“Regrets I have a few, but then again, too few to mention” – Frank Sinatra OK, here’s another one…

In the late 70s I helped run a boatyard in the Solomon Islands with a group of other Kiwis and Trevor Holmes, our English Boss. It was a great place and we loved it, and loved the people. But living miles from everywhere, we had to import everything, from hammers and nails to Caterpillar engines.

And once we’d bought it we had to stock and keep track of it. We had a very busy warehouse in which everything was recorded on 5×3 file cards. The good old days!

I still remember a guy from the Asian Development Bank telling me on the boat trip back to Henderson Field, “Ian, have you heard of computers? Man, you could really use an Apple II here to run that warehouse!”

Anyway, that‘s just scene setting. When we got back to New Zealand I went to work for the naval architect who designed the boats, one of nature’s true gentlemen, Jerry Breekveldt. In those days boat design could be a tedious business, with seemingly endless calculations designed to ensure that everything necessary fits in the hull, and that the vessel gets along economically without sinking, rolling over or breaking up.

Jerry was and is a very bright guy and he must have been one of the first people anywhere to write his own code (executed on a HP programmable calculator with a tiny screen) to develop the hull shape and run the stability calculations etc.

I had never forgotten the ADB guy and the Apple II. In fact I’d bought a IIe and tossed it for a Morrow running CPM (!) so I could run some decent software for what was to become Queensberry.

So I felt totally qualified to say to Jerry, “Jerry this is gonna be huge! Rewrite your program for the IBM PC and sell, sell, sell!” Another green field.

But Jerry didn’t like MS-DOS (who did?) and preferred making a decent living, going home at night, and hiking at the weekends. Who wouldn’t? I was just grateful that at least I didn’t predate the age of calculators.