swear. I mean, I'd done my national service, I knew how to swear, but it didn't come as a surprise to me when I found myself, you know, back amongst my erstwhile swearers. But what was I saying? I can't remember.
00:45:00
Speaker
So it was just accepted. Yes, it got accepted. Just because once it if it's all happening inside an enormous box and all it's doing is printing lines and lines and lines and lines of paper, you know, well, what the hell? But once once it started emulating them moving the pen around, drawing things, it's
00:45:26
Speaker
suddenly came over and they saw it and they didn't discuss it. What happened to those people? Because obviously their days of laying on the floor with pencils is over. But surely they assume they didn't all just become
00:45:45
Speaker
I assume they didn't just wander out of the front door of Boeing that day and go off and find other parts, other jobs. What happened to those people after they not so much saw the writing on the wall but saw the pen on the plotter?
Engineers Embrace Automation
00:46:03
Speaker
Yeah, well, that's right. They they were engineers, of course, these guys were engineers. I think we're being visited, but that doesn't matter. He comes in every day to pick up the newspaper. Okay. The
00:46:24
Speaker
They are engineers and the goal of an engineer, in the case of Boeing, was to get an aeroplane up. Hi Derek, we're having a discussion here. Okay, I'll keep that a bit. Yeah, I've put the papers out for you. Yeah, okay. Did they? What was the score?
00:46:50
Speaker
There was 2-1 but what was wrong was they just paid $5 million for a new player to boost their confidence and he was sent off. Oh really? Okay, we'll talk about it tomorrow Derek. Okay, bye. You just wander round the house and look at anything you like, yes.
00:47:18
Speaker
So these people, engineers, and I'm wondering if when they saw not so much the writing on the wall, but the pen on the plotter, whether they thought, great, we can now elevate our work on tour.
00:47:33
Speaker
more thoughtful things because they, some of the manual drives. It's a good way to put it, yes. I'm just guessing. The ultimate object was early on, before the war was a Spitfire flying and then it became a B-17 flying and so forth and how they got there is kind of lost in the actually
00:47:57
Speaker
seeing the thing in operation. It must have felt the same in the 19th century with locomotives and all the rest of it, because they had the same problems and they had no computers. So the object of the exercise is to get the plane flying, in the case of Boeing.
00:48:22
Speaker
And there wasn't much discussion by that time with the computer and so forth. There wasn't much discussion about how it happened, because it went overnight from being a crazy idea to being, this is how we do it.
00:48:47
Speaker
And so these engineers were, because the quality of the work got such an enormous improvement, the accuracy of the lines and the speed of the lines,
00:49:08
Speaker
Yes on the on the 727 the 727 is I'll show you a picture of some 27 in the book. It's a an airplane with three engines at the back You've probably never seen one because they didn't make many of them, but it would that was the breakthrough And and so that the team that we had in in designing in writing the
00:49:34
Speaker
Thinking of the mathematics, writing the programming and so forth, drawing and cutting and assembling the 727. That was the leading thing. That was the first thing ever made by a computer and it was made right outside my room and it was an incredible feeling at the time and it still is.
00:49:59
Speaker
But if people haven't gone through it, they probably don't realize what it meant. It meant a lot.
00:50:09
Speaker
So yes, so these engineers as as the as the equipment came along the engineers who they couldn't program we don't want in the program we know how to Just speak it just speak it and I'll design it and then the machine will make it, you know
00:50:34
Speaker
And I think that taking a step backwards here, when we were children at school, we learned about the Industrial Revolution. And because the computer was, I call it a digital revolution or something like that, but it was certainly an industrial and social revolution.
00:51:01
Speaker
and has been just absorbed by people. Computers are here to stay, plotters are here to stay, even though no one outside of a factory actually sees a plotter working.
00:51:18
Speaker
The people that really count here, they know exactly what it does. And if something goes wrong in the machine, they give you holy hell. And if they don't get the money to buy some crazy idea that is going to work like previous crazy ideas worked, you know, you're going to hear full of horrible English.
00:51:45
Speaker
Brilliant.
Closing Remarks and Future Resources
00:51:46
Speaker
Norman, it's been absolutely fascinating speaking to you. I really appreciate your time. I'll include some links to your book in the show notes for this and just thank you very much for joining us. Oh, great pleasure. We need more people like you to ask us questions and then turn the answers into sayable things. If I can do that, then I will consider my life well spent.
00:52:14
Speaker
That's right, you do that and get a good career and write about them and all the rest of it. Thank you very much.