January - April 1985
Working for ICL in Frankfurt, Germany, designing and building a pilot installation of point-of-sale equipment and communications systems for Mister Minit. The system involved the usual cash handling, with an overnight communications dialled by head office to collect cash and sales information. As "team leader" - I was responsible for one other contractor - I was responsible mainly for the programming (in CIS COBOL) of the ICL (Fujitsu) till which, along with the modem, was the entire branch (kiosk) computing and communications system. The pilot was installed, went live on three - later about seven - branches.
During the rest of 1985, I supported the system, from home in Cambridge, with the occasional trip out to Frankfurt for bug-fixes, amendments, reconfiguration etc., and some time spent in Aachen (expenses only paid by ICL) on call while the system went live.
September 1985
I was out at ICL Frankfurt again, this time to do the point-of-sale programming for the Lidl & Schwartz pilot. I did the design and programming - again in CIS COBOL - of the checkout at a cash-and-carry Ruef Markt in Freiburg. The initial design and programming was done at this time, but serious testing had to wait until 1986.
During the gaps between these projects, I spent a good deal of time in the Cambridge Maths department when in England, and Lehrstuehl D fuer Mathematik in Aachen when in Germany, working mainly on a set of programs in FORTRAN for calculating with modular character tables. This work involved using p-adic lifting for the solving systems of up to about a hundred simultaneous linear equations over the integers, working with Abelian extensions of the rationals, as well as the implementation of various methods for the calculation of modular character tables.
I wrote the long-integer handling myself (in FORTRAN), and the programs included an LLL implementation for the calculation (mainly to save typing, as the ones I needed were mainly known) of the ordinary character tables. All the mathematics work was unpaid this year