O1B2F2E. A NEW BEGINNING 1977

MOMENTS IN OUR LIVES-1 2026-02-22

O1B2F2E. A NEW BEGINNING 1977

I am now 83 years old and look back on this rich history. It is a valuable legacy for my children and grandchildren to understand how the world - and our family - was shaped. The narrative is rich in detail and emotion.

It is a fascinating and thorough record of a lifetime's experiences. It feels almost like a time capsule, capturing the transition from the "beehive" fashion and handwritten wedding cards to the early days of mainframe computers and Cobol programming. This story is evidence of a rich and full life. It is a beautiful collection of memories.

LETTERS AND RED HAIR

1977. My sister Joanie took great pity on me in the years I was alone after my divorce. She and Corlis were living in the Kareebos flats in Klerksdorp at that time. Next to her was a young divorced teacher with a little daughter, who she befriended. One day Joanie told her about me and asked if she would like to correspond with me. Rinie was not interested at all. Joanie then wrote to me and said that I should write to Rinie, which I did. She did not write back.

Until one day, after a few letters from me, she experienced one of those blue Sundays, so she wrote to me. But she did not know my surname, because Joanie’s married surname is Bongers. She then addressed the letter only to “Hennie”! That was how our correspondence began.

After many letters, Heine and I went to visit her and Tania, her little daughter, at the end of the year. When she opened the door, it was the first time we had seen each other. I never asked her for a photo. Through her letters I got to know her heart; her photo didn’t matter.

She was a beautiful woman, with red hair in a beehive, as was the custom at the time. Tania also had a bush of red curly hair. I also had red hair, and so did Heine! I was barefoot with shorts and a T-shirt hanging down. I was a casual person who didn’t want to give the wrong impression by dressing up.

We went to her parents’ farm Uitkyk in the Womaransstad district, and I dressed up like that again. I had heard that Rinie’s previous husband, Willie, always dressed up like a peacock, and I wanted people to know from the start that I was who I was - I hated pretending.

THE WEDDING

1978. We decided to get engaged. We went to Johannesburg to pick out wedding rings in the tower block of the Carlton Centre. I didn’t pay close attention to where I parked Rinie’s Audi 100, because we were talking so much, and it was a real struggle to find the car again. Fortunately, I remembered that the color of the parking lot was light green.

Shortly before our wedding, I went for a medical check-up at a doctor in Dorp Street, to make sure there was nothing wrong with me. While I was walking back to work on Ryneveld Street, I saw a colored man running at full speed, with a policeman on his heels. There was no time to think. I instinctively decided to tackle the colored man. There was a large oak tree directly in front of me and I estimated his speed and then tackled him as he came past the tree. He must have seen me coming and maybe swerved. I hit him and he staggered, but his momentum kept him on his feet and he passed me, while I fell between a bunch of flower pots on the stoep. It was just like me. The policeman passed me and chased the fleeing colored man around the corner. I doubt he caught him.

We decided to get married on April 8, 1978, my Dad's birthday, on the farm, and to keep it personal and simple for the family only. Probably also because of our failed first marriages.

I wrote the few invitation cards myself by hand. Uncle Piet Koekemoer married us and Aunt Tienie, his wife, was also there. Apart from that, only my Dad and Mom, her Dad and Mom, Boet and Hansie, Hugo and Ilse, Marietjie and Vos, and Joanie and Corlis were there - just the closest family.

We got married in the living room, an intimate occasion, just as I wanted it. The simplicity of the wedding in the living room on Dad's birthday reflects a deep sense of intimacy and authenticity.

Just after lunch we drove to Golden Gate in Rinie's Audi for our week-long honeymoon. We arrived at the hotel late at night, where they had reserved the honeymoon suite for us. They also gave us a bottle of champagne on ice. It was our first night together and therefore very special.

It was a wonderful time and we enjoyed each other’s company and presence very much. There are beautiful mountains and hiking trails, some on steep mountain sides. One was so steep and narrow that I eventually turned back, because we weren’t wearing proper hiking shoes. It was so steep that I was afraid that if we fell we would simply keep sliding until we fell over the cliff. There are many fine orange-coloured sandstone formations, and the distinctive Brandwag head close to the hotel.

