From Punch Cards to AI, one Crazy Journey
The book was an introduction to Cobol (not sure of the actual title), but it gave a good introduction to the language and had me hooked. I would punch my programs on the punch cards and send them to IBM to be compiled and ran (since personal computers had not appeared quite yet). Two weeks later I would receive the result, syntax error on card 28!!! I soon learnt to check my cards before sending them.
During my teenage years I bought a Sinclair Spectrum and learnt Basic and wrote adventure games for my friends to play. I also set up the computer lab at my high school and got their first O-Level A grade (actually helped a girl with her programs and she got one as well).
After dabbling in electronics (and crashing out of the RAF), I got my BTEC in Computer Science. It was after that when I interviewed with Barclays Bank for a computer operator position. They wanted to know why I wanted to be an operator since I was top of my class at college with heavy programming skills. I told them I didn't want to be an operator. I wanted to program for them and I felt the best start would be learn everything about their operations. So, for the next 2 years I worked in the operations center in Gloucester, moving from department to department learning everything. One day my manager called me in and offered me the chance to go on a programming course and if I passed it join the programming team at Radbrook Hall, in Cheshire. I jumped at the chance.
The course was at Radbrook Hall and lasted 6 weeks. It was a Cobol programming course, from the basics, file handling, DB2, IMS DB/DC, CICS through JCL. I knew most of this already so breezed through the course. On the 4th week, the instructors had to go to London for a course of their own and left a programmer in charge. She was a bit nervous and I ended up teaching the course for the week. Nobody failed the course. I was given choice of my first project and I chose one that had been struggling for the last 6 months, the Branch Income and Expenditure Reporting project.
The thing that the team were struggling with was that they couldn't uniquely identify an account because account numbers and even sort codes were being reused throughout the company. Each branch kept their own accounts. I brainstormed with the project manager and suggested that branch number, rather than the sort code along with the post code was a unique identifier for the branch and if the added the account number they would have a unique identifier. Unfortunately the project ran out of funds and I moved to other projects. Eventually my Fiancé, who was back in Gloucester made a fuss and I moved back there.
I joined a company that used Model-204 (a 3GL language with a database bolted on). I learnt it in a week and took over their EDI with Lloyds of London and the Institute of London Underwriters. It was the most stressful job I have ever done. I never missed a deadline, but my relationship failed as a result.
I moved to Milton Keynes where I worked for Argus. I was back using Cobol and in my happy place. After a couple of years I moved to EMEB, an energy company in Nottingham where I ended up on a really fun project, again using Cobol. When we were coming to the end of the project, I had a chance meeting with an agent who placed programmers on contracts. I'd never thought about being a contractor. We had a few drinks and he persuaded me to give up my job and take a contract in the north of England with MANWEB, another energy company, then a company in Cologne (Germany), where I was meant to be a translator, so ended up translating the requirements into English then helping write the Cobol programs which were integrated into Small Talk (the only version not in English). It was while doing this contract that I met my wife (on a trip back to Nottingham). We got engaged. I moved back to the UK and took a contract with BT (telecom company) in Cardiff (Wales). By now I had started to use APS, a Cobol code generator. I did a couple more contracts and then took one with a bank in Cheshire.
We got married and moved to a small town in North Wales. Unfortunately the contract didn't suit me so I ended up taking a year long contract in Perth, Scotland. It was for an Insurance Company, and it was a wonderful contract, again using Cobol. They wanted me to extend my contract but the joy of contracting was moving around.
From Scotland, I did a few more projects then ended up being approached from the company who wrote APS, they gave me a week's training with them to learn the inside of the generator so that I could customize it for clients. They had a client in mind who were teamed up with IBM to rewrite the Dutch Banking System. It was an American company and negotiations started and then on a Friday afternoon I received a fax with the contract and a ticket, not to Holland, but to Dallas TX. It was a 3 month contract between them (CardSystems) and my consulting company.
I flew out on the Sunday. My wife flew out for two weeks, then back for 2 and repeated this for 6 months (I extended my contract). At this point I told them I wanted to go full time, so they sponsored by H1B, which meant I had to leave the country and ended up living in Holland!!! I got my H1B and we move to Texas.
While there they contracted me out with EDS (now HP) where I wrote reconciliation reports in Cobol, to balance their bank conversions. Unfortunately, they moved the conversions of 3 banks to when I was on vacation. I offered to move the vacation, but they insisted I took it. I got back and they were millions out of balance. The manager told me the team who did the conversion didn't use my reports and asked me if I could see what I could do. It took a very long week, first I ran my reports, then found the problem, fixed it, then ran my reports again and instead of being millions off we were 25 cents overs. The manager gave me 25 cents along with tickets to the Dallas Stars. He asked me if I wanted to work full time, I said I would if my manager would approve it. The next day I was back at CardSystems.
CardSystems merged with a few companies and became PayByTouch. The Dallas office closed so we moved to Tucson. It was there where I started using Java and Visual Basis, then as soon as C# became a beta I got on the Microsoft beta testing team for it (which I got kicked off because I was vocal about the performance problems). I ended up doing a secret project to see how good C# and asp.net was. I wrote a virtual terminal that would allow you to swipe you card on a USB card reader and make a payment. This was the first ever virtual terminal. I ended up becoming a director who was responsible for putting a team together to integrate dynamic currency conversion into their processing system. It was a success.
One of our customers accidentally got through to my phone and was shouting at me about a problem they were having. I told him to stop shouting and call me back and would help him. He called back 5 minutes later and I helped him and we became friends. He found out I wrote the virtual terminal and asked if I could write him an internet payment gateway. It took a year of writing it so that it could use multiple card processors, made sure it was CISP, then PCI compliant, and ended up selling it to him. He persuaded me to move to Kansas City where I ran a small team who enhanced the gateway and added reward cards to it.
From there I moved back to Dallas and worked for another credit card company who I wrote a call center system that included a predictive dialer.
Since then I have worked for several other companies continuing to learn new languages, techniques and striving to help people where I can.
I left my last company is July 2025. Basically I had been put out to pasture. They wanted younger, cheaper staff who could use AI to generate their code without really understanding it. I don't blame them, but I do see the danger in it. I decided I wanted to go back to the days when I really enjoyed programming so I took a refresher course in Cobol. It got me longing to go back to programming using it. I have 14 years until I officially retire and would love to spend them with a company that values the importance of Cobol.
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