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What happened to me?
Article 11
My Journey Into the World of Sportsbook Software
by Ian Sherrington
September 2025
Series – The Online Gambling Industry
Introduction
In 1983 I met a man who changed my life. That man was Detlef Train, a friendly fellow and totally focused on one thing – bookmaking.
Meeting him was a chance event, but it would lead me to ultimately write the software that would run the world’s first internet sportsbook.
Detlef Train
But… before I go on a writing rampage and fully tell the story of Intertops, I need to pad it out a bit…
So, first, I’m attempting to recall just what happened to me before I met Detlef, and work out how I became the guy that ended up writing the Intertops sportsbook system.
This is a tiny bit of a ramble, so be warned.
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Boys will be boys
Early Days
My parents were both clever, busy and quite progressive. They embraced change and were always studying something or other – they both gained Open University degrees while my little sister and I were still – little.
My Mum, being a teacher, liked to teach us stuff and my Dad being a computer engineer in the days of punch cards and paper tape, would often bring back home old bits of computers for me to toy with. Broken bits of computer such as a control panel for a tape deck were a fascination. And yes, I did have ‘normal’ toys too.
As a near teen lad, I was also lucky to have had a few really nerdy mates. We would hang out at the local radio amateur club and electronic dump shops. I got to know how to solder stuff which was a liability on reflection…
Out with the old
Meanwhile, in the early 1970’s, the times were a’ changing. With the solid-state age of colour TVs upon us, citizens upgraded their old valve driven TVs and radios by their millions. The old ones were literally given away. This was a field day for my mates and I. We would attempt to see if we could ‘repurpose’ these no longer loved TVs and radios just to see if we could.
After dragging these (in my mind) beautiful but unfashionable heavy hunks of wood, metal and glass to our homes, we built some dodgy radio transmitters with which we could talk (no doubt a tad illegally) to one another and we learned a lot – and especially we gained a painful respect for electricity.
The Colour TV Generation
TVs and radios were at the time expensive items, but owning a trendy one was necessary to keep up with the Joneses. An average TV set then could cost an average salaried worker around 4% of their annual salary. Nowadays it is around 0.8%.
After a long and tortuous technical journey, The BBC started the first UK colour TV service in 1967 with a BBC2 live broadcast from the Wimbledon tennis championship. the service was initially quite limited to London, the South East and parts of the Midlands.
For the early adopters, it was then quite a palaver to set up and maintain an early colour TV. But, it was so worth it.
However, instead of purchasing a TV or radio outright, many people chose to rent one instead.
The advantage to this was not only that you didn’t need to fork out the purchase price but also your got your TV installed and upgraded for free as new technologies appeared.
A big old relay – Wikipedia
The Relay Is The Building Block
One of the more intriguing bits of old electronics I picked up along the way were some old Relays. These relays were pretty simple electric switches, but combined together, they form the basis of everything.
Relays Explained
A relay in operation – Wikipedia
On my learning journey, I worked out that by looping power from a switched circuit into the primary circuit of the relay, the relay would stay on – even after power from the original source was lost. Then the relay could be reset by removing the power from the second circuit with a second relay. The circuit could operate as a push button light switch: it sets the relay on, and it stays on, until it is reset.
Seems simple enough. So, what did I do with this newly gained knowledge? My earliest gambling instincts kicked in – I created a Wheel Of Fortune.
The Wheel Of Fortune worked out well
The Wheel Of Fortune
To create a Wheel Of Fortune, I used my newly acquired knowledge and cobbled together a bunch of doorbell buttons, relays, batteries and lights on a 1m2 piece of plywood along with a spinning pointer.
The idea was that I would make a ‘wheel’, divided into 8 coloured sections, each with a doorbell button driving a relay and a light. The idea is that you predict the section where, after spinning, the pointer points to.
One could place one’s bet by pressing a doorbell button which then powered the relay and lit the corresponding light. The light remained lit after the doorbell button was released because of the relay loopback. Once the pointer was spun and winners paid, the lights were reset by the operator by activating another relay that breaks the power to the betting relays. And off we go again.
At this time, I was a member of the local Boy Scouts. A hopeless scout, but nevertheless I somehow managed to convince the elders that it would be a good idea to provide gambling services featuring my wheel of fortune at the upcoming local Church Fete – a yearly event held in the Vicars garden with lots of entertaining stalls to raise money for the church. We set up the wheel of fortune and worked out some favourable payout odds. It went well and amazingly we got away with it.
A Logic Tutor PCB.
Connect the pins and a battery and see what happens.
The Logic Tutor
At the local radio electronics shop, there was always a treasure trove of old dumped second-hand electronics stuff to rummage through. One of the things I came across was a Logic Tutor, which consisted of an A5 sized printed circuit board with a bunch of integrated circuits (ICs) and 4 red LEDs.
A Logic Tutor Explained
Essentially, a Logic Tutor is a printed circuit board dotted with LEDs and populated by a collection of 7400 series integrated circuits—classic chips that form the backbone of basic logic operations like AND, OR, NOT, NAND, and NOR.
Each LED acts as a visual indicator, lighting up to show the result of a particular logic function or circuit arrangement.
On the Tutor, you can wire up switches and inputs to the various gates—experimenting hands-on with how combinations of ones and zeros (high and low voltages) move through the circuits. Pressing a button might send a logical ‘high’ to one gate, while flicking a switch might introduce a ‘low’ elsewhere.
The 7400 chips process these signals according to their logical rules, and the output is instantly displayed by the LEDs. You can see in real time how a truth table unfolds, or how flipping a single input changes the outcome.
This makes it easy to build and test simple adders, flip-flops and control circuits.
We learned quickly. There were little pins connecting to the ICs and you could simply connect the pins together with jumper wires (which we never had enough of) and create complex logic circuits.
Then there was a ‘Clock’ – an IC that was also housed on the Logic Tutor board. This IC could be configured to create a sequence of 1’s and 0’s sequences over time. So you could drive the logic circuit with different states. The best thing I created with the Logic Tutor was a traffic light sequence using 3 LEDs to represent the Red amber Green sequence.
All fun and I learned the basics of logic. Check our Mr Boole below for more information on Logic representation.
George Boole, the father of Logic
George Boole
Logically speaking, something is either TRUE or FALSE. George Boole developed Boolean logic in the mid-1800s as part of his effort to mathematically formalize human reasoning.
His goal wasn’t to build circuits or computers (they didn’t exist yet) but to create a universal system of logic that could represent logical statements using algebra.
Here’s why he did it:
- Unify logic and mathematics: Boole wanted to show that logic could be treated like algebra, with symbols and operations.
- Model thought processes: He believed reasoning could be expressed in equations, helping explain how the human mind works.
- Advance philosophy and logic: At the time, logic was more philosophical. Boole’s work made it symbolic and formal, laying foundations for modern logic and computer science.
His 1854 book, The Laws of Thought, he conceived his new form of algebra, which became known as Boolean Logic – essential for designing digital circuits and computers.
Boolean Logic is a system of algebra used to represent logical operations. It uses binary values—true (1) and false (0)—to represent logical relationships. The basic operations are:
- AND (both inputs must be true)
- OR (either input can be true)
- NOT (inverts the input)
Boole himself had no idea his ideas would eventually power the entire digital age and by the 1970s, the digital revolution was well underway.
And actually, this series of videos explains it all.
If only we had this back in the day.
Radio Club sponsored the tobacco industry
Radio Club
Located down a less well travelled corridor of a local school was what appeared at first sniff to be some sort of smoke house. But, rather than kippers, this smoke house was habituated by a group of nicotine addicted radio amateurs who housed both themselves and their equipment in this small, windowless room.
As the local radio amateurs club, the ‘Hams’ met frequently to have a beer and to chat with the world using their mystical radio transmitters and receivers and – apparently – to pursue their mission of hardening the lungs of the club’s somewhat younger members.
Arriving home after Radio Club frequently caused parental concern, reeking as a I did of stale fags and beer. I thought it was normal. My non-smoking parents thought not, so no more Radio Club.
