Starting with a brief account of my relationship with Bill Phillips, I propose to tell the story of the origins of the machine in which I was involved with him. We first met among a group of mature ex-service undergraduates at the LSE in 1946. My subject was Economics with subsidiary courses; Bill's was Sociology with Economics as one of the subsidiary courses. I was one year ahead of him in the three-year BA course. Within this group only the barest minimum was discussed about our war experience. Even when Bill and I had developed a close personal relationship, I learnt little about his very varied career except that he had trained as an electrical engineer in New Zealand and that he had been a prisoner of war in a Japanese camp. I shared various social activities with him and I recall that at one stage these were within a quartet with two members of the company of the musical show ‘Bless the Bride’! He was also one of a small group of students (men and women) who walked the footpaths of Surrey at weekends. Bill was certainly no misogynist, nor was he a workaholic.

It gradually became clear that Bill was dissatisfied with Sociology and was becoming increasingly interested in macroeconomics. We had occasional problem-solving sessions, but it was after I had taken up an appointment to the staff of the Department of Economics at Leeds that the crucial exchange took place.