The Software Café

Software Café logo

Software, quality and lunch in a time before the internet.


There was a time when if you wanted to know the news you bought a newspaper or listened to the wireless. You paid people in cash or wrote them cheques and did your banking at a building in the High Street. You might even have had a chat with the cashier while you were at it. The High Street was full of shops to buy things and you couldn't lose your life savings in a few seconds because there was a bookmaker between you and ruin, and he only opened for a few hours a day. You went to the library to look up facts in encyclopedias or reference tomes and the secret of great food was held in the bound pages of recipe books.

There were only two types of ticket for the train available at the station and the prices remained much the same from day to day. The travel agent would book flights and hotels for you, get you your favourite seat on the plane and give you a paper ticket. Telephones were fixed by a wire to the wall and were used for genuine communications rather than money scams. If you were lonely you looked in the lonely hearts column of the local newspaper or simply went to the pub, or took up country dancing, or phoned your cousin. Entertainment was delivered to your TV according to a schedule and if you weren't there you missed it, except if you had a flash video tape recorder. There was another shop in the high street that sold you music on vinyl records, some of which were not black. Software came through the post on a CD with a printed user manual. There was a time before the internet.

The software programmers of the day were masters of rare and charmed runes in Ada, Lisp, C, FORTRAN and COBOL. Their tools were exquisitely crafted Sun Sparcstations, Silicon Graphics Crimsons and Acorn Archimedes. It was a time of great creativity and exploration. Software development was a frontier and the map was being drawn in real-time. Programmers looked for the right way to do software, quality, and when they remembered, lunch. It was a noble quest. Then a bunch of dudes realised there was a fortune to be made selling porn directly over the phone line to a person's computer. Programming suddenly had a real purpose, the money to support it and thanks to Tim Berners-Lee setting it up right, the internet was born. Then there is the time with the internet. But just before that was the Software Café and the small matter of a speed-of-light transference machine to get you between restaurants.