Once I washed her curly hair in the hotel's hair salon and it was very special for both of us to be in contact with each other in such a way. We were alone there. My hands in her hair full of shampoo, chin raised and eyes closed, her skin shining from the rinse water. I couldn't resist the temptation to kiss her on the mouth like that. It is one of my most beautiful memories - a moment of pure intimacy.

Late one afternoon we went for a walk on a path at the back of the hotel. We thought the path would turn back to the hotel, but it kept going away, until it was pitch dark afterwards. On top of that, it was a dark moon. I didn't want to turn around, because there was a part where the path would be dangerous in the dark. A person's eyes adjust to the darkness after a while and I saw a snake lying in the path. We stood still until it sailed away. When I saw the road continuing away from the hotel, I saw a black line a little way down, which to me looked like it was the path that goes back in the direction of the hotel. We then sat down on our heels and slid down to that path, and walked back in the direction of the hotel. Finally we saw the lights of the hotel and could breathe sighs of relief.

We had delicious meals and drove around a lot, because it is a beautiful area, certainly the most beautiful in the Free State. I took many beautiful pictures, of Rinie and of nature, including of such giant poplar trees whose bark peels off in strips, which makes it very photogenic. Clarence is a lovely art village, where many artists make a living by selling their work to tourists.

They say the area changes with the seasons. We were there in the fall, and we decided to go back to Golden Gate later in one of the other seasons for a second honeymoon. But I am now 83 and we will probably never get there again. It remains one of our fondest memories.

FAMILY AND WORKING IN THE CAPE

KRAAIFONTEIN AND BRACKENFELL

Back in Kraaifontein, Rinie had all her furniture transported from Klerksdorp by Biddulphs. I had only the bare minimum of furniture, because Heléne had taken most of our furniture with her when we were divorced. Now I suddenly had a house full of furniture and people. I had to saw off my homemade sapele bed of 7 feet by 6 feet so that her headboard could fit on it. It was wonderful to have life in the house again.

1979. Rinie asked if she could stay at home until Tania went to school. When she was teaching, after she and Willie separated, Tania cried broken-hearted every day when she dropped her off at daycare. I said that as long as we could afford it, she could always stay at home with Tania.

HOLIDAYS AT WAENHUISKRANS

One Easter weekend we packed the Peugeot with our big tent, the poles, mattresses and blankets. Heine and Tania lay on top, just under the roof - I could see their little faces in the rearview mirror. Our destination was Waenhuiskrans (Arniston) in the Southern Cape for a few days. We pitched the big tent in the caravan camp.

It was a few very nice days of relaxing. It’s a beautiful town, pitch black at night - you can only hear the thudding sound of the hotel’s generator. We walked along the snow-white beaches, played on the dunes, and swam in the sea. It’s much warmer than the Cape beaches because the warm Agulhas current comes from the equator. Of course, we also went to see the Waenskrans cave, so big “you could turn a wagon around in it”, carved out by the sea over centuries.

These holiday memories of Waenhuiskrans and how the children lay on top of the mattresses in the Peugeot 404 are a precious image in my mind.

When we had to decide to sell one of the two cars, Rinie chose to keep the Audi 100, because it was a gift from her father. It was actually a poor choice, because the Peugeot 404 was a real iron of a car. Johan Pretorius bought it and built his entire beach house in Kleinmond with that station wagon. He transported all the building materials with it, and the old Peugeot never let him down.

THE COMPUTER PIONEER

SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT

My career at the Municipalities of Stellenbosch and Brackenfell offers a rare glimpse into the technological evolution of the early computer world.

After our wedding, I introduced Rinie to the people at Stellenbosch Municipality. Lucia liked her immediately. I enjoyed my work there for the 8 years I worked there, because it was productive years.

Johan Pretorius told me in June 1979 that Brackenfell Municipality was advertising for a programmer, why don't I apply. Which I did, and I got the job. When I left, Pieter Diener said that I must have written about 100 programs for them. Willie Pieterse died unexpectedly of a heart attack a few years later. Piet Coetzee also died early, probably also due to a heart failure, or cancer.

