[r-t] Double major principles

[Graham John]

Philip wrote:

> The page is written by Hamish McNaughton - does anyone know
> anything about him?

Hamish was keen on principles when at Manchester in the 70s and produced a
number of compositions for things like Duffield and Original. At that time
the MUGs rang peals of Original Minor to Maximus, ringing the odd-bell peals
on Towerbells and the even-bell peals on handbells. 

In 1973, Hamish let me have a copy of his proving programme (as a card
deck!). It was written in Fortran, and used a hashing algorithm, so was
pretty efficient on the university's ICL mainframe of the day. He later
wrote both a simulator and a proving programme for one of the earliest
commercially available microprocessors, a KIM-1. This is quite amazing when
you realise it had only a four hexadecimal digit display, a loudspeaker, and
an 8-bit processor with 1K of RAM. The proving programme took about 45
minutes to prove a peal, because it had to re-ring the composition from the
beginning as it checked each row, as there was not enough memory even to
store all the rows.

Perhaps we could get him to join ringing-theory. 

Graham