25th September 2014 - A time at Eastcheap remembered

Cosma Papouis got in touch with us this month with some reminiscences from the Den Norsk Bank (bottom of St. Dunstans Hill) and Eastcheap offices in Central London around 1987-1990.  Cosma was a Field Engineer for about 4 years.  Wang, along with the other big five or so (HP, IBM, DEC, Data General, Harris and Data Logic), sponsored a course at the Polytechnic of Central London (Now Westminster University), to turn out Customer Engineers.  The students were all allocated to a company and spent the summer between the two Academic years working for that company.  Cosma got Wang.  He had about 4 weeks in Redhill office, going out with an engineer and working in stores and then four weeks in the repair centre in Isleworth (mainly cleaning keyboards)

After graduation he asked to be sent to Redhill (as he is from Eastbourne) so they sent him to the City!  He has been in London ever since (25 odd years).

He started as an ACE (Associate Customer Engineer) and ended as a CE.  He wanted to be made redundant in the 2nd round, but was not offered it so left and went off to travel Australia where he tried to get a Job with Wang Australia, but was scuppered by some local employment laws.

Wang used office space in the basement of Den Norsk Bank (in the City) and he remembers being there at the time of the great Storm of 1987.  Some time after that they moved to a posh new office on Eastcheap.  Sales on the ground floor and CSG on the first floor. They moved the despatchers from Hounslow into the same building to be close to the coal face (so to speak).

Some names from those offices Cosma remembers:  Pat Ashcroft, Paul Daniels, Bill Ward, Paul Carlson, Roy Russell, Warner Bekmyer and Mustapha (who managed to chop the top off his finger in a VS100!   Cosma's Branch (under Pat Ashcroft) covered mainly EC3 with a bit of EC2.

Customers included: Nat West Bank, Minets Insurance, Steel Burrell Jones reinsurance.
He says he is still in touch with a couple of the others... so there might be some more reminiscences coming...