Principles of Data Management, 2nd Edition

PREFACE

I think I first decided that I wanted to be a soldier when I was about three years of age. In 1960, aged 16 and with a slack handful of GCE ‘O’ Levels, I joined the Royal Armoured Corps as a junior soldier. I suppose I thought that driving tanks would be fun, but my time with the Royal Armoured Corps was short-lived and, in 1962, I joined the Royal Corps of Signals and trained as an electronics technician. I learned to repair and maintain a range of electronics equipment that used logic AND, OR, NAND and NOR gates, multivibrators, registers and MOD-2 adders, all of which are the building blocks of the central processing units at the heart of computers. Nine years later, I attended a course that turned me into a technical supervisor. ...