Interview with Anthony Hodson

Anthony Edward Hodson was born in 1937 in Paddington, London. He is the second child of four boys. His father was a distinguished economist of the Keynesian school, working on the National Economic Council, he was also editor of the Round Table, a magazine associated with the development of the ‘Empire’, and, after the war, joined the Sundav Times becoming editor in 1951-1961.

Anthony says of him: “He was a student of Keynes.  He was somebody who didn’t really like carrying labels. He would have done his own thinking. He wrote a number of books on economics, of which the latest is called The Diseconomics of Growth, which was intended to be something that put the cat among the pigeons. I don’t know that it did, but there’s lots of truth in it. He was always looking at new insights to things.  He was a very intelligent man.”

He describes his mother as a brilliant socialite who was very supportive of his father and helped him with his social engagements. When the children were older, she became involved with charity work, Anthony adds: “particularly nursing and later in the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital of which she was Chairman of the League of Friends for many years.”

Anthony says of his parents: “They were two remarkable, very different people.  They were very much a pair, and I got some characteristics from both of them, including a certain amount of intelligence. I was much influenced by the way of the life that they had, which was actually a bit restive.  They didn’t stay in one place for any long time until much, much later in their life.” Anthony says this restive way of life meant that he and his older brother were often tagging alone and as a result tended to be loners, although extroverts

Anthony attended prep school which he enjoyed; he says that despite being a bit of a loner, he was successful academically and musically.  The school however, did not offer science on its curriculum. Following his prep school, Anthony, like all of his brothers, won a scholarship to Eton College. He says of the experience: “As rather a cosseted boy, going into Eton was a terrific shock in several ways.  Academically it was a shock because I was actually very interested in science and mathematics, that was my strong point. Although I was quite good at Latin and Greek, and, didn’t do too badly at that, because Latin and Greek were much the core subjects, the standard that was demanded as a new Eton scholar was actually extremely uncomfortable.” Anthony’s struggles with the classics was resolved when he was demoted from the top class and was introduced to The Odyssey by the inspirational Reggie Colquhoun. He says: “ We were doing The Odyssey in Greek, and it was Book 6 where Odysseus gets washed up and rescued by Nausicaä, who is a beautiful local princess. I fell in love with Nausicaä right away. I felt a bit like Odysseus, very much washed up.  After that, it was fine.” It was at Eton that music became an integral part of Anthony’s life, starting when he was drafted into the College Chapel auxiliary as an alto choir, soon after arrival. He later won the School’s open woodwind competition as an oboist – three years running – and won the School Music Prize in his last year.”

After spending five years at Eton, Anthony joined the Navy to serve his national service. He spent his career on the ‘lower deck’ and was an Upper Yardsman (officer-trainee) for a time. He says of the experience: “I spent all of my time on the lower deck, which was most interesting.  I regard that as socially just as important as any other learning phase of my life.” He was drafted onto HMS Diana and was involved with the 1956 Montebello atom tests. He adds: “I got myself hooked into the scientific team, and played a small part in making the instrumentation for recording what was happening with the atomic bomb explosions, for which we were a considerable distance away.  The precautions were extremely good.  We were very, very, well-briefed.  But I am the only person perhaps who you will ever come upon who has voluntarily walked out into a fallout cloud.” He did this to reset the instruments that were recording the fallout cloud. He continues: “Somebody had to volunteer to go and reset the instruments. As I had been working with those instruments for some time, I went out onto the upper deck, into the fallout cloud and reset them and then came back again. I was thoroughly decontaminated. It was perhaps one of the earliest significant things that I contributed to the world at large. The consequences of those tests are still used in British warships today, probably elsewhere as well.”

After completing his national service, Anthony went to Balliol College, Oxford which he describes as: “a place where you could talk at length with anybody about more or less any subject. The level of scholarship was pretty good as well. It was very much a broadening experience, although, I was mostly concerned with my musical and my academic life which led ultimately to a First Class Honours degree in maths.”

In 1960, Anthony joined Elliott Flight Automation in Borehamwood. The company was part of Elliott Brothers. Anthony started in the Inertial Navigation Division, creating accurate instruments for navigation using gyros and accelerometers.

Anthony says that they were a company that was always on the look out for new things, and adds: “There was a lot going on in the labs, mostly analogue stuff, wheels and servos and things, but later more and more digital. I found it a very exciting place to work.  Although they had no idea what a mathematician would actually do for them, in the event I felt useful and valued by them, and did very well if not too well. To show the esteem with which they regarded mathematicians, they bought me a top-of-the-market electro-mechanical calculator.  (They assumed that mathematicians needed calculators.) It did addition and subtraction and multiplication and, and division, and cost £700 which was quite a lot of money by today’s standards.”

