The what department?

Yes, W963 has an "Information Technology" department!

Well, back in 1994/5 Andy Grimbleby & Damon Naile set up some basic computing facilities at W963, which were much needed, and for the next few years these went very well with anyone who wanted to help with them putting a bit of time in.

The Network!

by Chris Cooper

This is the story of the W963 network and how it came into being - incidentally, the list of departments is wrong in this respect, 'cause there was no IT manager before Damon Naile in 1996/7 - previously there was a computer and the suaaa account at csv which were both looked after by the engineers or anybody else who could be arsed to bother) and which was maintained over the years by Andy Grimbleby, Bruce Newton, Damon Naile, Me and then Damon again when he became the first official IT manager.

Sometime in 1992/3 the station managed to procure its first ever computer, an Amstrad "PC" with a whopping 512k memory and two lovely 5" disk drives... and a hard disk that stored a couple of megabytes..., purchased from Andy Grimbleby's dad. This ran one of the earliest forms of the Record Library quite slowly. More usefully it could be connected (via a serial cable installed between the station and social studies where it plugged into a bank of ports on the second floor) to computer services via the now disused "LASS" system, from where it was able to run the catalogue on the csv mainframes - which was probably the fastest implementation that we ever had. Sadly csv decided to stop supporting LASS in 1994. It was also used to run a text-editor for the News and Arts departments to write up their scripts on. It had an Epson printer of uncertain spec, which to this day will happily spew out pages of text but has problems talking to Windows.

Sadly, the Amstrad's power supply died quite nastily in 1995 and since it was built on the Amstrad principle of "make everything as integrated and therefore unrepairable as possible" that was the end of it.

In 1994/5 Hilary Barnes, (then Ads manager) managed to procure us a 386DX with 4M memory and a 510Mb HDD, (at that time would have been worth roughly 800), built by Omega computers. It was paid for because the company was trying to flog their machines via the bookshop, so it was free on the understanding that we put out the excruciatingly irritating Omega advert, which ran for almost a year. In the previous summer Bruce Newton had written a secure frontend which was installed, and Damon Naile got to work writing something in Turbo Pascal that would read the Reclib files that had been recovered from csv. This went through several forms over the next two years, each more complicated than before and taking up more and more of Damon's time (at one point he started taking books out of the library in order to discover the ultimate search algorithm...). By the time that Damon had to take a year out due to illness he had decided that computer languages were no good and spent most of the following year while he was recovering, re-writing it in machine code.

In the last term of 1995/6 Chris Cooper suggested that we should put into our budget two second-hand 286's, since there had been for a long time a theory held in the programming "team" that it would be nice to have a terminal in the studio and one in the control room between which you could send messages, keep records of shows etc... after some thought by Chris Cooper, Keven Cook and Matt Howkins, the request was added to the budget and Chris Cooper started writing a rather dodgy demo that collected data from an on-air DJ. Once the budget applications were in Union Treasurer Nick Dunnet announced that he would like to chat to station manager Stewart Gregg about the whole thing with Nick Hull, treasurer, and the newly appointed union IT manager, Ian Brown. Keven Cook and Chris Cooper went along to explain the project, which at that time they didn't really understand themselves. After three-quarters of an hour of making stuff up on the spot between them, with Ian Brown asking questions from time to time, Ian Brown announced that since they were upgrading a lot of stuff in the union he would be quite happy to let us have "at least" three 386SX machines, a bunch of network cards and Windows 3.11. Surprised to say the least that we had got much more than we had ever considered, we were even more surprised when we wound up with four and a half such machines along with three printers of varying quality.

Over the summer Chris Cooper finished the demo of what the software should do, written in Borland Turbo Basic, and sent it to Damon with the suggestion that he re-write it in C++. After several weeks Chris received from Damon a reasonably professional looking bit of software, which after a few minutes poking through transpired to be the same program that he had originally sent to Damon, with lots of pretty graphics added to it. Despite all of the alterations since, the core of that program is still the badly constructed file appending routine that Chris wrote that summer. In the meantime, Ben Parcell and Chris Cooper had spent two days forcing ethernet cables through various holes in the station walls, and creating four working machines. However, by the start of term, despite various late nights from Chris, Damon and Bruce Newton, the system was still full of bugs - for one thing none of the machines would talk to each other, and Ian Brown couldn't remember where the drivers that would allow them to were. Further disaster struck when Chris, in a moment of misunderstanding one of Damon's answers deleted all of the source code for most of the software written over the past two years. Plus not all of the parts that we had were easily identifiable - that is until the day that Stuart Tomlinson walked into the station for the first time and announced that he had a book of every single hard drive manufactured since 1840...

Recognition, Finally!

In 1997, Iain Price took the momentous decision of suggesting the post of IT Manager be created, since:

1. The radio industry in general was moving towards digital, multitrack editing,
2. There were 3 computers sitting on the workspace outside Studio 2 alone, and
3. He was spending a good part of his degree tinkering with the W963 systems.

Some more notable milestones in the IT Department's history so far include the time when the CSV servers, Lupin and Thistle were found in a skip, rescued and installed in the Control Room as coffee tables, much to the annoyance of Station Manager Nick Hull; the time ex-Chief Engineer, Bruce Newton, turned up at W963 and formatted the NT system; and the time Iain exported the Microsoft workgroup "Bastard" across the whole Internet, prompting the Union's IT blokie to pull the plug on our system.