Heather Boyd - Fort Augustus Office
Photograph taken around 1986/87 is courtesy of John Ireland, who is currently based at Lochaber Forest District. Note that the
photograph was taken through the internal glass window hence the double image.
Heather an Administrative Officer at work in the Fort Augustus Forest District office on the Merlin Computer inputting what looks like supplier invoice payment details but difficult to be certain.
The Merlin Computers were British Telecom product which operated on a very limited hard drive and a series of large diameter floppy discs for data handling. This was the first distributed IT network established in the Forestry Commission and covered the country from Cornwall to Sutherland but came at the cost of a series of amalgamations of forest units into Forest Districts.
Beside Heather is a notice board which has a series of instructions to manage the computer amongst lists on other financial requirements.
Large Notice - Start Up
1. Insert S/U disc (Start up disc)
2. Respond to Time /Date Display
3. Remove S/U disc (in red letters)
4. Sign on – Micro140 (unable to read lastline) Process R? ?20
Another notice.
FAMIS ACCESS (Forgotten but could be Financial Administrative Information System)
AP+ 10.30 – 4.00 (Payment to suppliers and contractor)
Cash account)
Journals ) 8.00 – 6.00 (Journals sent cash amounts and quantities to the various individual accounts)
Mondays:-
Not available til 12.00
Except for Cash Account closure
On bottom of the notice board is the sheet with yellow line denoting the weekly, monthly and quarterly accounting periods in the Forestry Commission.
Behind Heather is the large fanfold paper printer from which all the outputs were printed. Being a dot matrix printer it was extremely noisy and over the years was either moved to its own room or had a large sound proof box fitted over it.
When it was running a print from the SCDB (Sub compartment data base) for the whole forest it was pretty near impossible to stay any length of time near it.
Running FIAP (Forest Investment Appraisal Package) which had to be done in the Thatcher era to justify spending anything also caused significant paper printing noise disturbance.
Any stories and details of the early computer systems would be most welcome.
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Groups: Forestry Areas, Forestry in Action