Teryl @ Work

My World of Tomorrow – Back to the Future The build up to the Business Connexion (BCX) event has really got me thinking back over the early days of working in the computer industry. As a fully fledged baby boomer, my career started when being a computer programmer still had a strong air of mystique. Computer rooms were gigantic, smoke free zones, limited to the chosen few. We hand wrote code, the punch room ladies punched it onto cards, and we booked time for testing. Testing time was very tight, the reason so many of us worked lots of overtime.    Much easier to get a testing slot after hours, and the computer rooms ran 24 hours shifts, anyway. Overtime usually started with drinks at Jimmy’s Tavern in Braamfontein, and led to a few punch card disasters! Carrying the punch cards for a big program was a delicate, balancing act.   If you dropped them, getting them back into order was a real challenge, even if you remembered to number t...

Speculating about what would really change our world is a constant conversation in IT companies.   Business Connexion (BCX) and  +Accsys being no exceptions. When BCX decided to launch an Expo and Conference around the topic, the conversations became really focused.    Personally, I am a Science Fiction and Fantasy junky, and that is, in part, because what was SciFi when I was 20 is now a daily reality.    My dad died in 1972.   He was a real futurist, always wondering what would be happening next, whether in buildings or technology.   Part of his legacy is that he taught me to think like that, too. If you re-read HG Wells, Jules Verne, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, you will see what I mean.   And if you are lucky enough to be reading any of them for the first time, you will agree how truly prophetic those writers were.   And as for Da Vinci….. So what do the Accsys staff look for in th...