SEB533: Four Years of Green Screen

**In October 1985, a college in Edinburgh gave him a number instead of a name. It stuck.** Callum Strang comes down from Bo'ness with a suitcase, a grant cheque and no experience of computers whatsoever. At registration a woman with a box of index cards writes SEB533 on a slip and hands it over without looking up. SEB is the course code. 5 is the year. 33 is where his surname falls in the register. For the next four years it will appear on his printouts, his machine room bookings, his exam results and, eventually, on a birthday card. The course is Computing and Data Processing, four years, one of them spent out in industry. The machine is shared by three hundred people and answers when it feels like it. The subjects are COBOL, C, statistics, business analysis and, worst of all, accounting, which turns out to be the one thing that separates the people who can code from the people who will graduate. Around him: a flatmate whose entire emotional life is settled on the last afternoon of the football season; a mature student who has actually seen a payroll run fail on a Friday and is therefore the calmest man in Scotland; the four women on a course of forty eight, one of whom is better than Callum at everything and both of them know it; a lecturer in a cardigan who says the machine is never wrong, it is merely obedient, and turns out to have meant it; and a man called Wullie who controls the line printer paper and is more powerful than the entire teaching staff combined. Then comes the placement year, in a small life assurance office in Edinburgh's West End, where nine people keep a system written in 1972 alive by not touching it, and where a student ends up writing code that goes into production because he is the only person with any time to spare. And in his final year, a project called COMET, which sets out to measure what makes a program good, and finds an answer nobody in the department wants. Warm, exact and very funny about queues, paperwork and the specific terror of a written exam on a practical subject, SEB533 is a novel about the last generation trained to get it right first time, because the machine would not let them try twice. *By the author of the Pondlife novels.*