2003 - Exeter College - University of Oxford

David Webb (Mathematics, 1983) experienced a different age of computers at Exeter. Here, he writes of the
past computing generation in Palmer’s Tower...
IN ANTIQUITY
Thank you to Jonathan Marks for his excellent
article in Exon 2002. I thought that readers
would be interested to know that Palmer’s
Tower in fact has a longer history in computing than
Jonathan realised.
I came up from Woking Sixth Form College
to Exeter in 1983 at 18 to read Maths, and my first
room in college was at the top of Palmer’s Tower, I
think room 8. Anyway, it was straight on as you reach
the top of the stairs, with a window overlooking the
Sheldonian (and through which one could climb, to
sit behind the parapet and snoop on the happenings
in the Rector’s Garden below). I suspect presentday
fire regulations mean the rooms can no longer
be used for students because when I visted later,
they had turned into dons’ studies. There were two
student rooms (one to the right of mine, occupied
by a Cellist called Hamish Walker) and a shared bathroom.
My fire escape was a crawl-hatch into
Hamish’s room and his was through a hatch in his
floor, down a ladder.
Back in 1983, the only computer in the entire
college, as far as I know, was an original Commodore
PET 2001 (Below: Right), with a tape cassette for
program storage and the “chocolate” rectangular layout
keyboard. It was living (or rather, dying) on the
ground floor of the library and largely ignored. Then
I arrived, and, by that time, I was a successful author
of games for the early home computers (Clive
Sinclair’s ZX81 and Spectrum - Above: Left). In the
summer of 1983, my first book “Supercharge Your
Spectrum” was in the computer charts. So I brought
with me a 48K Sinclair Spectrum, a 14" colour TV
and (acquired soon after) a CP/M machine from
Memotech used to develop the code, and of course,
a kettle and a toaster. The TV was necessary because
the Spectrum display output was UHF to the
aerial socket. I kept it fairly quiet because I wasn’t
sure whether it required a TV licence while “away
from home”, and TVs were normally banned in student
rooms.
I spent a fair part of my fresher year writing
another book called “Advanced Spectrum Machine
Language” – about game-writing for the Z80-based
8-bit processor. My tutors (Brian Stewart, Dermot
Roaf, and Dominic Donnelly who I see are all still
there) didn’t seem to know quite what to make of
all this and, perhaps in the futile hope that I would
do more maths, gave me an Exhibition award after
the first year. There was no undergraduate computing
degree at that time in the University, although
we did a bit of LISP in the maths.
With Mods out of the way, I spent a considerable
portion of the second year (now in Staircase
13:1) writing a space game called “Starion” (1985)
which you can still play in online “retro” Spectrum
simulators today. As there were no computers in
college, there was no e-mail either, and the principal
inter-student communication system was the
foot-mail deposit of messages in the communal alphabetic
pigeon boxes in the Porter’s Lodge (an early
version of the POP3 server). Student rooms had
no phones (with the possible exception of the JCR
President), and, of course, nobody had a mobile.
I’m delighted to hear that computing has made so
much progress at Exeter!
I used the royalties from my games and books
to play the stock market, and this stimulated my interest
in finance. After College in 1986 I gave up
computer programming and got a “real” job in corporate
finance in London, but maintained an interest
in computing to this day. In 1991 my work took
me to my present home in Hong Kong, and I retired
in 1998 to focus on my investments and running a
non-profit HK corporate governance campaign,
which is centred around my web site, named (you
guessed it) Webb-site.com.
Well I hope that gives you something to put
in the computing archives of
Palmer’s Tower. If you go
and look in the College
Library, you may find
copies of my two books
which I left behind –
although the Sinclair
Spectrum is now a
museum piece. For
further links see ­
www.oldcomputers.com/
museum/,
www.worldofspectrum.org/
If you would like to help support computing at Exeter please contact the Development Office.
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EXON - Autumn 2003 - www.exeter.ox.ac.uk/alumni