Twice Shy

He looked at me vaguely, his mind on his task. 'You know how it is. You have to teach boys individually on this baby to get good results. There aren't enough classrooms. This is all that's available. It's not too bad. And anyway, I never notice.'

I could believe it. He was a hiker, an ex-youth-hosteller, an embracer of earnest discomforts. He perched on the edge of the hard wooden chair and applied his own computer-like brain to the one on the tables.

There were four separate pieces of equipment. A box like a small television set with a typewriter keyboard protruding forward from the lower edge of the screen. A cassette player. A large upright uninformative black box marked simply 'Harris', and something which looked at first sight like a typewriter, but which in fact had no keys. All four were linked together, and each to its own wall socket, by black electric cables.

Ted Pitts put Oklahoma into the cassette player and typed CLOAD 'BASIC' on the keyboard. CLOAD 'BASIC' appeared in small white capital letters high up on the left of the television screen, and two asterisks appeared, one of them rapidly blinking on and off, up on the right. On the cassette player, the wheels of the tape-reels quickly revolved.

'How much do you remember?' Ted said.

'About enough to know you're searching the tape for the language, and that CLOAD means LOAD from the cassette.'

He nodded and pointed briefly to the large upright box. 'The computer already has its own BASIC stored in there. I put it in at lunchtime. Now just let's see…' He hunched himself over the keyboard, pressing keys, stopping and starting the cassette player and punctuating his activity with grunts.

'Nothing useful,' he muttered, turning the tapes over and repeating the process. 'Let's try…' A fair time passed. He shook his head now and then, and said finally, 'Give me those other two tapes. It must logically be at the beginning of one of the sides – unless of course he added it at the end simply because he had space left… or perhaps he didn't do it at all…'

'Won't the programs run on your own version of BASIC?'

He shook his head. 'I tried before you came. The only response you get is ERROR in LINE 10. Which means that the two versions aren't compatible.' He grunted again and tried West Side Story, and towards the end of the first side he sat bolt upright and said, 'Well, now.'

'It's on there?'

'Can't tell yet. But there's something filed under "Z". Might just try that.' He flicked a few more switches and sat back beaming. 'Now all we do is wait a few minutes while that…' he pointed at the large upright box… 'soaks up whatever is on the tape under "Z", and if it should happen to be Grantley Basic, we'll be in business.'

'Why does "Z" give you hope?'

'Instinct. Might be a hundred per cent wrong. But it's a much longer recording than anything else I've found so far on the tapes, and it feels the right length. Four and a quarter minutes. I've fed BASIC into the Harris thousands of times.'

His instinct proved reliable. The word READY suddenly appeared on the screen, white and bright and promising. Ted sighed heavily with satisfaction and nodded three times.

'Sensible fellow, your friend,' he said. 'So now we can see what you've got.'

When he ran Oklahoma again, the file names came up clearly beside the flashing asterisk at the top right of the screen, and although some of them were mysterious to me, some of them were definitely not.

DONCA EDINB EPSOM FOLKE FONTW GOODW HAMIL HAYDK. HEREF HEXHM

'Names of towns,' I said. Towns with racecourses.'

Ted nodded. 'Which would you like to try?'

'Epsom.'

'OK.' he said. He rewound the tape with agile fingers and typed CLOAD 'EPSOM' on the keyboard. 'This puts the program filed under EPSOM into the computer, but you know that, of course, I keep forgetting.'

The encouraging word READY appeared again, and Ted said, 'Which do you want to do, List it or Run it?' 'Run,' I said.

He nodded and typed RUN on the keyboard, and in bright little letters the screen enquired WHICH RACE AT EPSOM? TYPE NAME OF RACE AND PRESS 'ENTER'. 'My God,' I said. 'Let's try the Derby.'

'Stands to reason,' Ted said, and typed DERBY. The screen promptly responded with TYPE NAME OF HORSE AND PRESS 'ENTER'.

Ted typed JONATHAN DERRY and again pressed the double-sized key on the keyboard marked 'Enter', and the screen obliged with:

EPSOM: THE DERBY HORSE: JONATHAN DERRY.

TO ALL QUESTIONS ANSWER YES OR NO AND PRESS 'ENTER'. A couple of inches lower down there was a question:

HAS HORSE WON A RACE?

Ted typed YES and pressed 'Enter'. The first three lines remained, but the question was replaced with another.

HAS HORSE WON THIS YEAR?

Ted typed NO. The screen responded:

HAS HORSE WON ON COURSE?

Ted typed NO. The screen responded:

HAS HORSE RUN ON COURSE?

Ted typed YES.

There were questions about the horse's sire, its dam, its jockey, its trainer, the number of days since its last run, and its earnings in prize money; and one final question:

IS HORSE QUOTED ANTE-POST AT 25-1 OR LESS?