In message , June Hughes
writes
In message , Gordon H
writes

Joking apart, I can remember when I attended an ICL programming course
in Windsor, back in the 70s, we were entitled to 1st Class train
travel, along with the brief cases and umbrellas.

I too attended an ICL programming course in Windsor back in the early
'70's. Plan. 1900 series machines. Before that, I had attended an
IBM course for Autocoder (1400 Series) - also in Windsor. IIRC, I
preferred Autocoder to Plan but then we moved over to Cobol, which was
much easier but not half as much fun. I don't remember having first
class travel on any of the courses but do remember staying in an hotel
in Old Windsor.

The first class travel didn't last long once they realised how many
grades qualified for it! :-)
I had been put in the position of writing a Cobol program without having
any training, so I had to work from the green book (can't remember the
authors now), and crib from the print-out of a comprehensive program
someone had written.
I requested a Cobol course, but when I attended, it turned out to be a
conversion course for Plan programmers, of which I hadn't a clue!

Eventually I was moved into test programming for the Intel mini which
did the environment checks before booting up the S3L and DM1 machines.
--
Gordon H
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