We were told the machine would replace a room of clerks. Instead it made the clerks the most sought-after people in the building, because only they knew what the numbers meant. That lesson has outlived the machine.
In 1979 the first computer for accounts compilation arrived at South Eastern Railway headquarters in Garden Reach. It occupied a room the size of a small hall, ran on punched cards, and was accompanied by an engineer who did not leave for a year.
The talk in the building was that it would replace the compilation section. What actually happened was the opposite. The machine could add faster than any of us, but it could not tell a wrong classification from a right one, and the clerks who had spent twenty years on the ledgers were suddenly the only people who could check its output. They became, for a while, the most sought-after staff on the railway.
I have watched the same thing happen with every system since — AFRES, IPAS, and whatever comes next. The tool changes. The person who understands what the numbers mean does not become less valuable; they become more so. That lesson outlived the machine at Garden Reach, and it will outlive the current ones too.
Reviewed and approved by the association on 30 Jul 2026