As well as his calculator, Anthony also used an Elliott 803 computer which is described by Simon Lavington in his book Early English Computers as a forerunner of the modern minicomputer, although it was the size of a room.

Anthony says: “One interesting thing about the culture was that about the only women that were to be seen were those people who looked after the running of the Elliott 803 computers.”

Anthony describes his own use of the machine as “a scientific user, I didn’t programme it in machine language: it offered Autocode, a primitive high-level language.  I used the 803 for simulations and other stuff, which was actually quite difficult to do, because of course there was no video output.  You had a very short paper tape which was your program, and a very big one which was the operating system. Out came paper tape and it then went into a teleprinter, and that was it. It was really at that stage very, very, primitive, but it was very useful. It was very much more useful than the calculating machine that I had on my desk. I went on using the 803 for the rest of my Elliotts career for simulation and scientific calculating until I went to the States in 1966.”

After two years in Borehamwood, Anthony moved to Rochester where he spent a further three years working on electronics and electromechanical research in aircraft control and navigation systems.

He says that he had become interested in cybernetics before he joined Elliotts from a book of that name by Norbert Wiener and had decided it was a good direction to move in. He explains: “So the real principle was etched into my mind. I did a lot of quite mathematical stuff in the practical control systems affected by stochastic effects which modelled the sources of errors in aircraft instrumentation. That sort of side was quite interesting to me, but I was also evidently regarded as a very good engineer, and systems engineer in particular, so I got promoted rather quickly, too quickly. I didn’t really have the experience to know and to articulate what was good and what was bad. I found myself as Chief Systems Engineer of the Inertial Navigation Division in my late twenties, and I was landed with a mechanical design which had a serious flaw that I only gradually came to understand, and if I had been a lot more experienced, I should have had the ability to say, ‘Look, this is not going to work, so before we go and spend an awful lot of money on it, let’s abandon it.’  However, I didn’t do that, I tried to solve all the problems. Eventually I decided that there were better things that I could do and abandoned that ship.”

By this stage Anthony had led a small team working as systems engineers of various kinds.  He says: “It was not really a management post; it was more an advisory post, working out designs and getting other people to analyse them where appropriate.”

Of his management style, he adds: “I’m quite a good planner.  If you’re involved with computers and having to program computers, then planning is an extremely important way of doing things.  I went into senior management when I joined Sperry Gyroscope in the mid-Seventies and I tried very hard to be fair, to listen to people; to be analytical rather than judgmental. I had about 40 projects each run by their own project leaders, and I invented a way of just touching base firmly, very firmly if necessary, on a weekly basis, so that the information came in systematically week by week, and good decisions could be made and things could be detected before they went wrong. I’m not a natural manager, I don’t particularly enjoy management.  I don’t like the politics of management.  I have tended to prefer to do things myself, or delegating within a very close-knit team.”

While working for Elliott’s, Anthony spent eighteen  months working in Atlanta with Lockheed Georgia This was a time when the USA had opened up its defence engineering contracts to the world. Anthony explains: “That was a very exciting experience really.  There were a lot of really quite sensitive projects which were offered to bid from the UK and other sources.  Elliott Flight Automation at that time had won a number of quite significant projects with the C-5A, which was a huge military transport, and they were also competing (often successfully) for various other business opportunities with other defence aircraft companies.  For example, they were particularly interested in head-up displays for the A3J carrier-borne fighter/bomber: These have a sort of semi-transparent mirror system which projects the instrument readings on to what you see normally. These are obviously very important instruments in the military sphere, and Elliott’s were extremely successful at selling them.

“My role was to go around assisting the sales people with that and other big ventures by Elliott Flight Automation, but my main role with the C5A contracts was acting as the intelligent link between the people back at Rochester and the people in Atlanta so that Lockheed felt that they were actually dealing with somebody who was just down the road, rather than several thousand miles away. That was a very interesting job for the time, I enjoyed it, and it was extremely successful as well. I was good at that job. Although, being the man in the middle meant that you got the beatings from both sides.”

Asked if he is a good salesman, Anthony adds: “I’m not a natural salesman, but I sell in things that I’m really interested in.  I did later become export director for a firm which sold plastic pipes and fittings. I did not have a general business sense to do that well, whereas I did actually do quite well in selling the avionic systems and later the computer systems that I got involved with.”

