Process aborted (London)

I worked on two Chinese computer research projects from the mid-80s to the early-90s: a speech recognition and speech synthesis project, and a computer-aided language learning (CALL) project.

For the speech project, we generated the randomised sound samples by selecting a batch and recording them, then sending them over, in a digital form, to another college, our collaboration partner, for analysis and synthesis.  A computer program was written to do the analogue-to-digital conversion, with the conversion of just a few minutes of recording taking ages.

One day, the programmer David was in the equipment room on the other side of the lift foyer from our office when suddenly the clicking and churning stopped, and I got the message on my screen, “Process aborted.”  So I dashed out to fetch David to come and help. 

In the lift foyer was a man standing at the Japanese Department’s notice board on the wall opposite the equipment room, reading the notices.  I charged up to the door of the equipment room, crying out, “David, David, I’ve just had an abortion!”  The back tightened and froze.  I went on, “Would you like to come and have a look?”  This time, the head turned round—very, very slowly.  Words just cannot quite describe the look on his face.  That look got even more interesting when David then rushed out of the equipment room to go with me to have a look.

I later met the man in the lift.  He recognised me as I stepped in, and tried very hard not to look at me, but I could feel his curiosity and perplexity boring into the back of my head as the lift bore us down to the ground floor.