How BHP Avoided the
Pitfalls of Micros

by Graeme Kemlo,
Today's Computers, April 1985

Greg Knight (left), electrical foreman at BHP's Geelong rod mill, and Lloyd Borrett, former head of BHP's computer support centre

The Big Australian, BHP, foresaw the personal computer revolution, and avoided the headlong rush into them that has dogged many smaller businesses. In March 1983, just as the first IBM PC was officially released in Australia, BHP decided to establish a personal computer support centre, but to "hasten slowly".

The man who headed the centre, and was largely responsible for the personal computerisation of a company that already had one of Australia's most extensive mini and mainframe installations, was Lloyd Borrett.

"In many ways the decision was a pre-emptive one," Borrett says. "We decided to get in there and see where PCs could take us." Borrett had come from the coal-face — or, more correctly, the ore face. He was a trades assistant to a fitter at Iron Baron, South Australia, in 1976, before moving to Melbourne as a trainee computer programmer. He was one of the first people in Australia with an IBM PC, having imported one in September 1982, and the logical choice for promotion from systems programming. He left BHP in January this year to join Melbourne IBM dealer HiSoft as support coordinator.

"At the time the DP dictum was: 'Thou shalt get involved in micros or the department will die'," Borrett says. "We didn't hold to that, mostly because we didn't have all that many users on micros and so not too many demands that they be looked at. The other catchcry was: 'Thou shalt form an information centre for end users.' We didn't.

"The computer literates in BHP were users of the IBM and Control Data mainframes or Data General minis. They had applications including statistics, financial planning and graphics, and fourth-generation languages."

Borrett says there was a package called Supercomp, now known as Compucalc, for spreadsheeting on the mini, and a TRS-80 model II with Visicalc had performed budget prepa¬rations for the DP department since early 1982.

"We recognised the potential of spreadsheeting," Borrett says. "But no one was promoting it to users, and generally there were none of the great demands for a PC on every desk. We had time to evaluate the PC before too many started asking questions."

BHP's decision in June 1983 was to standardise on the IBM PC and the XT, announced at the same time but not then available. Software was the then little-known Lotus 1-2-3, instead of the popular Multiplan and Visicalc.

"Already other subsidiaries were looking at PCs and many were using Multiplan under CP/M, so they were unlikely to want to change to this thing called 1-2-3," Borrett says. His direct responsibility was only BHP head-quarters in Melbourne, and it was decided "we would offer support for those systems we recommended".

"By getting in early we would provide an intelligence service," Borrett says. "Even though the DP departments of Newcastle and Port Kembla were bigger than head office, we were to lead by example. It was a noble idea and overall reasonably successful. We hastened slowly with incremental expansion, by filtering users we would take on board."

The first user was Dick Johnson in the steel operations department. He had a micro at home and an array of equipment in his office to communicate with mainframes, minis and bureaus. His work was largely based on Control Data's Cyber, which was being made redundant in favor of an IBM 3083 mainframe.

Borrett concluded that Johnson was the perfect candidate, as much of his work could be run on the stand-alone PC or on the mainframe using the PC as a terminal. "He was more experienced and knowledgeable than most users — an ideal candidate, able to support himself," Borrett says. "He got an IBM PC XT with mono and color screens plus a HP six-pen plotter. First his Basic programs were ported over from the Cyber. Later he added graphics output to these programs, then turned his attention to the possibilities of spreadsheets."

The next user was, in Borrett's words, a typical PC user-manager, Peter Pickles, a national sales manager in steel marketing who finds 1-2-3 the answer to his problem. He had been generating figures from the mainframe, and printing them out after a three-hour run for analysis by hand.

From then things moved more quickly, with mainframe users adopting micros in marketing and branches.

BHP's first PCs were 64K, dual 320K-drive configurations, but the motherboard was upgraded with an AST Megaplus 256K add-on board with serial and parallel ports, calendar and clock. After the first year they were all XTs with 10 megabyte hard disks and 256K motherboards.

"I was accused of putting together a Rolls-Royce configuration with the XT, but I don't think there's a case where a machine has not been upgraded," Borrett says.

"As dedicated word processing was provided by a Wang system, nearly all users were just running Lotus 1-2-3, but there was an emphasis on graphics and we thought they would soon want more than 1-2-3 could offer." Things move more slowly than expected.