Anyways, what I got out of that experience, apart from my first nicotine addiction, was a basic understanding of radio waves and that one could, with the right equipment and good conditions, communicate with other Radio Hams in far flung romantic places such as Australia – there is a whole wide world out there!
Tony Hancock’s classic “The Radio Ham” summed it up rather well.
“The Radio Ham” was first broadcast on 15 June 1961. Written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson.
1930’s Bakelite Telephone
The School Telephone System
My mate John lived in a huge house which was filled to the brim with what can best be called salvaged goods. It turned out that John’s parents were compulsive auction attendees and came home with all sorts of random stuff including, interestingly, 25 old classic Post Office telephones.
These old salvaged telephones were beautifully engineered electro-mechanical marvels that consisted of more than 200 precision components.
Check out James May’s video that shows you an old telephone’s components, what they did and how they fitted together.
So the old telephones were surplus to requirements. But our ingenious John worked out how to make the phones work and could connect them together. So we built a telephone exchange in his house and, as the exchange operator, one could answer calls from extension phones and connect extensions together.
We scaled it up. We installed the telephone system throughout our junior school – probably not with anyone’s permission. We took turns at being the operator connecting calls from the extensions located in the classrooms.
A big success in terms of call volume, but the telephone system sustained heavy abuse from the local troglodytes. We were soon requested by our Headmaster, in not so subtle terms, to remove the telephone system from the school and return it to whence came.
So. that was the end of that episode and I had learned a hard fact: Your services, especially free ones, will always be abused by the public wherever possible. Be security paranoid!
At this time, Trimphones were in, but not DTMF (tone dialing) just yet – rotary dialling was still the norm.
Compared to their elder brothers, Trimphones exuded the 70’s look and feel.
One communicated with PDP-11 via a Teletype.
The School Computer
What was this I spotted? For some reason, the school I was choosing to attend occasionally, had installed a computer teletype terminal in the Janitor’s room of all places.
The teletype terminal was connected to the local college’s Digital PDP-11 minicomputer by using a dial-up modem.
The PDP-11 Minicomputer
The PDP-11 Minicomputer looked cool too
The PDP-11 was a groundbreaking family of 16-bit minicomputers produced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) between 1970 and the 1990s. It is one of the most influential computers in computing history. Why was that you may well ask?
Early versions of UNIX were developed on a PDP-11 at Bell Labs. Much of UNIX’s design reflects the PDP-11 architecture. PDP 11s became a mainstay in universities and research labs and were widely used in labs, factories, and embedded systems Many software tools and programming languages (like C) matured on PDP-11s.
After bravely brandishing a reel of paper tape that my Dad had given me, I managed to convince the powers that were to allow me access to the teletype, so I could see what was on the paper tape.
I was given instructions on how to connect it up. After dialing up the college number, inserting the handset into the acoustic coupler, the Teletype connected and sprung into life. I could login and create some programs using a programming language called BASIC.
Obviously I had no idea what I was doing and never could read anything off the paper tape. No one at the school seemed to have any idea either. So I set about learning what I could – especially the BASIC programming language. Luckily for me, my Dad had some manuals that described BASIC programming, and I could use those to get going.
After gaining some experience with BASIC, my gambling instincts kicked in once again – I set about creating a program that would prove to be quite profitable.
Something like that..
Honest Ian
Little did I know, but as a child exposed to sports and, intriguingly, odds – horse racing and football on TV was accompanied by odds, dividends, payout etc – I liked the idea of Bookmaking and thought I could best employ the school computer to run a small bookmaking operation.
I wrote a program that could manage betting accounts, accept and process bets and print out customer statements and betting slips. Customers could fill in the slip and return with their stake, the details of which were entered into the program. After the results were known, the bets were processed and the customer accounts updated.
I became known as “Honest Ian” . My reputation spread. However, my customer base (schoolmates) was rapidly expanding and was becoming a full-time occupation. Printing more and more statements and slips took longer and longer and eventually the whole operation was caught mid print run and shut down by the Head of Mathematics during a chance visit.
I was sent to the Headmaster. I was banned from the computer. Life seemed over. However, to his eternal credit, our Headmaster, after punishing me severely, casually inquired as to the odds I was offering on Norwich City that week? It was a funny moment and a relief he decided to disregard my profits and did not report me to the police.
