The Watchmaker’s Art

by Philip Rankin, Director, Marine Risk Management

When I first learned to drive a car, at the same time I learned all there was to know about the car’s workings. I reduced a car bought for £15 to its component parts and reassembled it entirely. Twenty years on, when I look under the hood of a car of today, I recoil, baffled by new boxes and devices whose purposes are unclear and whose maintenance is strictly in the hands of highly-equipped professionals.

The same reflection applies to computers – compressed over a much shorter evolutionary scale. I could understand the workings of good old Basic programming language, but Microsoft Windows 95 is an impenetrable mystery.

And yet things – cars, computers – still persist in going wrong. The difference today is that when things go wrong, I (and many like me I am sure) are helpless to do anything about it.

This is only an excerpt of The Watchmaker’s Art

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