By 1975 Rolls‑Royce had begun sending me on a sequence of courses that culminated in my being licensed by Michael Jackson Systems Limited as a JSP Instructor1 . One moment I was learning structured programming from the man himself; the next I was authorised to teach his method to others.
The instructor role grew quietly alongside my usual technical work. At first it was an occasional duty — the odd week away from the code — but over time more departments realised they needed people who could teach structure rather than merely apply it. I found I enjoyed it.
Alongside JSP, I was also giving PL/I Internals courses. These were designed to help programmers read core dumps — the strange hieroglyphics of 90ECD00C , state vectors, and the internal machinery of the compiler. It felt like archaeology again: peeling back layers, revealing the architecture beneath the surface.
Sometimes I had to fly to Glasgow to lecture. Occasionally I travelled on the Rolls‑Royce Executive Jet — the best‑maintained HS125 in the world. It was a small luxury, but it carried a certain symbolism: the company was willing to fly me across the country so I could teach other engineers how to think more clearly.
Teaching never replaced my technical work. It ran alongside it, like a second thread. One week I would be buried in code; the next I would be standing at a whiteboard explaining how to read a core dump or how to match data structures to a program structure.
And I learned something unexpected: helping other people understand a system is one of the best ways of understanding it yourself1.