Interview with David Tebbutt

David Tebbutt was born in Woolwich, in 1943.  His family lived next to the Woolwich Arsenal during the war; their house was destroyed by a bomb which landed in the garden. The family then moved to Bexleyheath, Kent. David says:

“We moved into a little chalet bungalow, which was jolly nice, and life was good, the schools were good fun, I enjoyed school at that time.” Unfortunately, David’s mother was ill and on three occasions went away for a few months. He adds: “Each time she came back I kept thinking that she was somebody different.  I had a bit of fractured childhood.” While his mother was away, David would stay with family.

David’s parents adopted the daughter of his uncle who lived with them on and off during her young and adolescent life before moving to Canada in her later life.

David went to local state nursery and junior schools which he enjoyed before sitting his Scholarship and gaining a place at Dartford Grammar School. He says: “It was an all-boys school; its most famous pupil is Mick Jagger.  He was in the year above me.  I never met him, never had anything to do with him.”

With many of the teachers being ex-army, the school also offered a cadets experience for the pupils. David adds: “It was all not to my liking at all, I’d been used to a mixed school up to that point and I just detested it.  However, I did love English and maths.  I didn’t do very well at maths, I didn’t like the teacher. It ended up that if I didn’t leave I was probably going to get thrown out, because I used to get negative marks in exams for bad writing, so it was not a happy year.”

The family moved to Middlesex for his father’s new job in central London and David entered the grammar school system there. As a result of the different starting ages between Kent and Middlesex, David resat the first year. He adds: “I did the first year again which was rather good because it made up for all the things that I’d cocked up at Dartford Grammar.  It was a mixed school which added to the pleasure. I had a jolly good time at that school.”

David gained five GCE’s including English, Maths and French. He decided not to complete his A levels and started work as an ice-cream man on the afternoon following his final French GCE exam in the morning.  David explains that his parents were not very happy about his decision but let him do it to keep the peace in the family.

Having left school as soon as he could, David drifted through several roles including: bread van salesman, trainee quantity surveyor, cardboard box specification clerk and then designer. He adds: “Then I decided I’d go round the world. I had no plan, I just took off.  The first stop was Paris, and I quite liked it there and after a while I was confident enough with my French to actually start speaking it all day every day, which was quite nice.  I ended up with a job as a receptionist in a hospital there. That trip lasted just under five months and then I came back to England with the aim of returning after Christmas.”

With no money, David began working at Bentall’s Department store selling menswear. It was while he was walking home one day in the rain that he took cover in the reception area of an office block in Greenford. It was here that David met Philip Maylor who asked him to leave. When David asked what the company did, he explained that they made adding machines, accounting machines, cash registers and computers.

David explains: “I asked what a computer was. He thought I was just playing for time in the dry, but I told him I was really interested. He then invited me back at 11.00am the next day.  I went back and he explained about computers and invited me to take a programmer’s aptitude test.  He sat me down and told me I’d got ninety minutes and that he’d bring in a cup of tea or coffee at half-time to see how I was getting on.  Half-time came and I’d already done the test, checked my answers, folded it up and left it on the desk.” David scored one hundred per cent in the test. David adds: “So that was the start and my first influencer in IT was Philip Maylor. When they asked me about my background and it was so shambolic, they were terrified of taking me on.”

The next important influence in David’s life was Basil Garsed whom David describes as “another big boss at NCR in Greenford”. David adds: “He decided to take a risk on me, and they roped in all sorts of other people for other interviews.  Anyway, after eleven interviews I got the job. I started as a programmer 3^rd January 1966.”

“It was absolutely totally brilliant, I loved it.  My first proper bit of programming was writing the demonstration suite for their main showroom for the computer. What I didn’t realise was that I’d written a control program, or an operating system, but at a very low level. It would fire up different peripherals at the console operator’s request.  They’d press a button and up would go the printer or the tape drive or the punch card thing, and do stuff and it would all appear on either printed out on the console or on the printer, or if you were clever you could read the control panel lights on the front of the machine.  So it was a way of demonstrating all the different functions of the machine to anybody that was interested in buying one.”

