This is the forth instalment of this column in which I detail my experiences of having to work to get money for my university fees. I am writing this to show all the university students who want to go to university and not pay any fees how much real-life education they are missing. I think this is a real tragedy.

After three years working on the mines and using the money that I earned to go to university in between, I thought a change would be good. Perhaps working in Cape Town (I lived in Johannesburg at the time). It so happened that the ‘Templar’ of the consulting firm Kantey & Templar was my mother’s cousin, Colin Templar.

So I wrote asking if I could have a vacation job. He wrote and asked if I could be there at the beginning of the second week of November. Now, it happened that university had ended a few days into November, so there was an opportunity to go rock climbing in the Cape for two weeks. At the time, I was a hotshot rock climber (and chairperson of the University of the Witwatersrand Mountain Club).

I phoned my friend, Philip Dawson, and asked if he wanted to go climbing in the Cape. He said sure. So, we met in Cape Town in a house in Kloof street. I was very tired, having driven through the night from Johannesburg. But Philip said no, no, let us go.

So, we walked from Kloof street to the lower cable station and then up the mountain via the India Fenster buttress. We reached Africa Ledge (2 000 ft above sea level) and Philip said we should leave our gear on the ledge and crack off a quick climb to the top. The sun was setting as we set off and we were overtaken by darkness and wet mist shortly afterwards. We reached the top and then scrambled back to Africa Ledge, which we reached at about midnight. I was absolutely exhausted. But, in those days, you were allowed to sleep on Table Mountain, so we spent about a week and a half doing all the upper ledge climbs, which are probably the most spectacular in South Africa.

The following week, I reported for work. I was immediately struck by how beautiful the receptionist was. Her name was Zeeta and she was utterly fabulous. I met my uncle and he introduced me to a Dr Stuart, who explained to me that he and a Dr Twemlow had an idea that they could use a computer to solve statically indeterminate and determinate trusses (a truss is a sort of metal frame that holds up the roof on a building, for example).

The company had bought a computer made by Wang that had a total on-board memory of 64 K. My project was to convert a Fortran program that Stuart had into a Wang BASIC program that would run on this computer. Fortunately, I knew Fortran and had an idea about BASIC.

The program would be input by keyboard onto a screen and then saved onto a cassette tape. I worked out that one was going to have to enter all the coordinates of the truss as XY values and store them. Then one would have to recall the values bit by bit (pun! Ha!) and do some mathematics to make sure that all values were input correctly.

Error routines were required, so we had to have a file with error messages. Then we had to have another file which had to have all the loading values for the truss and then we had to do all the calculations. It took time, but the days passed very easily, especially since they began with a vision of gorgeous Zeeta.

I finally finished the program and it was okay but it was still much quicker to do truss analysis graphically and check the results with deflection diagrams. I wonder if there is anybody out there younger than 60 who even knows how to do truss analysis graphically – without using a computer. All too soon, it was over and I left the Cape thinking I would never return. How wrong I was!