HAVING AT FIRST [BE]COME POTENTIALLY AWARE ...

[Michael Grove]

... of the internetwork communication capabilities of ARPANET prior to

my Ministry of Aviation secondment to Eurocontrol in Brussels as one of

the very first Air Traffic Controllers to have been trained in the then novel

ART of Joint Civil/Military Area Radar Control, [IT] would appear that I

was seemingly pre-disposed to coming up with THE IDEA of a better way

to execute procedural/radar handovers, between ATC Centres, when having

been subsequently posted to the Maastricht UAC in Beek NL, I became aware

of Philips development of their Laserdisc System • which [IT] transpired was

capable of storing 1.5GB of data, that in those days was potentially enough

to store the entirety of The Global Database of Scheduled Commercial

Flights, that was mandatorily required for the whole year ahead, each and

every October 1st • and so [IT] was that I proposed a solution to my Lords

and masters at EUROCONTROL, to implement a plan to improve the

handover of Air Traffic between Air Traffic Control Centres, that absolutely

ensured a much SAFER and EXPEDITIOUS methodology.

Needless to say my IDEA fell on very stoney ground, so to speak, and I

subsequently terminated my Ministry of Aviation secondment and returned

to the UK to take up my role as an Area Radar Controller at West Drayton,

with the organisation that had been set up as the Civil Aviation Authority

in my absence and so it transpired that it was to them that I re-submitted

my plan, which was eventually acknowledged and acted upon, but only

some time after I had developed my very own exemplar demonstrable

interactive authoring system, at home in the Old School House in Tackley,

which was subsequently developed, in extremely close cooperation with

the Council of Educational Technology and with the open support of the

National Physical Laboratory with regard to the development of their

Microtext Authoring Language for the BBC Computer Literacy Project.      

.