16th June 1970

Branik

16/06/70

Dear Mum and Dad

It was lovely to speak to you on Monday. I am so glad you enjoyed your holiday with us -we did as well. I am sitting on the balcony after tea writing this. It has been boiling hot all day and now I can hear a thunder storm approaching. We have been very busy since you left.

On Saturday we did the shopping, cleaned the car but I left the washing till Sunday. In fact it took us nearly all day to finish the washing but it dried very quickly in the sun. Around 4 o’clock we took a walk in a different direction from the one we went with you, through the woods and fields. In the evening we went to the pictures and saw ‘the Chase’ a film about an escaped convict.

We were pleased to hear we can fetch the new car from Amsterdam on Friday. We will fly there on Friday afternoon and travel home on Saturday and Sunday. We shall look at tents in Germany on the way home. The following weekend we will drive to Germany in both cars and have them serviced- the joys of having two cars!

Today we had some literature from France on Corsica including camping sites so I guess we will get some from Italy on Sardinia soon so do not worry if you cannot find anything to send us. Thank you for arranging the tickets for us and don’t forget to fill out a cheque for the money.

I am very busy at work at the moment and may have to go to Brno next week. I keep pausing as I write this to watch the lightening which is playing on the hillside the other side of the Vltava. We have a grandstand view from our balcony.

Thursday

Unfortunately I spent all last night watching the thunderstorm which went right over the top of our flat. It was terrific like a firework display.

By the way did either of you leave a Schaeffer pen a black one at our flat because one has suddenly appeared in one of our drawers?

I had better close now or you will never get this letter.

Love to all the family

Gillian and Tony

We did have a lovely holiday with Mum and Dad and have the films to prove it. Dad had some problem with his tooth and his eyes. I remember he went to a special clinic for foreigners and got both sorted. Then in the high Tatras he became somewhat short of breath and was diagnosed with angina when he got back to the UK but never had it after that which was strange. It could have been the altitude. He was still smoking his pipe at that time. The mountains were lovely in the summer with lots of walks that were colour coded. You could buy maps with the coloured routes on them and the sign posts not only told you where the footpath led but also how long it should take you to reach your destination.

The computers were sold at that time with a certain number of man hours engineering and programming support. In Brno Gill had been doing systems work, helping the tractor company write it first suite of stock control programmes. In those days it was not so normal for a company to use a pre-written software package (although some sound packages were available but somewhat inflexible), bespoke computer applications would more commonly be designed and programmed from scratch. The first programmes in the suite were data vet programmes. Computers were so oversold at that time as the answer to all problems that it was difficult to make the customer realise that data would never be 100% correct, however much you tried to programme for every eventuality. You could not eliminate human error; if someone said there were 10 spare parts when there were only 9 then the stock totals would be wrong. Czechs were very keen on theory, and Gill can remember endless discussions on the best way to add codes to data to allow the computer to check the data had not been incorrectly input.

The likelihood of the computer crashing also had to be addressed with a grandfather, father, son system of magnetic tapes where all the data was stored at that time, so if a crash did occur or a tape got corrupted you had an older version of the tape and only had to rerun the system a limited number of times to get back to the current data, albeit that it might take some hours!. I seem to remember that if the older tapes had been stored outside the air conditioned/temperature controlled computer room, further time would be lost waiting for them to acclimatise in the computer room. Does anyone else reading this remember those security procedures?