I worked at GEC Magnet Computer Bureau in Electric Avenue, Witton, Birmingham from 1967 to 2007 (now retired).

This website is documenting the details that I recall about the company and its employees.

I started work in 1967 at GEC Magnet Computer Bureau as a trainee Computer Operator.

The company was situated in the main GEC Works Administration Block.

	GEC Main Works Administration Block, Witton, Birmingham

I worked in the Operations Department for about 3 years, and in 1969 he graduated to become a Shift Leader responsible for a team of Computer Operators.

The company had Honeywell mainframe computers. The first one was a Honeywell 800 and it filled a large room! This would have had less power than a pc today! They then added a Honeywell 200 computer, which was used for small processing and to carry out the printing in an off-line manner. Later a Honeywell 1250 was installed, and was used to run the whole bureau service for the GEC customers. To give an idea of its size and power, it had all of 64 KB of memory, and the disc drives which were about a half metre in diameter with 6 discs vertically had about the same capacity as a floppy disc!

Roger was working a 3-shift system, days, evenings and nights. It was difficult to acclimatise to the change in working hours, but he enjoyed the night shift, with the eeriness of the whole works being empty and traveling back home in the early hours of the morning. He was often stopped by the police who wondered what he was doing out at that time of night in a red Morgan sports car!

Roger started to teach himself programming whilst he was a Computer Operator, working in direct machine language, and later in assembler languages such as ARGOS.

In 1970, Roger moved out of Operations into Computer Programming and Systems Analysis, using the COBOL programming language. He designed the main Project Costing and Financial Accounting system used by the then GEC-Marconi, a system called MARCAS (MARconi Computerised Accounting System). This computer system was in operation from the early 1980's until around 2005. In 1978, he became Project Leader and by 1987 he became Project Manager responsible for the development, support and maintenance of this system.

It was at GEC Magnet Computer Bureau that Roger met his wife to be Margaret Cundall, who was working with GEC as a programmer. She was living at the time in a flat on the Chester Road, Birmingham, and later moved to a small 3 storey block of flats at Brookvale Court, Erdington. The company went through many name changes and locations: