A memoir by Ann Moffatt
Ann’s detailed interview covering her life and career can be found here. This episode, not covered there, illuminates the society of the 1960s and the early application of computing to what was later called Business Process Re-engineering.
The CUBITH project was undertaken by Dame Stephanie (Steve) Shirley’s Freelance Programmers (and later F2 company) in the 1960s and the High-Level Design Document is in our archive and can be found below.
I worked in the Operations Research group at Kodak UK. I was taught to program by Conway Berners Lee, the father of Sir Tim Berners Lee who masterminded the World Wide Web. I loved programming from the start. In 1961 I married, and, unusual for the time, continued working for Kodak in the ‘Computer Department’ where I was the only woman Professional. In 1965, after my first baby was born, I joined Steve Shirley’s magnificent Freelance Programmers Limited (FPL). When I joined there were only 11 professionals. 8 years later I headed up FPL’s team of nearly 400 professional staff, all-working from their homes, to join the ‘traditional’ workplace. CUBITH was an early example of using IT for the management of strategic change and was also transformational for FPL. Introduction to Ann
When the new Labour Government handed down its first budget in 1965 it promised to reduce defence spending. But in the budget figures for 1966 defence expenditure and the budget allocation had both increased. This led to a public outcry, so Prime Minister Harold Wilson agreed that if anyone could suggest a project that would make better use of public funds, he would allocate money from the defence budget to that project. Harold Wilson's Labour Government
At that time, one of the highest priorities in the UK was the need to build and equip hospitals. Following the baby boom after World War II, Britain’s population was growing fast. Early baby boomers were about to become parents themselves. Most hospitals in Britain had been built before World War II and were poorly equipped. New techniques and materials which had been used to build houses, office blocks and factories had not yet found their way into hospital building. The Assistant Chief Architect from the Department of Health, Robert Radford, was a visionary. He decided that to build hospitals more quickly and cheaply, and to take advantage of new technologies that often arose after the initial intent to build a new hospital, a new approach was needed. Modernising Healthcare
In the 1960s, each hospital was unique in the way it was designed, built and commissioned. A large hospital took at least ten years from site acquisition to commissioning. In that time, building materials, construction techniques, medical techniques, philosophies and equipment could all change radically, rendering the hospital out of date on the day it opened. Radford’s concept was that hospitals could be built using modularised ‘activity units’. A ‘macro’ activity could be a medical unit, say, surgical or maternity. The basic design, shape and size of the unit could be fabricated off site. The hospital could then be assembled on site like Lego. A ‘micro’ activity could be hand cleansing which might be done using a hand washbasin, water, soap, taps and a plug. Later this might be performed using just a chemical spray. A computer database could be designed to hold old and new activity records. The consequences of the change could be calculated and design and services drawings updated. Radford had received £3 million to explore his concept. I was fascinated. The first task was to understand exactly how a large hospital was built. The system was similar in concept to the manufacturing process I had worked on at Kodak but instead of producing film, the end result was a hospital. This was exciting. It would be easy to build a PERT chart of the process but how could a computer system be built to support the project? The program would be managed for the Government by Solly Zuckerman, a South African born zoologist who was later knighted and elevated to the peerage. The Modular Approach
Learning about hospital design and construction was fascinating. As with the early stages of applying computers to processes at Kodak, there were many different opinions about the processes used to develop a hospital. Gaining consensus on which processes provided the best result took much diplomacy and brought together people who rarely communicated or considered others’ points of view before this project. The hospital building project, which was becoming huge. The idea of documenting the hospital building process and identifying best practice had caught the imagination of the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS), which was responsible for the National Health Service. Also, designers were experimenting with best practice design of both micro and macro activity models to support each of the activities in a hospital. A database was being developed to hold details of suppliers of hospital building products and internal fit-out products like floor tiles, windows, sanitary ware, beds, trolleys and operating suites. Exact specifications for each product were documented, together with price schedules. More fpl systems analysts and designers made up a steadily growing fpl team of about ten women. Other software houses were added to the team, including CAP and SPL. In all, more than 200 companies were involved in the project, including major construction companies and component manufacturers. Each company would assign people to the project. In all over 2000 people were involved. The project was known as CUBITH (Coordinated Use of Building Industrial Technology for Health Programme). It was easy to see where huge savings could be made by co-ordinating all suppliers to the hospital building process. In addition, hospital design had not been optimum in the past. This had led to women in labour being wheeled through hospitals to get from the maternity unit to the labour wards, which could be located at opposite ends of a large hospital. Similarly, if the morgue and the chapel were not co-located, dead bodies were often wheeled through hospital corridors. The Role of IT
Researchers were beginning to experiment with Computer Aided Design (CAD). A CAD centre was established at Cambridge University, based on an Atlas 2 computer, which was accessed through DEC PDP-4 minicomputers. DEC, which stood for Digital Equipment Corporation, was an emerging US computer company which made computers that were much smaller and cheaper than mainframes. They did not need to be installed in a strictly controlled environment and were often being used in manufacturing to control machines and analyse instrumentation data. They were also used to feed data to the mainframes, in which case they were called front-end processors. CAD was in its infancy. Programs had been developed to support two dimensional design drawings rather than 3D work. Although it was easy to draw a cube using a computer, when it was rotated the lines denoting the sides that should go out of view were still visible. It took quite a while to make this work. Similarly, shading on solid curved sided objects to give the illusion of depth and shadow was difficult to develop. Called grey scaling, this was at first very crude. All visualisations were in black and white or the strange greeny colour of the cathode ray tube display units. Nevertheless, there was great confidence that if only computers had more power these early attempts at CAD could be improved. These were the very humble beginnings of a technology that was to become ubiquitous in the 21st century. It would enable the rendering of very lifelike 3D images on games computers, spawning a whole film genre created from Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) and provide trainee pilots with realistic scenery from the their cockpits during simulated training. The DHSS hospital building team worked with Cambridge University to develop CAD systems to be applied to hospital building. There were dreams that one day it would be possible to ‘fly through’ a computer generated hospital design to see different views of wards etc. I was happy to see an Atlas computer again. Atlas 2 was a smaller machine which had been developed by Ferranti for Cambridge University, but it was much more powerful than the original Manchester Atlas I had worked on previously. Early Computer Aided Design (CAD)
Much of our work, as with the DHSS project, was in high level consultancy and systems design but the company was still called freelance programmers ltd. Project 727, as the Department of Health hospital project was now known, had grown considerably. fpl now had over 30 highly qualified systems analysts working on the project. Steve Shirley decided to split the company into two, a programming services company, fpl, and a systems and consultancy company, F2. I was appointed technical director of F2. The two other software houses involved, CAP and SPL, were vying for bigger slices of the contract but F2 had the lead role and managed the project. We also had the confidence of the Assistant Chief Architect that we were managing the project well. Developing fpl
Postscript
Sadly, the project was so far ahead of its time that it was eventually closed down before completion.
When I joined fpl there were only 11 professionals. 8 years later I headed up fpl’s team of nearly 400 professional staff, all-working from their homes, to join the ‘traditional’ workplace.
The ‘traditional’ workplace was very different from life within the very colligate atmosphere of fpl so when I was offered a position in Australia I set off a now ‘single’ mum with 2 children aged 9 and 6 to work on a project for Australia’s largest company where I found I was again the only woman Executive. But that’s another story – see my full interview on AIT to find out all about my life in Australia.
Project Documents
