Interview with Rodney Hornstein

Rodney Hornstein was born in 1940 in Hertfordshire. After 10 days he and his mother joined the rest of the family in High Wycombe where the family had been evacuated from Stepney. They moved  to Willesden in 1944. His father was one of four brothers working in the family business which manufactured and sold fur coats.

Rodney attended Kensal Rise Primary School in 1947. He says of the experience: “It was slightly traumatic for me because I went from an infant school, which assumed you would be eight when you went to the primary school, and I transferred to Kensal Rise when I was seven.  So, I’d missed out the rather vital skill of learning how to write.”

Having passed his eleven-plus, Rodney went on to a local grammar school.  He says of the school: “I enjoyed it very much.  It was an unusual school in that it was founded in 1926 by a strong socialist.  It was a co-ed school, so quite revolutionary in the way it worked – and I enjoyed my life there immensely.”

Rodney gained ten O levels and four A levels in physics, chemistry, pure maths, applied maths. He was drawn to the subjects because he loved mathematics and excelled in it, regularly coming top of the class in maths exams, he adds: “I suppose the great thing about maths is either you really understand it and have got a talent for it, and you don’t have to spend hours swotting and stuff, you just either can do it or you can’t do it, and maths absolutely appealed to me, it was a natural talent.”

Rodney left school in 1958 and went to University College London in 1959, having taken a year to work at IBM as a vacation student, he says: “It was basically a gap year at 101 Wigmore Street, the Service Bureau, working on an IBM 650A. You had a plugboard machine attached to it, but of course its main memory was a magnetic drum. I went back in vacations when I was at university, they’d added 32 words of core store, so a major enhancement. … The 650 was what you would recognise as an electronic computer, it held its program on a magnetic drum which you had to optimise. The programming language was called SOAP, which stood for Self-Optimising Assembly Program.  But I soon got bored with that and I did a lot of stuff in machine code because the key to programming a machine like the 650 was to ensure that the next instruction from the one that you’d written previously was in the right place on the drum as it rotated. I wrote some incredibly complex programs using machine code, which I am ashamed to say, nobody after me even remotely understood what I’d written. My training at IBM was from another student, who’d arrived three weeks before me, taking me through the programming manual.  Within a week I found myself writing programs for clients of IBM, including amongst others, British Rail.”

Having completed his degree in 1962, Rodney joined LEO Computers via the university milk round. He says: “I’d noticed, as I’d gone back to IBM over my vacations, that the people that were successful in IBM were salesmen and being a rather arrogant maths student, I thought being a salesman was an utterly demeaning occupation. There were these characters from LEO who appeared to know nothing about selling but seemed to know all about computers.  I was particularly impressed with Frank Land who interviewed me. He later became a distinguished academic at the LSE and who was one of the Lyons team working on the the first business computer in the world, the LEO I.  So, I decided these are the guys who understand about the application of computers to business problems, I’ll join them.”

 Having joined LEO Computers, the irony in Rodney’s career is that he would rapidly progress to becoming a salesman, or consultant as they were called at LEO, subsequently becoming sales manager for English Electric LEO.

Rodney explains: “My boss sent me on a sales course run by Alfred and Harry Tack.  Alfred wrote a book called One Thousand Ways to Increase Your Sales. I arrived at this course and I was amazed. I discovered that there was a process and a discipline to a sales campaign. For me it was a bit like a conversion on the Road to Damascus, I realised there’s something intellectually challenging in this.”

Working through the merger of LEO Computers with English Electric to become English Electric LEO, then the addition of Marconi, followed by ICT before finally becoming ICL in 1968, Rodney says: “There were several mergers and they were very gory. The final merger in 1968 of all the major British manufacturers to form ICL was gruesome.  I was very lucky, because I was working at that time for Doug Comish, who died in August 2023 age 97. Doug was the major mentor in my career, and a wonderful boss to have, through the mergers he basically protected the team of people that he’d built up.  I learnt a lot from him.  He was a very tough boss, I mean if you made a mess of something, you would know about it, but he would protect you to the ends of the earth from the outside world.  He took personal responsibility for everything that went on in his domain, and that’s something which I’m really grateful for.  I think it’s a very important characteristic of a boss.”

Of his own management style, Rodney says: “There are three things that I learnt.  One is to make sure that you select good people and if you make a mistake, rectify it fast.  Secondly, give the members of your team very clear terms of reference of what they need to do. Thirdly, don’t interfere, let them get on with it and just encourage them to come to you for advice if they need it and to be very frank and honest in reporting what they’re doing.”

 With each new merger, different and new computers were included in the range, including the LEOs, English Electric’s KDF, System 4 which was RCA designed as compatible to the IBM 360, the ICT 1900 Series and plans for the ICL 2900 series.

Rodney says: “Looking at it from the sales point of view it was a very, very difficult period. We were talking to confused and suspicious potential clients who said, well, what are you going to propose, the 1900 or the System 4?”

Over the period of his career, Rodney worked under a variety of senior management, including Arthur Humphreys, managing director until 1972, who was replaced by Geoff Cross who was from UNIVAC and was in charge until 1977. Geoff over saw the business with the rollout of the 2900 series and numerous operating systems including VME/B, VME/A, VME/E and K. He also brought with him a team of people and introduced an American style of management.

 During this time, Rodney continued to progress his career and become marketing director during the ICL years. It was a job that he had been created following on from a marketing organisation review project that Rodney and a colleague had conducted.

In 1979, Rodney joined A B Dick as director of Europe, Middle East and Africa. He was persuaded to join by Geoff Cross. A B Dick, headquartered in Chicago, had been acquired by GEC (General Electric Company) under the management of Sir Arnold Weinstock.

Rodney says: “Geoff persuaded me to join but as I very quickly pointed out to him, apart from some IBM-like electronic typewriters, it was not an IT company but a very respectable offset printing company.”

It was also the first time that Rodney saw an Apple II computer. It was in the office of A B Dick UK subsidiary’s financial controller using a programme called VisiCalc, a predecessor to Excel.  Rodney immediately bought an Apple II.

Asked about working with Arnie Weinstock, Rodney says: “It was very character forming.  The problem was, Geoff Cross was based in Chicago and Arnie, bless him, didn’t believe in time zones, so he would phone me and ask me questions about A B Dick world-wide which were not really my business, so that was quite challenging.

But the most interesting thing about Arnie was, he drove the business essentially on six ratios, and you as a manager had to know what they were and understand fully what they implied.”

Rodney was briefed on how to handle this by a senior colleague working in the GEC HQ, he adds: “The key was that you had to offer no excuses, what Weinstock wanted to know was not why things were wrong, but precisely what you were going to do to cure the problem. It was a bit of a business school education because it meant you really had to keep on the ball and understand everything about the businesses you were running.  So I had to know, for every single country that I was involved in, what ratios were wrong and what steps were being taken to correct them.”

In 1981 Rodney was headhunted to join Gestetner where he stayed for five years. The company was a family-managed public company which was 100 years old when Rodney joined it.

Rodney says: “It had made some acquisitions and there were some divisions within the company.  It was run by two brothers. I joined them at a very difficult time because  they’d got Bain in as consultants to help sort out their problems. I took my Apple II there and I introduced  internationally  the kind of financial disciplines that Geoff Cross had done in ICL.  There were thorough regular reviews and they revealed all sorts of problematic stories of what was going on in some of the overseas subsidiaries in Gestetner which I had to sort out.”

After five years with Gestetner, Rodney was headhunted again and joined AMT who had the rights to the Distributed Array Processor which had been developed by ICL. Rodney explains: “It was a spin-out from ICL.  ICL had, actually had two developments which came out of their research group based in Stevenage and the DAP, the Distributed Array Processor was one. It was what was called a massively parallel processor. The first model consisted of 1,028 simple processors working in parallel.  It was clear that it was going nowhere within ICL and they approached some consultants, who recommended that they set up an independent company and in the initial manifestation, seven private equity firms invested in AMT. They were looking for a managing director or CEO, and I was approached to do the job. I’d really decided I wanted to get back into computers and the idea of doing a start-up was extremely attractive to me, so I said yes, and we had a very interesting challenge.

“The DAP, in its ICL manifestation, had about 30 engineers concerned with working on it and developing it, and it cost something like £30-40,000 to manufacture. We needed to redesign it so that it could be manufactured at around $5,000. We found a little group of three people in southern California: a chip designer; a motherboard circuit designer and a project manager. They contracted, for a fixed sum and a fixed timescale of one year, to reengineer the DAP down to being able to be manufactured for $5,000, and they did it. It was a stunning experience, seeing them work. It was just a completely different world to what I’d previously experienced.  Within the year we had the new machine and were marketing it.”

 As part of the role, Rodney and his family moved to southern California.  He adds: “What was amazing to me was the attitude in the USA to start-ups, the risks that companies were prepared to take, despite the fact that you were a start-up.  We had to get somebody to manufacture the board, somebody to fabricate the specially designed chips and the company that manufactured them were NCR. Nobody questioned the finances of this start-up UK company.  It was a totally different world and things happened incredibly quickly; decisions were taken quickly.  That was my experience of working in the USA; people were much more prepared to take gambles, including trying a new machine.”

The machine was ideal for signal and image processing and was sold in the US to E Systems, now part of Lockheed Martin. Rodney adds: “They worked on what were called ‘black projects’ which meant. the staff working on them required a very high level of security clearence from the US DoD.  Again, an eye-opener to me was that, even in the security conscious defence world, if you had a mousetrap that was sufficiently attractive they would just give it a go and use it.  In the UK, we sold it to GCHQ in Cheltenham. We also sold to the Cancer Research UK. We were lucky because it was just at the beginning when they were mapping the human genome and Cancer Research UK took a machine because it was very good in DNA sequencing.”

In 1989, Rodney left AMT to return with his family to the UK where he joined Alphameric as CEO. Rodney was approached by Robb Wilmot who had been managing director of ICL and who was acting as a consultant to Alphameric to help sort out some issues. Rodney says: “Robb had been given a consultancy assignment to help rescue them, because despite having been extremely successful in the early eighties, they had made a number of unwise acquisitions and were going broke.

 Alphameric’s principal original business was keyboard manufacturering but it had also got into fintech. Rodney explains: “It had a software system used by banks and similar organisations. It had also acquired two or three other peripheral businesses, which were disasters.”

As the economy started to head into a recession, Rodney was appointed CEO and lead the refinancing of the company and subsequently the complete restructuring of Alphameric. He explains: “I worked with the Alphameric stockbrokers and we did a huge rights issue to provide the money to start restructuring the company. It was a fairly desperate time for both the Company and the British Economy. Later during the rescue process we tried to draw on what were called “standby facilities” from the then Midland Bank, which was itself in serious financial difficulty. I learnt very fast that standby facility meant that it was notionally there when you were raising money from the City from shareholders to get equity, but when you actually needed it, it wasn’t there anymore.

“The restructuring got rid of and closed down the businesses that really weren’t functioning, so that we could focus on what worked.  Perhaps the biggest task was to sell the fintech business, which we did to British Telecom; that was the key to the survival of Alphameric. We then developed the keyboard into what we now know as point-of-sale terminals and we went on to develop a very nice point-of-sale business.  We also got into the satellite communication business, which meant putting satellite terminals into betting shops around the UK.  So we really shifted the whole business away from the multitude of things it was doing into keyboards, point-of-sale, which was directly related to keyboards, and the bookmaking business.”

Asked about whether the work done on Y2K was justified, Rodney says: “I don’t know the answer.  I suspect at the end of the day, it was a bit like a vaccination programme, it was necessary.  There was undoubtedly some unjustified hype, but I came to the conclusion in the end that a lot of the work that was done was valid and it would have been seriously problematic had it not been done.”

Asked about what he’s most proud of in his career, Rodney highlights his work in the latter part of his career as a business angel investor. He explains: “Through a bit of help from me, I’ve seen some really talented people achieve great things.  The other thing is having seen a number of people that worked for me, whose careers I  actively promoted, went on to become extremely successful.” He goes on to highlight Peter Gershon who was a regional systems manager for Rodney at ICL.

Asked why the UK is unable to create large scale tech companies from start-ups, Rodney says: “Firstly, the sheer scale of the USA as a market to start a company is extraordinary.  There are hundreds of companies in the US that would be mega-companies in the UK that are medium-sized companies in the USA.  The other thing is that we tend to take profits earlier. I can think of situations where we’ve sold companies, including to American companies, when I guess there is an argument that said we should have gone on and tried to build them to be much bigger, but we took the opportunity of selling them.”

Asked about his biggest mistake, Rodney says: “I’m finding it very difficult to answer.  In retrospect, maybe I shouldn’t have left the IT industry when I did.  Perhaps if I’d have stayed in the industry, I would have developed quite a bit faster and might have got into being a business angel and developing new companies much earlier.  I am not sure that was a mistake, because I did learn a lot from a general management point of view. But my whole attitude in my career has always been to look forward.  I’ve never looked back and said, oh if only…..”

Asked about his thoughts on the current debate around generative AI such as ChatGPT, Rodney says: “I’m quite scared about it, because it’s going to eat itself up, thatis to say you’re going to get lots of false stuff created by generative  AI software, and then get it regurgitated again as if it’s true. I fear that although it’s got lots of real potential, as with all human inventions, it also has the potential to cause a lot of harm if it’s misused.”

Interviewed by Richard Sharpe

Transcribed by Susan Nicholls

Abstracted by  Lynda Feeley