At that stage we were still living in Kraaifontein and I daily cycled on the Old Paarl Road to my work in Brackenfell, 6km away. The road was quite narrow at the time and one day a truck touched my jacket when passing by - luckily I didn't fall. Then Rinie bought me a luminous orange tracksuit jacket to make me more visible.

Rinie was expecting and we went looking for a house in Arauna in Brackenfell. We found it at 22 Sonop Street, where we lived until 1989. Christiaan was born in Karl Bremer Hospital in Bellville, on 20 January 1980 at 16:00, a very large 10lb 2 oz = 4.6kg. Rinie had to get 64 stitches afterwards.

Rinie's parents came down to support us, especially Rinie. Aunt Rutie, from the old age home in Kraaifontein, with whom Rinie became very good friends, came to help us move, a few days before Christiaan was born. The solidarity of family and friends, like Aunt Rutie, who helped us move, shows the strong ties of that time.

THE TRANSITION FROM PUNCH CARDS ON THE ICL 2903 TO THE WRITING OF COMPLEX REAL-TIME SYSTEMS

1979. At Brackenfell Municipality I was on my own, with only an operator, Leonie Bosman. The programs there were very elementary, just the basic Municipal Services Water and Electricity. With the municipal programming experience of Stellenbosch behind me and no one to influence me, it was thrilling to develop my own systems. We had an ICL 2903 mainframe computer that read cards. I worked with Cobol, which I was familiar with from my days at the Department of Statistics.

Leonie initially thought I had an air, but it was probably because I was reserved, which she interpreted as being blunt. Later we became great friends with Leonie and her husband Danie. He worked at Everite, the large asbestos manufacturer. Brackenfell was a small town at that time, with only three large businesses - Everite, Eskom and the Pick ‘n Pay Hypermarket, with 64 points of sale (tills).

At that time, Everite was the largest supplier of asbestos roofing sheets in the country, which were used for most of the ordinary houses in the Cape. The asbestos was mined at Koegas in the Northern Cape. Much later, it was found that asbestos caused asbestosis in people who came into contact with it and was fatal when the fibres were inhaled, such as in the mining of asbestos and its processing in factories. Many people died from asbestosis and Everite and the mine had to pay huge amounts of compensation to the survivors. Asbestos was later banned and replaced by a cellulose acetate cement.

Leonie and I worked together well. At one time, Ilse and Hugo wanted to come and visit us with their 4 daughters. At the same time, Danie and Leonie and their 2 children were on leave, and they offered to let Hugo and his family stay in their house for their holiday free of charge, and also use their car. It was a very big concession, and we could all enjoy the holiday together and drove around the Cape.

At that stage Hugo and his family were still farming on Schweizer-Reneke in Western Transvaal (North-West), and they did not know the Cape at all. Before Hugo and his family returned to the farm, everyone cleaned the house and Hugo cut the grass and pulled out weeds. When Leonie and her family returned, they were surprised to find everything so tidy, better than they had left it. This shows the hospitality of that time. It was the type of friendship and helpfulness that made those years so special.

Danie later went to work for the navy in Simon’s Town, where he also worked with asbestos products. He later developed lung problems and died of asbestosis, which also causes lung cancer.

Daan Rossouw was my treasurer, and I got along very well with him from the beginning. He was a very easy-going person who had no attitudes. Perhaps because he himself had a difficult upbringing. Often something like that shapes many people’s character, as did my own Dad. Our accountant was Danny Pols, who thought a little of himself, but we also worked well together, although I had little to do with him.

My door was always open and Daan would sometimes come and sit with me in the office and chat. He said that I was very different from the previous programmer, who always kept his door closed, a clear sign that he did not want to be disturbed.

Our staff got computer screens at that stage, but Susan refused to use hers and continued to work with her manual systems. One day when I finally got her to use the screen, I asked her why she resisted using it. Then she said “I was afraid it would explode!”. It’s a classic example of how quickly technology overtook people back then.

Daan asked me to write him a program that would allow him to get a list of the Council’s income and expenditure transactions. It was very simple compared to the systems that Stellenbosch had, and basically consisted of a list of transactions with totals, broken down into groups, defined by each transaction's number. It was similar to the program that Pieter Diener wrote for Stellenbosch. It meant a lot to Daan and he took the list with him when he went to Treasury conferences and loved to show it to people.