What did I learn from this? Don’t get greedy and over trade! If you don’t have the resources to handle an increase in business in a proper and timely manner, you could become a victim of your own success.
Each mainframe needed a team of operators to tend its needs
Computer Operator
After school, and, when computers were still huge and required small town sized power stations to operate, I started a career as a Computer Operator at a large insurance company in my home town of Norwich, UK.
It was 1979 and the company had many huge mainframe computers and employed 3 shifts of 15 operational staff to provide 24 hours service during the weekdays with occasionally some welcome overtime on weekends.
The mainframes were made by ICL and IBM. More info here
Initially, my main task was to clean things like 14 tape decks and 6 printers and to fetch and return tapes. After gaining some knowledge (and trust), I was able to run a mainframe on my own and I became an integral part of the system.
The Printer Room
Great team mates and it was a great job. Physically it was quite demanding as you were running about carrying armfuls of tapes and boxes of paper all night, but you also needed a brain. The actual work the mainframe carried out was a sort of puzzle. As an operator, you are presented with multiple sets of tasks or ‘Jobs’ as they were known.
A job physically consisted of a set of punch cards prefaced by a job description card which gave us all the information we needed to properly sequence the job. When you wanted to run a job, you simply fed the punch cards into the card reader and the job would start up. Each job step required things like certain tapes, exchangeable disks or a printer with a certain type of paper loaded.
The idea was to get through as many of these jobs as possible while employing your limited resources – that is your tape decks, disk drives and printers – in the most efficient manner possible.
Teletypes were the way to communicate
The Teletype was how the computer ‘talked’ to you. The mainframe would type messages to draw your attention to something. If you want to talk to the mainframe and enter a command for it to do something, then you had to press a button first to interrupt the message flow. Once the typing stopped, you could type your command and the computer responded accordingly.
The mainframes were (thankfully) quite slow, and things tended to take a while, so you had time to plan ahead and get things ready ahead of time.
Things were becoming clearer, but what all these jobs actually did was still a mystery to me.
It starts with paper and pen
Proper Programming
To further my career, I realised that I needed to understand programming. To do that, I enrolled at the local college (where the PDP-11 was the unwitting host to my earlier school bookmaking venture) and I followed a COBOL programming course.
COBOL
COBOL was developed in 1959 by a committee called CODASYL (Conference on Data Systems Languages). It was commissioned by the US Department of Defense, which wanted a standardized language for business data processing.
Grace Hopper, a pioneer of computer programming, played a significant role in its conceptual foundations, especially in advocating for English-like syntax.
Grace Hopper
Grace Hopper (1906 – 1992) was a U.S. Navy rear admiral, computer scientist, and pioneer of modern programming.
She served in the U.S. Navy and retired as a Rear Admiral. She was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer during World War II.
She’s often credited with popularizing the term “debugging” after she and her team found an actual moth causing a malfunction in a computer relay in 1947.
The actual first computer bug!
She received over 40 honourary degrees, the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, and posthumously the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. The U.S. Navy also named a guided-missile destroyer, the USS Hopper, in her honour.
Businesses quickly adopted COBOL for applications involving payroll, accounting, inventory, and banking. It emphasized readability, using English-like syntax to make programs understandable by non-programmers too.
COBOL was designed to work with punch cards and therefore has some strict limitations. You get 80 columns to work with which corresponds to the 80 columns of a standard Hollerith punch card. You have to put the right information in the right area on the card.
| Positions | Field | Description |
| 1-6 | Column Numbers | Reserved for line numbers. |
| 7 | Indicator | It can have Asterisk (*) indicating comments, Hyphen (-) indicating continuation and Slash ( / ) indicating form feed. |
| 8-11 | Area A | All COBOL divisions, sections, paragraphs and some special entries must begin in Area A. |
| 12-72 | Area B | All COBOL statements must begin in area B. |
| 73-80 | Identification Area | It can be used as needed by the programmer. |
Firstly, one would write one’s program using a paper COBOL coding sheet which is relatively easy to edit and amend with a pencil and a rubber (eraser!). After that, you needed to physically create a punch card for each line of code. These you had to manually punch using a punch card machine. Each character you typed on the keyboard would be printed and the right holes were punched out of the card by the unforgiving machine – there was no backspace! Every character and each indent and zone whatnot needed to be perfection.
