He used Meccano too. Which didn&#x27;t go down too well when he tried to take it through in his hand luggage on a recent trip to Spain. Was no trouble in the end but they made him take everything out of his bag and scanned it individually.<p>In the 1970s he was a computer mechanic, with a spanner and oil and all that kind of stuff. There were only two of those computers in the country, one at Raleigh Cycles and one at Cabdury Chocolate. They used them to do the wages. They had an agreement that if one broke he or his opposite number could jump in a car and drive to the other with a box of cards to run the batch and then fix it later.<p>He used to take me to work on a Monday night and it&#x27;s where I got interested in computers. He stopped working in 1978. I wish I had been old enough to understand it more. I was 6-8 at the time.