Judy hated being in the public eye. She had presented a paper on her curve drawing algorithm at a conference once, and it had cost her dearly. She worked for weeks structuring the paper and making it as clear as she could, but she was nervous for weeks before the event. People understood what she was saying, and recognised that she had solved a problem that no-one else had solved before, but it took her days to recover.
Once BUSS had been formed, she would get David to make a presentation, and then she would answer questions. He was a good, if inaccurate speaker. His skills had been learned in his other role as a Methodist Local Preacher. You will hit everyone if you go for the intelligent 12 year old. Judy, however was there in the background to correct misunderstandings. Their relationship was based on that of Moses and Aaron in Exodus 4, where it is recorded that Moses was a deep thinker but a lousy speaker, but his brother Aaron was a showman.
Buss was growing, and started to organise annual User Group meetings where customers could come, display the ways in which they had used Judy’s software, and make suggestions about facilities they would like. Judy offered to speak at one. This was extraordinary. She had taken up embroidery – something she would have to abandon later when she could no longer hold a needle. She had been experimenting with colour effects achievable by interlacing different coloured threads.
This was not unlike the techniques she had been using in the Electrical Engineering Department displaying 2 contour maps on the same graph. Over the months she worked on 3 or 4 different “Mona Lisa” tapestries to demonstrate her argument. Judith Butland, who never told a lie, told a room full of people how to deceive. The presentation went well. At this conference a heart surgeon from Oxford showed how he was using the “temperature in a fish tank” software she had designed to display data from heart scans as a series of pulsating heart beats. This would be laughably crude now, but it was leading edge technology then. Another customer involved with building research showed how he had used it to display smoke dispersal in a room, and you could see the clouds drifting around.
Buss had become a modestly successful software house. It could afford to add new staff, and morale was sky high. Judy continued to remember the lessons learned when living for a week on 3/= No extravagances.
Maybe 1 personal extravagance. She and David started to go on holiday to places other than Blackpool. In Malta she sprained her ankle and had to go into hospital. In Jersey she fractured her arm and ought to have gone into hospital but didn’t. In Schwarzenberg she sprained her ankle again, and the hotel she was staying in bought a wheelchair so that she could get around. Just like old times.
However. Technology was moving on, and Judy was physically unable to move on with it. She was never able to make ready use of a mouse. Her hands had continued to close up, and she did not have the fine control needed to move a mouse and click. Cause and effect are difficult to entangle, but she hated the guess and press culture. Computer languages were being developed based on the new technology. She readily picked up new languages, and would learn to use them thoroughly. but some of them began to presuppose that you could “drag and drop” items on the screen. She couldn’t. She would blossom once more, but the glory days of BUSS were coming to an end. She had never taken a lot of money from BUSS, so the coffers were full, but money was draining away. Staff were given the heave-ho, and BUSS moved to a smaller unit on the Science Park.
Then unexpectedly a man phoned to arrange a visit. He owned an antiques shop in Derby, and had been talking to this man in a pub. He had an idea how to solve an interesting mathematical problem.
jbrip 