In 1969, having spent some time in Atlanta, Anthony decided it was time to leave Elliott and learn new things that he had witnessed in computing in the US. He joined Diebold Research Program, which was run by John Diebold, an entrepreneur in management consulting, who specialised in the way in which computers were involved more and more intimately in business. Anthony says: “I was working in New York, in Park Avenue. It was very interesting.  The culture was completely different because I was involved with big computers which did data processing and big companies, whereas all the computers that I had so far been involved with at the time were tiny.  Even then, the biggest computer that was then being used in aircraft was about the size of a suitcase.  So, there were two culture shocks; one was getting to understand how computers and business work together.  We did a lot of training in management consulting techniques and so that was good.  We also did field studies by interviewing people who were pioneering in the use of computers, and then distilling their experience and presenting it at big conferences. Doing that was also a big culture shock because that was almost the first time that I had ever been called upon to give a speech to a big audience. (I had done quite a lot of technical teaching to a classroom audience before going to the USA.)  We had to talk for perhaps ten or fifteen minutes on some particular topic, having written a speech which met high standards of immediacy and interest.  Coming to terms with that was extremely valuable, sometimes very hard work, and sometimes my efforts got me a kick in the ‘arse’ requiring re-work but, overall it was a very good experience.”

In 1973, Anthony joined Sperry Gyroscope in Bracknell as an engineering project manager, reporting to the board level.

Anthony says of the role: “My job was to manage 40 projects, some big, some small, which involved uniting the skills of the project managers who would be ultimately responsible to me, for the correct performance and delivery of their projects, and also for the resources that they used to develop these projects. I sat at the top. I didn’t have any staff other the project leaders, there were six or seven of them. This was a very interesting job, and I was very, very successful at it.  But, ultimately, I came to the conclusion that I was not a good enough manager to progress up to board level, and I decided that I would turn techie again. I managed to share my time ultimately, not only managing at the high level that I had talked about, but also taking a detailed part, including coding, in one of the projects that particularly interested me, which was an early messaging system.”

Anthony goes on to describe the pioneering ‘message switching’ project which was commissioned by a shipping company, he explains: “It used a system based on Intel 8086s, which were in effect a fully-fledged little computer, and it ran on a DEC PDP-11-based operating system which was tailorable. The general idea was that you had small computers which acted as email clients which were connected to a network of messaging hubs or servers. That was a message switching system, it had no single centre; it was a distributed system, with a small number of hubs, and peripheral computer systems acting as the agent.  It was before the X.400, X.500 developments came along. It was really, really pioneering.  There was, there was nothing quite like it at the time. It was new because it was intended for people who were not techies really to be able to use it.”

In 1979, Anthony joined ICL in Bracknell. He explains how he was selected for the role: “Brian Millis was one of the senior people at ICL and he was looking about for people who would think a bit differently. Somehow I got into his sights and I was brought in as a roving technical consultant looking at all sorts of things. One of the first things that came up was X.400 and X.500 which were key parts of the top of the 7 layers of OSI, international standards for open systems interconnection.”

At the time Anthony joined ICL, it was a company oriented towards mainframes. Anthony says: “I found it very difficult to understand what was going on in the theoretics of mainframes. This was only mitigated by the fact that on interrogation I found that hardly anybody else really understood what it was all about either. It had got to a rather woolly set of ideas, buzz phrases and things.”

As part of Brian Millis’s team, Anthony was involved in the early stages of Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) which Anthony describes as a foil to IBM and its centralised concept of distributed computing.  He adds: “It was ISO who saw that something which was more under general control was needed. It was about that time that the X.400 and X.500 OSI standards development came about, firstly with devising the international standards, and subsequently the practical implementation standards. ICL’s leader on X.400, the messaging standard was Ian Valentine (who had been the Sperry message-switching architect before moving to ICL), and I became heavily involved in X.500, the Directory standard and later the implementation standards in Europe and the USA”

ICL has a history of experiencing crises and booms before eventually collapsing. Anthony says that the central issue of the problem was the soaring interest rates of the 1980s which raised the value of the pound and saw ICL’s export market disappear almost overnight.

He explains: “There was a huge implosion, something like 40,000 people were made redundant. The company then went through a very difficult period of rethinking itself.  The original board had absolutely no idea what to do next.  There was no comfort zone around at the time and there was essentially a collapse. Behind the scenes, I think Maggie Thatcher helped to prop up ICL so that it didn’t completely collapse.

“What was left was the realisation that the small computers with which we had been toying were now the way the world would develop. So, the culture changed very quickly from very big machines to very small machines and I found myself unusual in being one of the few people that actually worked intensively with very small machines, particularly with the work that I had done with the message switching system which involved really literally low-level programming of the 8086s. X.500 and X.400 seemed particularly important for the rise of electronic mail as a key office application.

Anthony was also involved with word processing and became for a time ICL’s word processing expert. He explains: “I helped them acquire a freestanding word processing system, which they bought from another company.” He was also involved with messaging clients. He adds: “I was involved with ICL’s early days of that, and designed a complete messaging client and implemented it.  Having been involved with a number of bids, I saw that ICL;s X.500 work needed a leader, so I did what I could and became that leader.”