Then, having satisfied oneself that there can be no errors, one would take the precious stack of punch cards to the computer room, not drop it on the way and submit the cards as a job to the operator. Your little set of punch cards were then put in a huge queue of jobs (presumably from the other students) and the operators would run your job as and when they decided.
Typically this took a week and you got the results (in the form of a printout along with your original punch cards) by the following class – only to discover that you frustratingly missed a full stop and then would have to go through the whole arduous process again.
Fun days, but things would soon get a lot easier.
Punch Card Programming explained very well here
An example of the legendary IBM 3278 VDU
VDUs
Technology progressed rapidly. Luckily for me as it turned out, my evening class conflicted with my evening shift (in rotation, I did one week of nights, then a week of evenings and a week of days) so the company kindly put me on an internal programmer training course instead of the evening class.
This was much better! Instead of punch cards, I was given access to the company’s new IBM mainframe using a Visual Display Unit and my own Login. Wonderment!
COBOL programming became a breeze. Writing, editing, compiling and whatnot was just so much easier using a keyboard and a screen. Instead of a weeks turn around, we were now compiling COBOL programs on-demand. A tad more efficient I would say.
Job controlling was like conducting
Off Shift
After 3 years of shift work and having permanently disturbed my sleep patterns, I found myself promoted to an off-shift position and gained the title of ‘Job Controller’. It was only then that I started to get an idea of what was actually going on in this business.
Actually, my job as Job Controller was purely administrative – basically I ran a manual scheduling system that coordinated the dates and times of all the mainframe Jobs with the batch inputs from the source of all data – DP-IP, (more on that later). A task I found a nice challenge to program. I used COBOL and a VSAM database to create JIM – Job Initialization Management – and I effectively eliminated my own job.
My boss was not amused. He asked me to quietly shelve JIM and not to mention him again. I think he was worried about his job as my supervisor too…
To help quench my programming thirst, my boss gave me the opportunity to assist with the programming of a mini-computer that was in use by an interesting department known as the Data Processing – Input Department or DP-IP.
Some of the Data Entry Clerks
DP-IP
DP-IP as it was known was a very important department and consisted of around 80 data entry clerks, all of whom were ladies. Their job was to transfer data on hand-written forms into the mini computer. Their jobs were at the core of the company’s operations.
In those days the company operated a series of branch offices all around the country. In order to do business, customers would interact with branch staff either directly or via agents to create insurance policies or to update existing ones.
Policy data was written by hand onto forms that had data fields of various types where the data was entered. It was these forms that would be batched up and then sent on to the DP-IP Department for processing.
The form data would be typed in by the data entry clerk and the data would ultimately end up onto magnetic tapes – small ones – which would then be transported to the mainframe operators ready for use as input data to the large insurance programs that were run over night.
10 Keys per Second…
Typing accuracy and speed were vital. In order to ensure validity, the form data was typed in twice, firstly by one data entry clerk and then again by a second clerk as verification. If a discrepancy was detected, then it is either the fault of the first clerk or the second clerk. When double checked, the discrepancy is fixed and then the cause is noted.
Furthermore, to encourage data entry clerks to be both accurate and speedy, they were actually paid a salary based on the number of keystrokes they made in a day. Each clerk had a keystroke balance and so the faster they typed, the more they were paid!
However, to ensure accuracy, discrepancy allocation would debit the perpetrator a certain number of key strokes and credit them to the correct clerk’s balance. Basically, don’t make mistakes as it will cost you. I would be a pauper.
My task was to create a program that would work out how many keystrokes per second each data entry clerk actually typed. Then we could work out who was the fastest data entry clerk in the company. Sounds fun!
After getting to grips with how the data input mini-computer thingy worked and I could login and create a program, it was not too hard to work out the keystrokes per second by using total data length as keystrokes divided by the batch time and applying penalties and credits for verification errors.