 David then joined a  department which sold computers into businesses. He explains: “Each time they sold a computer they’d send me in for six months. My salary was £900 a year, so it cost them £450 to put me in for six months, plus overheads, and the machines at the time were about £15,000, so it was a minor additional cost to have me writing payrolls, sales accounting, stock control, whatever was needed, I’d write every program from scratch.  It never occurred to me to reuse what I’d written previously, so it was all highly bespoke to each company. It was just huge fun, massive amounts of learning.”

David recalls three of the companies where he installed systems, adding: “I put in three systems; one in Fabergé, one at DER, the TV rental company and one at Conduit Bureau, a staff agency company based in York House in Wembley.  Conduit Bureau employed me as a freelance while I was still at NCR. I had thirteen people working for me doing their accounts out of hours and we saved up enough in three months to put a deposit on a house, so York House has a lot to answer for in my life.”

David cites Tom Day, one of the tutors at NCR, as another of his inspirational mentors at that time. David stayed with NCR until 1970.

After leaving NCR, David went to Fabergé. He explains: “I went to Fabergé because their data processing manager left and I think I thought this was a career move, but it clearly wasn’t because this was the first time I encountered stress at a high level.”

David found himself caught up in the power struggle between the financial director and the managing director. The stress made David ill. He decided to leave and found a role at Danasco after being told about it by Phil Murphy, a salesman at NCR. David adds: “Phil was another influencer in my life and was my salesman throughout all the commercial sales and my subsequent first two freelancing roles.”

David next applied for a data processing manager role at Givaudan, a company that turned oil into flavours, perfumes, colours, industrial chemicals etc. He says of the role: “That was the start of a decent few years as a data processing manager.  It was accounts, payroll, stock control, all the usual bits and bobs.”

As the oil crisis of the period bit and created the three day week, David grew interested in environmental issues. He joined the Soil Association and the Intermediate Technology Development Group which was started by Ernst Schumacher who wrote Small is Beautiful. David also read John and Sally Seymour’s Self-sufficiency  book. He says: “All these things interested me and as Givaudan relied on oil as its raw material, I was getting a bit agitated generally about nuclear power and all that stuff which was all a bit questionable. I read a book called The Spoilt Earth and all these things got me thinking that I really ought to dedicate my life to spreading the word about what is now called environmentalism. However, I realised that I couldn’t go out spreading the word unless I learned how to communicate. I decided to get a job as a teacher or as a trainer and use that as a way of learning to interact.”

David joined Allied Business Systems in Mitcham as a trainer. Unfortunately, the person who had hired him had broken his ankle in a motorbike accident. With no-one else knowing what David and the other new trainer were meant to be doing, they were left with no option but to break into his desk to find the schedule of work for them.

David says: “There were two things in his desk, one was a schedule for a DOS course which we agreed that I’d run. I didn’t know the content for that machine, but I figured I could learn that in the week and as long as I was a day or two ahead of the students I’d get away with it.  The second thing we found was a memo from my boss’s boss saying do not hire David Tebbutt. Luckily the bloke who fell off his motorbike hadn’t acted on it.  I decided to just ignore it.”

“I ran the programming course for Thorn based in Enfield. Every time I or they got stuck and asked how do you do this, I’d say, let’s go down to the machine and try it out, shall we? That’s how I got through the course. At the end of the course they said it was the best course they’d ever been on. All I’d done was hide my ignorance by taking them down and doing it practically, which by accident was a great thing to do.”

Despite his success, having read the memo in his boss’s desk, David realised he was not going to last at ABS and began looking for something new. He ended up with three offers; from NCR, Univac and ICL.

David chose the ICL role because it was training project management and team leading skills rather than technical skills. In 1975, at ICL, David went through an in-house teacher training course lead by Sue Knight. David adds: “Sue Knight is quite well known internationally for her work with NLP, but at the time I knew her she was big in transactional analysis as well. She essentially taught me to teach and that was a totally brilliant course, totally brilliant tutor, and a very nice person as well.”

David also highlights the role his boss played. He says: “I joined ICL and it was fantastic. A major influencer was my boss there, Ann Simm who was just the best manager I’d ever had and, as it turned out, ever did have in the rest of my life.  She was just wonderful, professional, organised,  considerate and brave.  She even sent me off to teach in Trinidad, Lagos and Poland.”

 After he had been training for a while, Daivd was sent on a short behavioural psychology course. It was on this course that David was introduced to behavioural skills, David adds: “The one that really clicked and stuck with me was transactional analysis (TA).  It was all about managing people’s behaviour by changing your own behaviour and that was such an eye-opener for me and it  governed an awful lot of how I managed and taught going forward.”