Asked what Robb Wilmot, CEO of ICL, was like, Anthony says: “I only saw him on a few occasions. I think he was a success in that he did turn around ICL technology towards working with small computers.  It was a very long and difficult struggle over the next two years while ICL really decided what they were about. They hadn’t really decided what they were about at the time that I had left in 1993.  Were they selling systems solutions to people, or were they selling hardware, or were they selling software, or what?  At that time there was a lot of competition in that area, and so it was a big struggle for them.  They then tied up with Fujitsu who provided the mainframe support base that they had really needed with the demise of all the 2900s etc.  Also at the same time there was consulting work which was becoming increasingly important for managing big projects to people, and there was the technology work attempting to do something within the nascent technology such as X.400 messaging and X.500.” ICL was eventually taken over by Fujitsu.

I managed to put together a tiny team which essentially was initially myself and Peter Gale, a very high-powered software person. I decided that we would together design the ICL’s X.500 offering as fast as we could, with both of us creating masses of C code from scratch. We spent as much time as we could developing this and it was very successful.  The main problem was getting funding. First of all I managed to get a piece of the funding which was based on the EEC funding of OSI projects as I was very much involved in both the primary and the secondary standards of that.  So there was a certain amount of money that was coming up, but my managers in ICL on the whole were not very understanding of what it was that X.500 was or could be, and they were taking various opportunities to try and switch me off.” Despite the issues, Anthony solved the last of the major problems and another part of ICL decided it wanted the technology so Anthony and the project “got hoovered up” , designating the ICL X.500 product that he had created as “i500”, after which there was a stable source of funding.

In 1993, given the option to move with the i500 project to ICL at Kidsgrove (it later went to Macclesfield), Anthony decided to leave the company and set up his own company; XdotD Associates.

 After an initial project ended, Anthony was wondering where to turn next when he was contacted by Teodor Dumitrescu, at Siemens in Munich (with whom he had been working for a few years on a European X.500 project). Teo asked him to join a consortium to create a standard for testing and validating X.500 systems. The project involved BT, France Télécom, GEC, and others.  Having accepted that project, Anthony was then also invited by Steve Dooley, also ex-ICL, to create a training course on X.500. Anthony adds: “After that moment, I was never out of work.  First of all, there was a number of things that happened consequentially from Steve Dooley and his company.  The Siemens thing materialised and subsequently, Siemens themselves engaged me as a consultant on the development of their own X.500 system, and involved me in various other peripheral projects on that.  Meanwhile, ICL came back and gave me quite a lot of work, and I did all sorts of things in the area of i500.  And that lasted me until 2006, when I was almost completely working X.500 stuff for Siemens.” The work continued until budget cuts took place at Siemens and Anthony, at the age of 69, decided that there were other things he could do – including an Open University degree on Latin, Greek and Music (achieving a 1^st class BA honours degree in 2013).

He says of running his own business: “It was a very successful period. It was also very interesting, I became involved with international standardisation at the primary and secondary level, working in the USA as well as in Brussels. There was a lot to do, and you learn every aspect of running a real business company. I was quite happy not to be working sixteen hours a day for someone else, although I often was on my own behalf.”

Asked why companies like Siemens succeeded where UK companies fail, Anthony says: “The thing about Siemens is that they are very diverse. For example, the thing that interested them particularly was using X.500 as a basis for identity management, particularly in their medical equipment side.”

As a consultant working in the approach to Y2K, Anthony says of the period, “I started with a certain amount of shame, because it was I who actually took the shortcut that made Y2K an issue, but on the other hand, they (ICL) subsequently engaged me to fix it, and I did.

Anthony says: “I made loads and loads and loads of mistakes.  Small ones, a few big ones.  I think one of the biggest ones was, I did not in my early career find it 100 per cent necessary to go all the way through projects.  I’m afraid to say that there are a few projects that I abandoned, leaving to others to complete. I learnt that the only good project is one that has been completely, successfully completed and that involves a way of thought, a calming down of one’s ambitions and so on.  That was certainly a very important lesson.” He says that he also learnt resilience while at Eton College, adding: “There were quite a number of occasions which were very difficult later in life where I was under a lot of pressure, and one of the things that I did learn was that if you persist in doing what you are doing as best you can, then you can usually ride through.”

Asked if he is patient with individuals who are not as well versed in technology as him, Anthony adds: “I’ve learnt how to put things over fairly simply and articulately to people. This is something that I’m very interested in in my current role as a Council member of Gresham College, as well as a Past Master and still-active member of the Court of the Mercers Company”

Interviewed by Richard Sharpe

Transcribed by Susan Hutton

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley