Dear Mum...

Well, (Annie's) mum - it's been 20 years to the day since cancer finally got you. I took the day off today and went to visit your grave with flowers. I sat for a while and thought of all the life you've missed - and quite how cross you'd be about it. I realised with a start a few days ago that I had now been alive longer without you than with you around; I was 19 when I lost you and you were 54, and that's just too young.

In the meantime I've: got married (Chris - you'd like him), gained two lovely stepdaughters, owned two more cats, lived life to the fullest, travelled the world and generally grown up. Well, mostly grown up; you'd be disappointed if I were dull. My lasting memory of you will always be your laughter, usually laughing at yourself. Even today after all this time, you are my inner strength when I need it as I hear your laughter in my ears.

I've lived the years without you well I think, with the support of some wonderful friends (and now, of course, Chris). They took your part admirably - supporting me with humour and acceptance. I love them all for this. They can't replace you entirely, but they do well to fill that hole left by you.

I wanted to include some of the words you'd written yourself below. I only knew these words existed a few years ago, when my godmother dug them up out of her files. These words showed me that you were an amazing, quirky, pioneering lady in a very different time. I'm so proud, yet so sad I never got a chance to know you in an adult / adult relationship.

Reading your words below, it would make you smile (as it does me) to know that I'm writing my words in an airport, using an iPad (more powerful than your mainframe) and 3G to access the Internet, having texted my brother to digitally photograph the article and email it to me from his phone. You'd say, "Hang on there - go back a bit - an i-what?". You'd also smile at the fact I can only really work in the job I do today by being able to work from home, and remotely access the work computers a few days a week. You were a part of starting that, you were.

While I grew up I never questioned the computer console in the house, even in the 70s before the rise of the PC. It was just furniture to a child who had always known it to be there. But it was as unusual then as it is usual now.

On my 18th birthday you thanked me for 18 happy years. You told me you'd also thanked me at one day, one week, one month and so on. So, mum, I'd like to dedicate today's blip to you and the very, very happy 19 years, 10 months and 12 days. You were a unique experience.



- Original text below written by Judy Matthewman for (as far as I can remember) Computer Weekly, 1970. With thanks to my godmother Rachel for keeping the article for us for 39 years, and to my brother David for being able to lay his hands on his copy.

"When your friends keep making the same joke at you, you wonder eventually whether you should be taking it seriously. After working for the Cambridge University Crystallography Department, programming first the EDSAC 2 then the Titan, for 6 years, I stopped work in late 1967 to have a baby.

Like so many women who have acquired a specialist skill, I was reluctant to abandon work completely, and I struggled on for a time, doing the thinking at home and travelling into Cambridge to prepare and run jobs on the Titan. It was about a year later, when I undertook a fairly large programming job for the British Museum, that I began to think in answer to all my friends who had laughingly said, "What you want is one of those on-line consoles in the kitchen" - "Well, why not?".

It was all surprisingly easy. The University Mathematical laboratory, which runs the Titan, already had consoles scattered in several university departments in Cambridge, and gave us permission to attach to the Titan. The Teletype itself and a line termination unit [was needed] - the UML cost £450 and we rent five miles of telephone cable from the GPO at about £100 a year. [...]

Logging into the system probably resembles logging in anywhere, involving user identifiers and secret passwords. Around 23 consoles are typically logged in to Titan during the day, with a background offline load of anything up to another hundred jobs (not, let me hasten to add, all running; the hundred involve jobs being input, jobs ready to run and waiting for store, or magnetic tapes, jobs which have been running and are temporarily halted, jobs which have finished computing and are waiting for their output to go to the relevant peripheral, and, typically, only about five or six user jobs running).

At busy times, I may well be told SYSTEMS FULL. Fortunately, the times which a housewife has available for work do not coincide badly with the times at which more conventional users flock to consoles. Evenings, weekends and mealtimes are my best times, and, of course, if I were to suddenly dream what was wrong with my program, I could in theory leap out of bed and contact the Titan there and then. Even at busy times my study is a comfortable place to sit and wait; during the day.

I do not even need to keep trying to log on, as I have a two-year-old who delights in starting the process for me [Annie: this was my older brother, David]. [...]

The number of people who could follow our example is at present probably rather small. [...] However I can certainly recommend it as a way of working, with or without the accompanying kitchen stove and cradle. David "helps" me work; the on-line system has so far been protected against random typing. He soon tires of the console and returns to bricks and rabbits, leaving me enough time during waking hours to keep up with work."


Final (and main) credit to my brother David, who took the original mono we've re-photographed here. It's my favourite picture of mum, and I'm sure you won't mind the copyright infringement... :)