This is going to be sooo easy...if there are no decisions to make!
- START
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- Go into the kitchen
- Fill jug (on bench) with water
- Plug in and turn on
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- Go to pantry and choose a tea bag from the tin
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- Go to the drawer and select a cup
- Put the tea bag into the cup
- Wait for the jug to boil
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- Pour boiling water into the cup making sure not to let the tab fall into the water
- Wave the tea bag around by the tab until the right shade of brown
- Take the tea bag out and throw into the dustbin
- Tea is ready
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- STOP
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Establish Conditions: what conditions should I check in the first instance…how atomic do I need to be?
The journey begins with a simple exercise: the creation of a flowchart for making a cup of tea. This seemingly mundane task introduced me to the essence of logic—how it organises actions into sequences, connects steps, and ensures outcomes. I learned a lot from this simple process…the sequence of decisions needs optimising and “what happens if…” entered my mind and has never left.
The 'tea' exercise was about consciously organising thoughts into a sequence to deliver an outcome.
One piece of advice stuck with me: “Check for errors and clean up.” Optimisation and error processing remain the biggest issues computer technologists face today and so it was a lesson well learned.
My first programming task was to build a 'wages' system for all the employees, in COBOL. This would be the company's first commercial return on the money invested in my training and salary.
I was excited…none of my mates were working with computers. It was novel and so different to any other profession. Being a little fish in deep water, I had to learn how find and keep swimming with the currents.
This first experience with structured logic sparked an awakening. I began to see patterns and structures in everyday life, realising that logic wasn’t confined to machines—it was everywhere. This chapter represents the beginning of a lifelong fascination with systems, logic, and the art of breaking complexity into simple, executable steps.
Spoiler alert...there is a little history that follows...feel free to jump to the punchline!
Sheffield , UK, was in the steel industry, but by 1968 it was in trouble from competitors who had managed to re-tool after WWII, Japan leading the way. The home industrial landscape was falling into steep decline, the north of England heading for a mining collapse, bankrupt British rail, and a 15-year recession with 40% unemployment. Oxford-educated Harold Wilson was prime minister, leading a Labour government with social welfare high on the agenda, supported by strong unions. Computers and information were only in their infancy and nowhere on the government’s radar, perhaps with the exception of grants for science and universities. Had they only had a crystal ball, things would have been so different.
The era of monolithic mainframes and punched cards was both exhilarating and challenging. These machines, with their blinking lights, there were no screens yet. Rows of illuminated buttons in sets of 3 were used for booting sequences and produced stop codes. Three buttons per group represented 3 bits in the machine memory. Setting these bits as ON-OFF-OFF created decimal number 4. Setting 4040 would boot the operating system from tape drive-1. Not quite the power-on sequence of PCs and mobiles today!
Their limitations were profound. Memory was scarce, and processing power was limited. Programs were too big to fit into memory; a program had its own constraints and needed to be loaded in executable segments…again, the sequence of operation was critical. Create multiple passes of the data, store interim output on tape, sort it, merge the data with other data, and load the next process.
We were on the cutting edge in more than one way…trees were a casualty of the era, paper being a vital output from early computers. Reports were massive and were printed and discarded 90% of the time. I now am appalled by waste in all its forms. Yet these challenges taught me patience and precision, as well as an appreciation for trees…and the hidden beauty of logic.
Some of my most vivid memories involve creating flowcharts from ideas, translating flowcharts into both process and into rigid, monolithic code…I learned to ask, What is the process? What are the exceptions? What happens if something goes wrong? These questions became second nature, shaping the way I later approached every system I built.
Punchline
The simple exercise of creating a flowchart for making tea taught me the essence of logic: sequencing, optimising, and anticipating errors. Decades later, these lessons remain as relevant as ever. Whether debugging a legacy system or designing modern AI algorithms, the ability to break complexity into executable steps is foundational for every technologist.
These experiences also reinforced a critical lesson: logic is only as good as its context. A system that worked perfectly in one environment might fail spectacularly in another, reminding me that logic is always tied to time and place.
After 14 months, I secured a programming job in London…it was time to leave home!