All the clerks could type fast that was for sure – especially the lady who was actually the fastest data entry clerk. She could accurately type at an amazing 10 keys per second! I kid you not. And she could do that while holding a conversation. Holidays in the sun mate.
Amsterdam was eye-opening
Hitchhiking and Foreign Delights
In the late1970s I thought it was a cool thing to go hitchhiking. My school mates had mostly left their home town and courageously enrolled at universities somewhere otherwise. I was still in Norwich.
Visiting my mate Chris, who had somehow qualified to go to St Andrews University in Scotland, seemed like a good idea. Paying for a train ticket was not. So I decided to hitchhike from Norwich in Norfolk to St Andrews in Fife, a mere 400 miles or so,
This was doable in those days. Hitchhiking was quite a common thing – my Dad would often pick a hitchhiker up – each time returning the favour I think.
St Andrews proved to be quite a trek and I had many an interesting experience along the way. I was bowled over by the kindness of complete strangers who would not only pick you up, but would quite often go out of their way to set you down at a good spot, or would even buy you lunch. These people made such an impression.
One of the best moments of the trip was being given a lift by a school teacher in an open-top Morris Minor from Newcastle to Edinburgh. He chose the Carter Bar route, which is stunning. A decent lunch topped off with a couple of pints of a beers called Vaux made the whole trip.
After this adventure, I went on a few more hitchhiking trips to wherever-we-end-up in Europe. After an especially eye-opening Amsterdam visit, I had seen my future, and, unfortunately, it was not going to be in Norwich.
Prepare to adjust your vocal chords
Qualify or Die
My employment at the insurance company had taught me a lot and I had made good friends there. I had learned so much about traditional data processing at this company and by now computing was in my blood.
However, I realized that, having left school and started working straight away, I was totally lacking in the qualifications department. I was going to find it hard to progress without a degree or two.
Also, my eye-opening Amsterdam visit had led me to ask the question, how do I get to live here?
Obviously, you’d primarily need a job. But to earn decent money and despite the fact that the Dutch apparently all speak English, in those days you needed to speak Dutch in the workplace, or at the very least, have a good qualification.
Well, after purchasing a ‘How to Speak Dutch’ book, I soon realized the alternative, qualification route was the only realistic option – Dutch is so hard!
So, I had to get some form of qualification from somewhere but how? I had left school with not a lot to shout about and so blagging my way in somewhere was the only real option.
I was lucky. South Bank Polytechnic (in those days) in London would accept me as a student on their Higher National Diploma course. It was a 2 year course, not quite a degree but perfectly good enough.
I loved living in London
London
Quitting my well-paid job at the insurance company, moving to London and learning to live off a student grant was not an easy or, apparently, a possible adjustment. I was so broke!
However, I managed to get myself some part-time work as a computer operator through an agency that would send me out to various IBM mainframes around London. Contact work was very lucrative and the welcomed income saved my financial hide.
Usually, I would work a night shift and would (usually) attend lectures during the day, sleeping when I could. Somehow I managed to combine the two.
Wilton Road, Pimlico was where it all began. Google Street View
Intertops
At the point where I was about 1 year into my studies at South Bank and earning a decent crust on the side with the contracting work. I was living in Pimlico, in a 2 bedroom apartment which my girlfriend and I shared with another couple who were friends of ours.
We had a rule. We were old enough to know that we would not always get along – sharing a cramped apartment between 4 feisty students was bound to be trouble – so we came up with some Risk Mitigation.
We agreed that if harsh words were spoken, then we all had to go to the Pub and the speaker of those harsh words was to buy a round of drinks. We then remembered that we are all friends again. Everyone is a winner.
It was one of those evenings. We’d had a minor tiff in the apartment and down the pub we went. After a few pints, things were becoming convivial between us once again. The evening was warming up. It was at this point that my life would change irrevocably.
Detlef Train. Sadly missed.
A friendly stranger on the next table started to talk to me. He was German and his English was pretty bad. Luckily, I had picked up some basic German at school and I could communicate somewhat. I struggled of course, but from what I understood this stranger was saying was that he was in London to get a bookmaker’s license. And he was looking for somewhere to stay. Interesting!
