18th March 1970

18/3/70

Branik

Dear mum and dad

I am at home ill again this time due to a visit to one of the best hotels in Prague. I went to the International Hotel on Monday for my lunch with one of the engineers and got food poisoning! I diagnosed my illness which was stomach pains, diarrhoea , temperature and lethargy as Clostridium Welchii and realised it would only last a couple of days. Yesterday I felt awful but today I am much better and I am just cooking spaghetti as I feel hungry again. This is the first time either of us have had a problem with the food here- the moral must be to eat in cheaper restaurants!

Thank you for your letter which arrived in 5 days- I hope you have some of my letters by now. I must close to catch the post

Love to all the family and pussy Nick- even if he is a naughty pussy.

Hoping to see you soon

Love tony and Gillian

The cultural life in Prague was fantastic. For us the tickets were extremely cheap. You could go to the national opera or a concert for very little money. For no more than the cost a simple café meal, we went to see Don Giovani at the Tyl Theatre (now renamed) on Ovocni Trh that was the very theatre where Mozart first performance of this opera was given.

Travel on the trams and buses were well organised and affordable even to the Czechs. The carriages were very old and some should have been in a museum rather than still on the road. The Czechs were very good engineers and could keep a machine working for ever or so it seemed.

Tony tells me of a mysterious customer he visited this month in the Prague suburbs. They have a fairly large ICL 1900 computer running situated in a grand 18^th Century suburban villa that looks as if it might well have been owned by a rich Banker. Without exception, whenever we approach this site for a progress meeting or engineering maintenance up impressive steps to the front door, we are kept waiting outside the large double door for at least 15 minutes whilst the Czech technicians inside ran-down and remove the programs they were running and fired-up some innocuous accounting routines. Although the brass plate by the door called it a ‘Research Institute’ or something like that, it was the common view amongst our engineers and programmers that it was really the Czech Secret Service computer centre. After sanitising the computer, we are let in.

Like all computers allowed to be sold by ICL, it had to have been approved by the NATO ‘Co-Com’ Committee that sat in Paris. In the height of the cold war the West was desperate not to give Communist Countries access to western technology that could be exploited for strategic or military use. The Russian made computers were, by reputation, unreliable and at the time fell far behind the sophistication and speed of western computers. Tortuous Co-Com negotiations and long justifications would be undertaken, taking many months, just to gain permission to ship a computer behind the Iron Curtain. In good faith ICL had gained permission to sell this particular computer to what we now all locally suspected had been a ‘front’ organisation for the Czech Secret service. We could never be sure but it was certainly a very suspicious and secretive organisation, showing no signs of being vaguely like a ‘Research Institute’.