Hi All
I joined Control Data in 1969 as part of the customer education team. 
The primary task at the time was education for AIS and BHP staff as 
they had just purchased 3300 machines for Pt. Kembla and Newcastle
and I was charged with developing and running courses in discrete
event simulation techniques and the Simula 67 programming language. 
When we ran the first course in late 1969 we were running the 
first Object Oriented  programming (although it wasn’t called that at the time)
course in Australia as Simula was the first truly object oriented 
programming language.

Developing that course was quite harrowing as all we originally had to work 
with was a syntactic definition of the programming language. 
I still recall clearly the definition “An object is a dynamic instance of a 
class declaration” which I must have read over 1000 times trying to fathom 
what was an object and why would you want one anyhow. 
Finally with the help of some notes sent over from the Norwegian 
Computing Centre, which developed Simula, the penny dropped 
and we ran a course which was in the end well received. 
So well received in fact that Don Dyer, the AIS Operations Research 
Superintendent, requested an advanced course. 
You can imagine my dismay as I had just taught them everything I knew 
about the subject. 
In the end I put together a course on the run time system and they seemed
to think that that was worthwhile as well.

After the education stint at Pt Kembla and Newcastle, I recall spending 
many late nights (no word processors in those days) as part of the 
Victorian presales support team working with account rep John Hill and 
other members of the support team putting together a proposal to the 
ANZ Bank based on Cyber 72’s and the TOOS operating system 
(Transaction Oriented Operating System) which CDC was building as 
part of an order it won from the Union Bank of Switzerland. 
As I recall  we came within a whisker of winning that order, 
but it turned out to be a good one to have lost as CDC had a lot 
of problems with TOOS and eventually was sued by UBS.

After CD I spent a couple of years lecturing at what was then QIT and t
here ran what was probably the first OO programming course in an 
Australian tertiary institution when I included Simula in a Comparative 
Programming Languages Course that I was teaching. 
The students ran their assignments on the CD Data Centre 6600, 
as the QIT’s ICL gear didn’t support appropriate compilers, through a 
remote batch terminal in the CDA Brisbane office after hours. 
Each student was given a budget and they had to get their assignments 
working before running out of budget – a useful benefit of learning the
 true cost of computing, which was not cheap in those days.

I then spent about 6 years with ICL and Burroughs/Unisys but the experience 
was not comparable to that at CDA. Most of the rest of my working life 
has been spent in userland as EDP manager at Theiss Mining, Applications 
Development Manager at Metway Bank and MD of a software development 
company, Sirrus, where I again teamed up with another ex CDA associate, 
Garry Simpson. We were developing a new object based banking system 
and all was going well until the Qld government spoiled it all when it effectively 
took over our major client, Metway Bank, through its Suncorp operation, 
closed down our project and bought a 20 year old batch based banking 
system from a US company, Hogan Systems.

I spent the last 2 years of my working life back in Melbourne installing a 
Project Accounting system for the Building Services Agency. Just as we 
were about to go live the BSA was sold to engineering company Sinclair 
Merz Knight and as they already had a system they were happy with the 
project simply vanished into thin air. 

So one way or another I got to practically experience the well reported 
statistic that over 70% of large software projects never see the light of day.

These days I spend my days with my wife Lyn enjoying life at Castaways Beach 
on the Qld Sunshine Coast (5 km south of Noosa for the uninitiated). 
I’ve renewed my enthusiasm for tennis and spend a lot of time on the courts 
trying to keep fit, a few hours on the beach every day taking our Labrador 
Retriever, Sally, for a walk and I still dabble in OO programming, writing 
software to manage my DIY Superfund and various other investments 
using c# and the MS .Net Framework. In the absence of deadlines 
I find this strangely enjoyable.

If anyone is passing our way and feels like reminiscing there is always 
a cold beer on the fridge and a red in the rack and we’d love to see you.

Dennis Jelavic