Rules For Success?
This is the notes and presentation for a talk I will be giving to students in the Engineering Department at Liverpool University on March 17th, 2011.
It is of course, St. Patrick ‘s Day, so in deference to Liverpool’s Irish history, I will endeavour to make this talk, less serious than it could be. After all, being succesful in life and/or business and technology is supposedly a serious business, but you need it to be fun as well. And the Irish and especially Liverpool Irish know about that!
The talk has two objectives.
For you, I’m trying to tell you what a great experience it can be to take the germ of an idea and create and nurture it, like one would a child. And hopefully make you think hard and long about yourself, your ambitions and how to create something that is worthwhile not only to yourself, your family, friends and country, but hopefully to the whole world.
For me, it’s more of ego trip or a voyage of self-rediscovery after suffering a stroke on holiday in Hong Kong. So I’ll perhaps apologise now, not for my brain, as it was always a few pence short of a shilling, but for my hands, my voice and my hearing.
You will notice that I have added a question mark to the title. You can question everything I say as much as you want and that is why it is there. No-one has the monopoly of what is right, least alone me. If I’d listened more to my doctors, I probably wouldn’t have had the second bad stroke.
To start the presentation, just click the link below.
Rules For Success? – About This Presentation
I should also say now, that this presentation is done in a WordPress blog. If that company can run a whole distributed organisation with participants all over the globe using their own product, then surely I can write a simple presentation. If you want to see how they do it, look here.
The reasons for doing it this way, instead of in something like PowerPoint are many and varied.
The first reason is that it’s so easy to create and edit. I could have been actually editing this presentation on the way up from London this morning.
You have no restriction as to content, so you can link to pictures, videos, documents and even program downloads.
Here’s an educational video for an example.
And of course you can access the presentation from anywhere in the world from any device with a web browser!
Rules For Success? – A Quote
I’m going to start with a quote.
The only thing that all successful people share is that they are robust, resilient and resourceful.
It comes from an opinion in The Times of March 2nd, 2011 entitled “We’ve disabled a generation through kindness.” It comes from one of their regular writers, Alice Thomson and she goes on to say how we’ve all been too kind to all our children, by mollycoddling them too much and not letting them use their intelligence.
Just a quick question, but how many of you came up to Liverpool for your first year on public transport with just a very large suitcase?
I’ll just add a bit more about Alice, so you can see where she’s coming from. One of her great great-grandfathers was J.J. Thomson, the discoverer of the electron and a grandfather was William Bragg, who won a Nobel Prize for Physics and headed the Royal Institution. So she has a rather unusual background for a journalist.
So now I’m going to tell you about my group of Electrical Engineering students at Liverpool and what some of us did later.
Rules For Success? – The Class of 1965
I started in this then new building in 1965 and there were just over a hundred of us. We weren’t a morbid lot, but in the first term quite a few had accidents, so we reckoned about one-in-eight of us wouldn’t last the three years.
Perhaps we did things that students don’t do now. One climbed the enormous crane on the Catholic Cathedral, which was being built at the time. Sadly he died in his first year in a mountaineering accident.
One of the students was Robin Saxby, who went on to be the CEO of ARM Holdings. And most of us have a device with one or more of that company’s chips in it.
I’m not sure, I do though, as I don’t use a smart phone, but a Nokia 6310i, which is now eight years old and still on the original battery.
The other you might have heard of was Cedric Sloan, who became the Colonel of the Royal Engineers.
A lot of us are still in contact and we think that on the whole, we didn’t do too badly. But that’s not for us to judge. It’s a question for the future!
Rules For Success? – About Me
I am a typical London mongrel and was born in 1947. I had a very good education at a grammar school, Minchenden, and then here in Liverpool.
But in some ways my parents and relatives taught me a lot more.
My father was a proper letterpress printer and he taught me everything about the industry, from how to design and layout pages and how to set lead type, to how to mend complicated printing machines. I actually think the precision and care needed in the industry in those days, made me into a very pedantic programmer.
My mother was the mathematician in the family and now would have probably gone to University to read that subject. She taught me many skills from mental arithmetic, to cooking and how to knit and repair and make clothes.
Her brother, who himself was no mean artist and engineer, taught me a lot of things. Like how to use machine tools.
I think that they all left me with a deep sense of curiosity and invention, which throughout my life has been the driving force behind everything I’ve done.
My father also taught me one important thing. If you need to perhaps consult an expert or approach someone important to what you want to do, then just do it. If they don’t reply or you can’t get access, then they weren’t the person to help.
In my case, when I was 16, I needed a job for the school holidays and he phoned the boss of his best customer and asked if they had anything for me. I got a job for eight weeks in the electronics laboratory and I can still remember many of the things I did then.
Everything you have ever done is important to being a success and especially a successful entrepreneur.
As a child I spent hours reading encyclopaedias. What do I do now, as I watch television? Check out things I see in Wikipedia and the wider web.
Rules for Success? – PACE 231R
Whenever I do a presentation, I always put in a plug for the PACE 231R analog computer, I used for the simulation of chemical processes at ICI in the 1970s. Here are a couple of pictures.
In my view, there are computers, good computers and the PACE 231R.
The 231R was built in the 1960s and it was all valve or vacuum tube, if you are from the United States. It was a formidable beast for solving differential equations and I have a feeling that there isn’t one left even in a museum. These pictures taken by a colleague at ICI seem to be two of the only ones of a 231R in a working environment. Hopefully the Internet will preserve them for ever!
The biggest claim to fame of the 231R was that two of them were used in tandem to solve all of the mathematics and differential equations of getting the Apollo spacecraft to the moon. They were actually linked to virtually a real spacecraft to test everything out.
So when Apollo 13 blew up and they had to use the Lunar Excursion Module to bring the astronauts home, it was these two computers that were reprogrammed to try to find out how to do it. They wouldn’t have stood a chance with a digital machine, but the engineers, programmers and astonauts were able to get the two 231R’s to find a strategy. I’ve never seen the Apollo 13 film, but I suspect that the role of the 231Rs is downplayed or ignored.
So when you ask me, what is the greatest computer ever made, there is only one answer. The amazing PACE 231R.
Rules For Success? – My Three Main Successes
I have had three main successes; LCAS, Artemis and Respimat, in the technological field over the past forty years, since I left Liverpool University. I’ve done a large number of things that I consider innovative, but generally although they satisfied my need for solving problems, they weren’t great financial successes.
Sometimes it disappoints me, that some of the technology I played with forty or fifty years ago has never been fully developed and could have applications today.
Perhaps someone should research the sort of things being done in that time and see if some of the products that didn’t work then, will work now with modern methods, materials and computing.
I think in general, the large problems we face in life haven’t changed too much, but the solutions have changed greatly.
Rules For Success – LCAS
LCAS is a strange one, that went on to have a profound effect on my life. I was employed by Lloyds Bank as a consultant to program a system to work out how much the individual transactions in a bank actually cost them.
The system actually was used by the bank for nearly twenty years and was only retired when they couldn’t find a PDP-10 to run it on.
I never got the contract for the replacement system, as that went to one of the major consultancy firms. Lloyds dismissed my proposal on the grounds that I was too small an organisation and couldn’t offer the support they wanted. Twenty years of support didn’t could for anything!
Banks have never understood technology and especially anything that involves risk. After all the collective noun for bankers is a wunch!
I’ve only ever met one decent banker with intelligence. David was on the committee that proposed LCAS and later by chance was my personal branch manager. Over the years we became firm friends.
Rules For Success? – Artemis
Artemis was and still is a project management system, that used PERT and critical path methods, coupled with advanced computation and graphics to solve the problems of managing, budgeting and controlling costs in projects.
I programmed the original mini-computer based system in the mid-1970s, building on earlier PERT and other programs I’d written for a company called Time Sharing, which allowed people to dial-up a large mainframe computer.
By the 1980s, over half of all the world’s major projects were managed by Artemis.
The software ranged in size from the PC through our own hardware to large mainframes.
In 1984, we sold the company to Lockheed for $128,000,000.
Since then, the company has suffered many changes of ownership and is just a shadow of what it could have been.
As an example, our database system was fully relational and pre-dated Oracle by a few years. But we didn’t realise totally what we had.
So always make sure that what you develop, doesn’t have more important applications in areas that weren’t in your original thoughts!
Rules For Success? – Respimat
Two guys approached me for funding, as they were doing unusual things in the field of fluid dynamics. As I understood a fair bit about that from my past at ICI and at the time I lived in the family home of Osborne Reynolds, I decided to fund them in their work.
The first product was an aerosol valve that instead of working with HCFCs, worked with compressed nitrogen. Actually, we always talked about using purified air. (Sad, but the general public believes nitogen is poisonous!) We spent a lot of money on IPR and then sold the whole idea to Johnson & Johnson at a small profit. Whether they ever used it in a real product, I don’t know.
We were then approached by a major pharmaceutical company, who asked if we could use our technology to power a metered-dose-inhaler for asthma drugs and they gave us a near six-figure grant for research.
We couldn’t, but the two guys came up with another idea that worked.
Strangely, our contract with the pharmaceutical company, gave them no legal rights to the device, if we decided to go elsewhere. So we put in nearly half a million of our own money to complete all the IPR and obtain the patents.
When the patents were granted, we sold the device and all the rights to Bohringer Ingelheim, the German pharmaceutical company, who called it Respimat.
It had been a project with a long and difficult history, that somehow managed to limp to a successful conclusion.
The Anonymous Widower 