In 1977 after spending two and half years teaching, David was keen to get back into the business. David says: “I was anxious to get back into the business and also find out if the theory that I’d been teaching actually worked in real life. As a project manager for ICL, I installed three systems. I had staff and I quite often found myself working with the clients’ programmers and analysts, the third party software house programmers and analysts, the ICL legal department.  I had to co-ordinate everything and make sure it all flowed okay. I did that for a few years and the training that I’d been doing was absolutely fantastic in helping me be a better project manager. It was all rather good.”

Having had such a good time at ICL, David says that he took his ‘eye off the environmental ball completely’.  It was while he was in Calor Gas working with some programmers that he spotted someone reading Personal Computer World and first heard about micros.

David immediately went out and brought three issues of the magazine, he explains: “I bought three issues, I didn’t realise at the time but they were actually the first three issues of PCW.  I went home and I studied them. A lot of it was complete gibberish to me, but on the other hand I could see it was something that was going to happen.”

It was in one of the magazines that David saw an advert for someone “interested in getting involved with micro’s”. He applied. It turned out to be a publishing company. He says: “I’d always wanted to write. I wanted to be a writer when I left school, that’s all I wanted to do. They asked how much I earned and then said I was too expensive for them. I suggested we keep talking.” Bruce Sawford, an editor, visited David at home to continue the conversation. David explains that he had borrowed a small computer from work and loaded John Conway’s Game of Life on it. He showed Bruce his electric typewriter and the computer. He adds: “I showed him this machine, showed him what it could do and he said he’d talk to Felix Dennis. Weeks went by and I got very ratty with him.” The hold up was that Bruce’s wife was having a baby and so eventually, David got to talk directly to Felix Dennis, the publisher.

David says: “I met Felix and we got on just fine.  The money was a problem, I agreed to a drop, and that was it. I joined as technical editor.  Bruce and I started by creating a concept for a personal computer magazine, largely based on the American Creative Computing magazine.  Bruce was supposed to be editor but was off doing other things, so most of the work fell on my shoulders.” At this point, Felix Dennis wasn’t running PCW.  However, he subsequently bought it and David and Bruce turned their attention to producing it.

David picks up the story, “After a few months, I decided that I’d like to make Bruce executive editor, I thought the title would appeal to him, and I’d elevate myself to editor. We had Peter Rodwell on board by then a writer, but he wanted to be deputy editor.  So we all moved up a notch. …   ”  David adds: “It was great fun, I learnt lots and I got the chance to start exercising my writing skills that had been long dormant.  So when I left there were lots of offers for work which was lovely.”

With itchy feet and a desire to return to industry, David left PCW but remained on the team as an editorial consultant and set up his own business Caxton Software with Alan Wood and Bill Barrow. He says: “I left to set up Caxton Software.  The urge to get my hands dirty again was quite large, but I wasn’t going to give up my writing and, as it turned out, I was going to be retained as an editorial consultant on PCW, so, so I had a foot in both camps.”

David says: “Alan was running Digitus, which was a computer consultancy, and he had a program called Optimiser that he thought we could sell.  It wasn’t a packaged program.  Alan asked me to join him to find other products and to do all the editorial and tarting up side of it.  So I joined as Technical Director.

Caxton worked on the packaging for Optimiser but it was very difficult to sell. David continues: “We didn’t actually sell very many, but while that was all going on, I found Cardbox which put Caxton on the map.  We started with Cardbox quite by accident really, the guy had come in with one thing and he’d actually delivered something far better with Cardbox which took off. We did a typing tutor called Touch ‘n’ Go, which we supplied in a floppy disk case.  That did all right.”

The next program they published was one David had written while he was at PCW, called BrainStorm.   He continues: “I’d written it in 8080 Assembler.  We sold a lot of those and it’s still being sold.  I sold BrainStorm Software to an American company about twelve years ago and their website is the same as the website that I created fifteen, twenty years ago.”

After Caxton Software, David concentrated once again on his writing career and his career has seen him act as writer or editor for over forty titles over the years.

