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Over the Christmas holidays I gained money instead of milkshakes: employed by the computer centre to write a data-checking system in Fortran, plus my first introduction to IBM1130 assembler.
In 1972 the family moved to Wellington on my father's promotion to Chief Surveyor, and so to Victoria University where we students had access to the IBM1130 and Clive NicholsonNicolson was the pre-eminent expert and the same height as me - 6'4" so we could not ovelook each other. We got stuck in to the operating system and miscellaneous device drivers, none of which had much to do with our course work, which had little to do with computers or the likes of tables of prime numbers, or e calculated to 132,800 places. Thus, the analysis of the results of a physics experiment might be facilitated by using a computer programme, but using computers was not a part of the course. In other words, unlike computer science courses where the programme is assessed on aesthetic grounds, these programmes were written to produce results, and correct ones at that. This proved to be an employment advantage.
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