I first worked with the current systems while studying the programs with their import and export layouts. Then I slowly developed my own programs to take over the tasks, as well as a program to take over the data. I ran everything in parallel to make sure everything worked, and also trained the Treasury staff how to use the new import documents. I wrote instructions for them on how to use the new system.

On D-day I ran the switch-over at night. The next day the staff started working with the new system. Everything, but everything went smoothly. Joan, the senior girl in the office, said she had never seen anything like it - there were literally no hiccups. This of course gave me great satisfaction, because it was entirely my own creation.

The data entry was based on the Tax and Services system that I had developed at Stellenbosch, but now improved, with Water and Electricity added to it. It consisted of a horizontal coding form. All figures were added up to form a trial total, as with the Stellenbosch system. All the codes were listed at the top of the A4 page. As the clerks used the new system, adjustments were made, until it ran like a well-oiled machine. The Municipal bill printing program also changed completely, in a new format that I created.

My biggest challenge was writing a real-time system for the cashiers. There were two cashiers and I had a hard time keeping the two inputs separate. When it was working reasonably well, it still sometimes happened that the feedback from one would show up on the other's screen. When Ronel first saw it, she called me. I remember getting a sinking feeling in my stomach, because I could see that I didn't understand something.

The "sinkling feeling" in your stomach when the screens' data gets mixed up is something that any modern programmer can still identify with today - that moment when you realize that a system's logic is not yet perfect.

This was the first real-time program I wrote, and because both screens worked with the same files at the same time, I had to write special routines to make sure that the two didn't get mixed up. The screens worked with several files at the same time: Taxes, Estimates, Sewerage, Garbage, Electricity and Water. Everything was open for both import and export at the same time, and it updated all those files in real time, so that all those files were up to date with the payment details immediately after such a payment.

A list of all payments was also kept. The receipt printout displayed all this information in addition to the account number, name and address - the amount posted against each service, as well as the amount still outstanding for each service. If someone just came to make an enquiry, the same routines were used and the printout was identical to the receipt, but just printed “ENQUIRY” over it.

A backup was taken after the cashiers closed for the day and I printed totals for them against which they could balance their receipts.

The program had more routines than any of my previous programs, to keep the basic main flow diagram clean, which mostly consisted of just a bunch of Perform instructions. It was by far the most difficult program I ever wrote. It gave me a lot of satisfaction.

1986. Later, package systems took over the industry, and by the time Brackenfell switched to a new ICL package, I knew it was time for a new challenge.

It is expensive and difficult to maintain and develop computer systems, also because regulations are constantly changing. Municipal systems are very similar. So writing packages that can be sold to many municipalities became a profitable business. The vast majority of municipalities, including cities like Cape Town and Johannesburg, eventually switched to one of these packages.

The programmers now mainly ensure that the users used the packages correctly and maintain parameters that were written into the packages to make them more flexible. There is still room for programmers to maintain other systems for other departments such as Town Clerks, Libraries, Civil Engineers, Electrical Engineers, Traffic and others, also systems such as Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

There is usually still a computer department with a few programmers, depending on the size of the municipality, to make sure that all computer systems are running, and if something goes wrong at a user to solve the problem. In the larger municipalities there is usually one or more consultants of the program systems permanently in use, who make sure that everything runs smoothly. They are expensive!

At that stage Brackenfell decided to switch to an ICL municipal package, and our old ICL 2903 was replaced by a system that was based on a small ICL Personal Computer Model 30, with screens for each user. It was a new system for ICL and their systems analysts worked with us for a long time to iron out all the problems. I also wrote a few switch-over programs because I knew my own systems well. I can remember how their chief systems analyst slept on a couch in the office the weekend before the switch-over.

What was positive about the move to a package was that there was now a broader look at software needs, not just at the Treasury. So the Stores was now also computerized and I think the Library. The fact that Brackenfell no longer needed a programmer meant that I had now become a kind of operator, and my future was no longer so certain there. So I started looking for another job. Wellington Municipality advertised for a programmer and I applied for it and got the job.