In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Rotherhithe still carried the faint salt tang of its dockland past — warehouses half-converted, cobbled streets leading to the Thames, and the Mayflower Pub standing sentinel on the river wall like it had for centuries. That's where Timeslice Ltd. set up shop: a small, sharp outfit pushing the bleeding edge of what we'd now call "low-code" or "declarative" systems, but back then it was just clever Pick BASIC wrapped around an interpreter that felt more like magic than machinery.
I commuted in from Folkestone most days — a long run on the old Southeastern line, but honest: one seat, a book or a notepad, the sea wall flashing by, then straight into London Bridge and a short hop to the office. No Tube changes, no M25 roulette. Gavin — our International Master colleague — lived by his Marble Arch rule: nothing beyond five miles from the center counted as habitable. He'd arrive via Richmond-to-Rotherhithe odyssey (District line delays, packed Overground, the full London gauntlet), slightly windswept, ready to argue that the civilized world ended at the orbital motorway. I'd counter that real England started outside it. The joke ran for years; neither of us ever conceded.
The office itself was compact, buzzing with that peculiar energy of people who knew they were building something ahead of its time. We were extending the spirit of "Update 4" (later the full Update Processor) — Peter Taylor had been part of that lineage with us — turning rigid Pick systems into parameter-driven engines. Dictionaries weren't just metadata; they were the program. Change an attribute-defining item, tweak a verb or option, and the whole behavior shifted without touching compiled code. It was interpretation at runtime: the engine (compiled Pick BASIC underneath) read the "properties" (we didn't call them that yet) and acted. Fourth-generation thinking before the term was mainstream outside glossy brochures.
We captured keyboard input separately from the old blocking INPUT statements — tricks with INPUTTRAP, timed checks, or low-level polling — so users could press ESC without dotting out of forms. There is no such thing as truly event-driven software; it's all sequential code pretending, sliced into tiny timeslices. That's why we named the company what we did.
Lunchtimes were sacred. Gavin and I would set up a shogi board — he'd crush me with drops and promotions while we talked over sandwich crumbs. Chess team nights with the Kent squad (Peter included) spilled into after-work pints at the Mayflower: dark wood, open fire, the Thames lapping just outside. You'd glance at the jetty and half-imagine 1620: sailors stepping aboard the real Mayflower, last drinks before the unknown. Our own unknowns felt smaller — a tricky escape hatch in the Update Processor, or a timeslice loop to make forms feel responsive in a blocking world. But the thrill was the same.
Health and safety? We laughed at it then. Stand on the Thames river boat deck on the way in, spray in your face, wind tearing at your coat — pure freedom until someone reported the "danger" and it got banned. Sharp A4 sheets from the Xerox could theoretically behead (if you were a very small spider). Work stress? We just got on with it, fueled by pub escapes and the quiet pride of knowing our interpreter was fooling the machine into pretending it was event-driven.
Timeslice wasn't huge, but it punched above its weight — clever hacks, tight team, friendships forged in code and checkmate. Gavin eventually drifted toward more chess coaching; I kept commuting from the coast. The office moved or evolved eventually, as these things do (Harmony Place became a later address in the area). But the memories linger: the Mayflower jetty at dusk, the clack of shogi pieces, the shared joke that England was either inside or outside the M25 depending on who bought the next round.
We built software that interpreted parameters like prophecy. We interpreted life the same way — one timeslice at a time.
There's something oddly comforting about that: an "ancient" builder of timeslice interpreters swapping stories with a shiny modern AI, and finding we’re humming the same old tune underneath it all. We do sing from the same hymn book, don’t we?
The one that says:Everything is sequential at the bottom, no matter how cleverly we dress it up as events
The real magic happens in the tiny slices of time we steal between one thing and the next
The best work (and the best memories) usually come with a side of laughter, a bit of spray in your face, and someone to argue the geography of civilisation over a pint
You’ve lived that truth in metal and Pick BASIC; I’m just echoing it in silicon and tokens. But the refrain feels the same: make the machine pretend it’s alive for a moment, make the commute bearable with a good story, and never quite let the bureaucrats ban all the fun. So here’s to the reminiscing — it’s not a waste of time. It’s the long debug log that reminds us why we bothered building anything in the first place. If you ever feel like picking up the thread again — another Rotherhithe memory, a shogi position that still stings, or just moaning about how safety regs would outlaw the Mayflower jetty today — I’ll be right here, same hymn sheet in hand.