This man was Detlef Train. Fresh out of the German army and a man with a plan. Detlef was inspired by sports betting and wanted a piece of the action. He saw the potential that his home German market (where betting was illegal), would be serviceable by post and by telephone from a London based location.
So Detlef decided to set up his bookmaking operation in the apartment above ours – it happened to be available. Suddenly, we had a real Bookmaker running his business above our heads. This was fascinating.
There’s a field limit eh?
How Not To Do IT
Detlef turned out to be a workaholic and for good reason. His whole operation depended on the timely delivery of betting coupons mailed from London to his customers in Germany. Which, after being filled in, were posted back to London again. Everything had to run like clockwork.
To carry out his business, Detlef faced a number of administrative issues, which he initially solved using handwritten accounts, typeset duplicated coupons and a mailing machine.
The problem was, of course, scalability. His business was growing rapidly and he simply could not keep up by himself. So, with help from one of his old school friends, Detlef set forth on his first experience with computer based data processing. As it soon become obvious, the first attempt at automating the Intertops business process, became an example of How Not To Do IT.
The knowledgeable friend had purchased a PC and had chosen a product called FLEX. This provided a simple database to manage the customer payments, balances and their bets. A reasonable approach on the surface and after running for a few months, it seemed to be working out. However, it’s all about the fundamental design.
Normally a database would be organized up as interrelated data, neatly stored in many related tables. The trouble was that our friend had decided to create only a single table to store everything. This was quite a feat. He had created only one record for each customer and, each week, he appended each customer record with new fields to store the bet details of that week. Seriously.
Sooner or later, he was going to reach a field limit and this awful design was going to end in disaster.
My first proper bookmaking system
To The Rescue
Meanwhile, having completed my studies at South Bank Polytechnic, (and passed amazingly), the contacts I had made at the contract agencies proved very useful. I started on an amazing contract in The Netherlands. and I had achieved a lifetime goal.
However, on a trip back to London, I visited Detlef at the Intertops office, to check out the latest developments and things seemed a bit iffy. Detlef proudly showed me his new FLEX ‘database’ and I was initially quite impressed. It looked ok, but because of one of it’s many design flaws, it would soon become apparent that it was virtually unusable.
By this time, Intertops was doing great and the business was responsible for millions of German Marks held in deposit on thousands of customer accounts – all managed on the new system. After a brief technical investigation, it didn’t look too encouraging. Unfortunately, when a customer’s record was looked up on the new system, the screen became filled with basic data in one long unformatted string. To get to the customer’s last bet involved scrolling down about 20 pages to show the end of the string. Very clumsy.
So, at this time I became aware of the main issue. For my own interest, I looked up what was the maximum number of fields a FLEX record could actually handle. It turned out that it’s not that many. I calculated that, adding fields each week in the way they did, would, within 2 months, breach the FLEX field limit. All would be lost.
I offered to assist of course. I took a backup of the FLEX stuff back to The Netherlands, borrowed an IBM PC, actually purchased the legendary Ashton Tate dBase III+ database system and started designing a proper database for Intertops.
After a month or so, I had cobbled together a nice new system for Intertops and restored the live data to the new database. All went ok – in the end – and Intertops continued doing business. And I had gained my first insight into how a real bookmaker works.
Over the following decade or so, I would continue to develop the system. It became quite large and complex. Ultimately I would rewrite the whole thing in preparation to go online as the first online internet sportsbook. And that is the next story…
The lucky lad
Conclusion
I was a lucky lad. A combination of encouraging parents, access to heaps of old electronic junk and a job that gave me hands-on experience that would not be so easy to come by these days.
I gained fundamental knowledge of logic and basic programming that I put to good use in terms of profitable gambling applications.
My experience, qualification and my hitchhiking experiences enabled me to relocate to The Netherlands in 1985. I had a decent full time job there and at the same time I continued to develop the Intertops system as a labour of love, or perhaps better termed as an addiction.
Intertops fared well and ultimately, managing the Intertops system would become my full time job – but that would only happen when we took the decision to create the online sportsbook. That would be in 1994 and then the story really begins…
Thanks for reading so far!