Asked about some of the big stories that he has covered, David talks about accidentally walking into an Apple dealer meeting at Softcon in New Orleans for the Mac. David says: “I was treated to a most amazing demonstration of a Mac and what it could do.  It was just absolutely astonishing. I actually wrote an article at the time to say how I fell in love with a Mac.  I don’t know if that’s how I ended up writing for MacUser and Macworld, but I did.”

On an earlier occasion, David met and went to lunch with Steve Jobs when the Apple III was launched. He explains: “I’d gone to this room where Jobs was giving one to one interviews. He  showed me this Apple III and I wasn’t very impressed at all. I said, ‘I understand what you’ve done there, I can see how you did that graphic stuff, it’s not exactly complicated, it’s not rocket science. There’s other things wrong with the machine, the way you’ve conceived it.’  He asked me to lunch.  He didn’t mention the Apple III again, so lunch was a very clever move on his part because I got zero out of him about the Apple III.”

David was invited to act as a consultant to the Science Museum in London. David explains: “They had a massive project for environmental sustainability in 2003. They phoned me up and asked if I could come to a meeting to talk about the project.” They wanted David to write a pitch to the trustees about the environmental project.   He says: “I was very interested because it was all about living, accommodation, hotels, factories, and education. There were lots of areas that were going to be covered and ways of making them environmentally sustainable and the whole project was going to be created in an old World War two airfield in Wroughton, Wiltshire.  I wrote the pitch as a book, as a vision of what it would be, I actually took people on a tour round it. So it brought it to life for the trustees. Greg Dyke was one of the trustees and as I’ve known him for a long time, I knew exactly what he was like and how influential he was likely to be, so I wrote the whole thing, without telling him of course, for Greg Dyke. I thought if he likes it it’ll work.” Unfortunately, before the project could be properly launched, the head of the museum was obliged to resign and the project fell by the wayside.

Asked for advice for someone thinking of work in in technology, David says: “Go for it.” He believes that young people should not rule out the different routes into technology, including apprenticeships. He adds: “It’s about focus, … you’ve got to go to a decent university and you’ve got to do exactly the subject you want to do and it’s got to relate to your life ambitions and don’t do it just because you can get a degree.  You’re going to end up in debt and you’re going to end up frustrated because the degree doesn’t match where you really want to go.”

Asked if he would do anything differently, David says: “I wouldn’t change anything.  I’ve been a bit of a nomad and followed my own path without knowing what that path was in advance. I had basic ideas, I wanted to write, I enjoyed maths and I wanted to do something about environmental stuff.  They were drivers.”

David is currently ghost writing a book on behalf of an individual who he describes as ‘an industrialist, a scientist, an electronics engineer, a computer engineer’.

As part of his ghost writing, David is considering what the future may look like, including the world of work for humans when automation has potentially taken over many roles. He says: “We’ve all got a huge transition to go through and I think we’re all going to go through it at different speeds, but we’re going to transition to a life where a lot of things are going to be automated. There’s going to be a shift in working patterns, there’s a lot of work that can be done, in theory, by AI and data, huge data resources.

“I don’t believe there’s a singularity coming any time soon.  Singularity is where AI takes over everything and humans become irrelevant and if they get it wrong then the AI could decide to get rid of humans because it would make life better for them.  I don’t believe that, but that’s kind of an exaggeration of what singularity is.

“The other thing to consider is if the amount of work available is being done automatically, then that is very low cost, or almost cost-free once you’ve got the equipment.  So a lot of the goods and services that we’re going to get are going to be provided at a lower cost, either that or the companies are going to make lots more money.  But the end result is going to be that there’s not going to be enough work around for everybody.

“Therefore, we’ve got two choices: we can put loads of people out of work or we can reduce the working hours.  If we reduce the working hours that gives people more free time to do more interesting things, but they need money.  There’s a call for a universal basic income.

“So the future may be a future in which technology takes over huge, huge amounts of work, humans do a lot of human stuff, like looking after people. But there are human things that people can do, if they’re not doing it in their work, they will be doing it in their own time.  So there will be a massive growth of theatre or music or all sorts of things.  It could be a new Renaissance where people actually have the time to exercise their talents and skills to a much greater extent. However, we’ve got to get from where we are now to where we’ll be then, and that’s going to create all sorts of creaks and groans in society.”

You can go to David’s personal archive of 264 pre-internet articles by clicking here.

Interviewed by Jane Bird

Transcribed by Susan Nicholls

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley