An Ungentlemanly Act

 

That's the thing about reading: you not only discover a lot about other people and places, you also discover a lot about yourself. What I discovered about myself is that once I have learned about something, I want to learn more and more about it, which is what I did after I had learnt about the Falkland Islands in "The Sun Never Sets : Travels to the remaining outposts of the British Empire" (SIGN UP, LOG IN, then BORROW, and go straight to page 248).

YouTube postings about the Falkland Islands are all about the war in 1982 (which I had totally missed as at the time I had just started a new and demanding job in the world's largest sandbox, Saudi Arabia). Besides countless documentaries, they even made a dramatisation about it:

Based on actual accounts, this film portrays the days and hours before and during the invasion of the Falkland Islands by Argentina, which eventually lead to the Falklands War. As the Argentine forces land on the main island and make their way towards Government House, the British Royal Marines batten down the hatches and prepare to defend Governer Rex Hunt, his family and their fellow islanders from the invaders.

 

 

Charles Darwin went to the Falklands aboard the "Beagle" in 1833, the same year that the Union Jack was first raised by a visiting vessel. He knew that the existing Argentine garrison had been ordered to leave, and was scornfully dismissive of the Admiralty's action. He delivered a judgement as haunting as it was economical: "Here we, dog in manger fashion, seize an island and leave to protect it a Union Jack." Ten years later the islands were formally colonised. According to the 2016 Census, the islands have a population of 3,398, who remained British at the cost of 258 men, 6 ships (10 others suffered varying degrees of battle damage), 34 aircraft, and £2.778 billion (£9.255 billion in 2018-money).

 

 

After the "war", arguments were advanced about the need for keeping the Cape Horn passage in safe hands, for the day when Panama fell to the other side. Most people saw it as pointless preservation of Imperial pride by an Empire who had claimed that the sun would never set on it (though the original remark - 'the sun never sets on my dominions' - was written for Phillip II of Spain, and had nothing to do with Britain at all).

Until it does, I may tune in to the British Falklands Broadcasting Services or open up the "Penguin News" to hear and read about what one not-so-happy governor called 'a remote settlement at the fag end of the world'.

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Additional viewing:
The Falklands Play
The Falklands War
Falkland Islands Broadcasting Station. Live broadcast of invasion
Tumbledown

 

Just another old tee-shirt

David Hartley's website website in 2011 and now

 

There is one early Australian software entrepreneur who really stands out, and I was working for him during my quick sojourn to Toowong in Brisbane back in 1980. He did a lot, but he could have done so much more. It is a little known tale of what might have been.

David Hartley (not to be confused with the British computer scientist of the same name) started his working life in 1966 as a civil engineer with Brisbane City Council. His work later took him to Namibia in southern Africa, where he was introduced to computing while conducting mathematical modelling of rainfall in the vast Okavango river basin, using FORTRAN on an ICT 1500.

When he returned to Australia he decided that computing was more interesting than civil engineering. He started Hartley Computer in Brisbane in 1974 to develop software for the accounting profession, on the rationale that accounting could be easily computerised but that many in the profession did not realise that.

His first effort was to write a program in BASIC called AANCS (Australian Accountants Number Crunching System) to run on a Hewlett Packard cassette based desktop calculator. But the HP machine had only a one line display, and Hartley was approached by Wang to rewrite the program to run on a Wang 2200, the company’s newly popular small minicomputer, which had a full display screen, and ran off floppy disks. He called the Wang program HAPAS (HArtley Professional Accountants’ System).

The new software was very successful – it was the only software in Australia designed specifically for small accounting practices. Hartley also designed SHEILA (System by Hartley for Entirely Integrated Ledger Accounting) for larger organisations. The venture included building hardware (the Hartley 3900) and an operating system. Both the hardware and the software were very innovative. In Hartley’s words:

“The operating system was called RT86, a ‘true pre-emptive multi-user multi-tasking operating system for the 8086 chip. It was launched in 1980, 15 years before Windows PCs had that capability.

“Hartley Computer was one of the first mini/PC computer vertical market successes in the world, with ultimately 250 staff and 3,000 sites in seven countries. In the process I became known as ‘the father of computer client accounting’, and we won several awards. The success was killed by hubris and a messy divorce. Big lessons, only partly learned at the time.”

The company sold thousands of copies of HAPAS in Australia in the 1970s and early 1980s. With the improvements in price performance of imported minicomputers Hartley moved out of hardware manufacturing and concentrated on software. At one stage Hartley was the largest global customer for Wang minicomputers.

In 1979, Hartley expanded the business to the US, setting up in Denver Colorado. The US business was run by Roger Brownlee, who built the operation there to over 100 customers. But financial problems developed as Hartley diverted more and more funding into the development of his hardware platform.

The US business was closed, much to Hartley’s regret. He believes that had it continued the entire history of the microcomputer industry could have been very different:

“When IBM launched the IBM PC it decided to use the Intel 8088 (an 8-bit external bus sister chip of the full 16 bit 8086 we had chosen). IBM asked Intel for an introduction to someone who could supply an operating system. Intel knew of our work in Australia, but did not make the introduction because we were not in the USA.

“Instead they introduced IBM to Bill Gates, who did not even have any Intel chip based software at the time. Bill was smart enough to rush out and buy what became MS-DOS for $50,000. And so MS-DOS was inflicted upon the world – a huge cost compared to what could have been with our far superior RT86, and Microsoft was on its way.”

 

HARTLEY office building (in background) in Toowong in 1980
I lived just around the corner in Sherwood Road

 

In 1982, Hartley Computer was put into receivership by the Queensland Government. Hartley says this was under a technicality via a loan guarantee, “even though there was no commercial reason or need as business was booming with just some cash flow issues during financial year end, exacerbated by a cargo handlers strike in Sydney, which the bank understood.”

David Hartley believes that he was being punished for not having donated to the Joh Bjelke-Petersen Foundation, a kickback vehicle for the corrupt Queensland Government. Embittered by the experience, Hartley moved to Hong Kong in 1985 and founded Banksia Information Technology (BIT), which designed and manufactured IT gear, including PCs, modems, and an early voice-activated fax/phone switch, called PHAXswitch.

He later returned to Australia and developed HAPAS Mark II. In 1993, he went to the United Kingdom and with some colleagues set up Hartley Computer UK, which gained over 1000 accounting practice clients ranging from sole practitioners to PricewaterhouseCoopers. In 1999, the company was sold to British accounting software vendor Sage, and Hartley moved to the Caribbean. He still lives there today, where he is a self-described ‘Caribbean Blockchain Evangelist’, pursuing initiatives using the new blockchain technology, including work on accounting systems for what he believes to be the new age of blockchain business.

Funny, the memories just another old tee-shirt brings back!

 

Here are two podcasts with David Hartley from his home in Saint Lucia: click here and here

 

Today, David Hartley lives in Saint Lucia in the Caribbean, hoping to stay fit and healthy long enough to pursue his new Pacio venture - click here.

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“The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.”

Read Richard Dawkins' book "Unweaving the Rainbow" online at www.archive.org

 

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?" (click here)

I am trying to pique your appetite for wonder with these words written by the visionary and often controversial (which is the social fate of every visionary) British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Hate him or love him, he's got a strong point of view and is not afraid to voice it.

It's not an easy read but nothing important ever is. Try and stay with it for the first dozen pages. If you're not totally hooked by then, you can always go back to your favourite comic book. WOW! OH! ... BAM!

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Travel to a remaining outpost of the British Empire

 

As 2021 slowly made way for 2022, I walked, courtesy of Simon Winchester and YouTube, the tropical sands of Boddam Island, part of the British Indian Ocean Territory.

 

 

As Simon Winchester writes in his book "Outposts - Journeys to the surviving relics of the British Empire", a long time ago, Boddam Island was to be turned into the greatest free port in the entire Indian Ocean - a port to rival Hong Kong, and where all transoceanic liners would be bound to call so passengers could buy silks and perfumes and wines.

But nothing came of it until, at the end of the Sixties, something very strange happened to the people of Boddam Island. Let John Pilger, Australian journalist, writer, scholar, documentary filmmaker, explain:

 

Go to John Pilger's website www.johnpilger.com for more information

 

But back to Simon Winchester's book, which was also published under the title "The Sun Never Sets : Travels to the remaining outposts of the British Empire", and which you can read online. Simply SIGN UP (it's free!), then LOG IN, and BORROW. Then go to page 26. Meet you there!

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Into the Heart of Darkness

 

More than a hundred years ago, a Polish sailor named Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski travelled to the Congo to take a job as a steamboat captain on the river. The Congo Free State, as it was then called, had been founded in 1885 under the supervision of King Leopold II of Belgium with the self-declared mission of promoting progress and civilization, free trade and the abolition of slavery. Korzeniowski was supposed to stay for three years, but after just one round-trip on the river, from Kinshasa to Kisangani and back, he quit.

For more information on the Congo, click here

Korzeniowski kept a diary of his journey and almost a decade later, in 1899, when he’d settled in England and Anglicized his name to Joseph Conrad, he transformed those notes into his novel "Heart of Darkness".

More than a century later, with hardly any roads or rails linking most of Congo’s cities and with flights too expensive for nearly all Congolese, boats — belching tugs that push open barges with no facilities — are still the primary way people use to travel between Kinshasa and Kisangani, a commercial hub a thousand miles upstream. If you’re lucky, you can make the upriver journey in four weeks and the downriver journey in two, the same amount of time it took Conrad.

I've read Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" several times, and I've watched the 1993 TV adaptation just as often; now, thanks to YouTube, I can travel from Kinshasa to Kisangani without leaving my sunlit verandah.

Click here for the trailer

 

"Mistah Kurtz - he dead." Not at "Riverbend" he isn't!

 

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