Hong Kong Computer Society - enterpriseinnovation.net

COVERSTORY
HKCS: 40 years
Hong Kong high tech in the
60s and 70s
Sent to Hong Kong on a three-year contract as a programmer in 1966, John Strickland
qualifies as one of the pioneers of IT in Hong Kong. He shares his memories with
CWHK in this exclusive interview By Chee Sing Chan
CWHK: How did you first come to Hong
Kong?
John Strickland (JS): I arrived at Hong
Kong on 28 April 1966 by boat from Venice.
I had signed up for a three-year contract
with the Hongkong and Shanghai
Banking Corporation Limited (HSBC)
as Chief Programmer at HK$3,600 per
month, plus housing on the Peak.
HSBC had ordered two IBM S/360
30s—each with 64KB memory and
35MB disks—for processing all the
banks savings and fixed-deposit accounts,
as well as handling the capture
of Magnetic Ink Character Recognition
data encoded on checks: firstly for interbank
clearing but later to automate the
banks current account record keeping.
The bank had transferred 19 young
Chinese staff from the branch network
as trainee programmers for the new
computer systems. None had university
degrees. All programming of the IBM
S/360 30s was in Assembler language
(i.e. essentially machine code), and they
were trained by Mike McNamara from
IBM Australia.
CWHK: What was Hong Kong like at the
time?
JS: The Cultural Revolution was un-
derway on the mainland, and Hong
Kong was far from being calm. Demonstration
marches and confrontations
with the police were common—so were
street sides “bombs,” although most
were fakes. We had running water four
hours per day. And loudspeakers on the
roof of the Bank of China blared the
mainland’s point of view, which was
drowned out by Cantonese opera provided
by the Hong Kong Government
from Beaconsfield House on Queen’s
Road Central.
The IBM 360/30s were delivered to a
new bank annex on One Queen’s Road
Central in September 1967. As shipping
containers had yet to be invented,
they were transferred from the boat by
crane over open water, then taken
to Queen’s Pier and similarly
offloaded. Glen Rasmussen of
IBM, who together with his
son Reid played a notable role
in the development of IT in
Hong Kong, helped oversee this
perilous transfer.
In 1969 HSBC hired
its first university
graduates as Systems
Analysts before
it started hiring
graduates as
bank officers. Computer Society.
But by then my contract was up and I
was working for Control Data in the
States developing the operating system
for the CDC 7600 supercomputer. I returned
to Hong Kong as Computer Systems
Development Manager at HSBC in
July 1971 and immediately joined the
newly set up Hong Kong Computer Society
(HKCS).
CWHK: What was the IT scene like
then?
JS: I still have many of the publications
of the time, including copies of “Computer
Asia” (1980-1990) and of “Hong
Kong Computer Journal” (1985-1990).
They all look so unsophisticated and
dated today!
In the 1970s the autopay
system was introduced by
Hong Kong Bank. This was
greatly welcomed by factories
because it allowed them pay
the workers by bank transfer
instead of cash. Huge
numbers of passbook
savings
accounts
were opened
by factory
workers. The
workload
John Strickland, current chairman of Cyberport,
former chairman of HSBC (Asia) and head of
Group IT, Distinguished Fellow of the Hong Kong
20 Computerworld Hong Kong Nov 2009 www.cw.com.hk