My influences: Dick Howe

I first met David WG Howe ("Dick") in ICL; he was the Area Manager of a sales area based in Harrow, Middlesex, in about 1975. As ICL was then organised, there were separate reporting structures for sales and support staff which converged at divisional level; the thinking behind this was that it insulated professional support staff from pressures from the sales force to cut corners and deliver systems that were short of what the customer thought he was getting. So I worked with the salesmen, and with Dick, rather than for him. Despite this, over the ensuing couple of years we got to work well together and when, in 1976, Dick was head hunted by a technical documentation company to set up and run a software house for them, he recruited me as a member of his team, based in Wokingham. In fact, this was not a good decision, either for Dick or for me, but we worked together for a couple of years and got to know each other well.

I had always felt that Dick was gullible and was inclined to chase after the next intellectual fashion, whatever it was. At the time, he had been reading books by Erich von Däniken, who had a bee in his bonnet about extra-terrestrial intervention in the affairs of the earth. He had accumulated lots of alleged evidence, including the Old Testament book of Ezekiel and some unexplained geological lines in, I think, South America. He had a big hit with Chariots of the Gods and a number of other books on a similar theme.

Dick and I were having a pub lunch in the garden of the Duke's Head in Wokingham and Dick was expounding one of von Daniken's more far fetched theories. I delivered what I thought was a devastating critique of his alleged evidence and was feeling rather pleased with myself, when Dick said, "In being so narrow minded, you are cutting yourself from all sorts of ideas and concepts; some of them will indeed be rubbish but some undoubtedly will not. You need to give some thought to your attitude to challenging ideas".

This had been said to me before by others. But whether it was Dick, the moment, the weather, the beer or something else, at that moment the criticism went home. It changed me instantaneously and, looking back at my subsequent life, I am sure that I have benefitted from a number of ideas which, before Dick's comments, I would have discounted.

I owe you a lot, Dick. Thank you.