Tony Hoepper
QSITE Vice President 1983-1988
QSITE Committee member 1989, 1990
Life member

From Laurie Vogler

I remember going to lots of 'country cabinet' meetings with him, when we used to take the
monthly management committee out to the like of the Gold Coast, Toowoomba, Ipswich
and Caloundra in an attempt to drum up business. Tony was always a great stalwart on
these occasions. Mostly I remember his gutsy yellow Monaro.

Tony worked closely with me when we organised the Inc. to go into CEGQ Inc. He
became the resident constitutional expert and (very usefully) could recite the more arcane
rules concerning agenda and voting at AGMs and the like.

I probably had most to do with Tony when he worked on SMS. Although one often hears
SMS maligned in recent times, I am yet to see a replacement for it. Tony deserves much of
the credit for operationalising and documenting the system, for which the Department did
not give him adequate recognition.

He was a decent, meticulous but generous bloke, who, in his quiet way, did a great deal for
secondary schooling and the use of information technology in education for Queensland
kids.

From Graham Black
Student and teaching colleague

In his professional career, Tony was first and foremost, a classroom teacher.

While a Physics teacher at Kedron High in the late 70’s

….. we bought/acquired one Apple computer, which was good for Space Invaders (Monochrome – Black & White, Green & Black or Orange & Black … switchable at the back of the latest in monitors!) and Zardax, the Bee’s Knees in Word Processing. None of this WYSIWYG – shades of the Monty Python script that carries on about how the young of today don’t know how lucky they are! Tony actually had a good sense of humour once you cracked the thin serious veneer.

About the same time, the Department began to take some interest, with advice from a few at the chalkface which I believe included Tony. The Department installed a “PDP11” (some huge refrigerator sized thing with the computing power of today’s wristwatches) at State High and a dumb (now there’s an understatement) terminal at Kedron SHS.

By this time Tony was a competent Apple Basic (and whatever Basic ran on the PDP 1) programmer. Tony wrote an attendance checking program for the Terminal. To be honest, it was more trouble than any manual checking program would have been and in itself was fairly labour intensive. The same could be said of the use of punched cards for multiple choice tests which were marked and analysed (mean and standard dev.) by the PDP11. It was the start of a search for the proper place of Information Technology in education. Tony “networked” constantly with this small nucleus of computer heads. A great strength of his was his informed opinions. He avidly read remembered and kept, magazines, books etc. in the computing field and was invaluable in terms of time to those of us whose preferred learning style involves modelling.

While the exponential explosion of IT has continued unabated since then, Tony would be the first to acknowledge that while computers are an integral and proper part of life today, the dream has not yet been realised. Computers still have the upper hand over the community at large, their value in education is almost impossible to quantify in so many fields and they have not delivered on issues of equity – social, availability, ease of use, employment etc. Equally, Tony would agree that it’s not the computers that are the fundamental problem nor the fundamental solution – its people and politics!

As Apples spread state-wide, Tony wrote an Apple Basic program to automate the Teaching Return – possibly the first large scale computer data collected from schools in Qld. By this stage we had printers, albeit incredibly loud (8 pin?) dot matrix monstrosities. Every night, Tony would pack the computer and printer into the yellow Monaro (he was a closet, but responsible, hoon!) for another evening’s entertainment.

Tony was involved with the next milestone, the Sperry Phase. We received our roomful of U-beaut double floppy (pre 8088?) machines along with the first software package for schools … the Perfect Series. Perfect Writer, Perfect Calc and a few others which escape me. Somewhere in there, the other high flyers of the time, Doug Carey and Herb Coleman et. al. were distributing these goodies along with the Coleman Coffins to securely house your treasures – there were sick people even then who wanted to steal Sperrys.

Momentum was gathering in the Department by now, both at a State and Federal level. I think this was also the start of the now entrenched “bucket funding” (or is that economic rationalism) approach to education. There were the Commonwealth SERS funds, some of which was used for computing initiatives. Tony left Kedron SHS in about 1984 to become a Brisbane North Computer Consultant (Brisbane North was what Stafford District etc. is today, though we had only a few large Districts then). There Tony juggled, with very limited SERS funds, the competing interests of the emerging IBM clones/Microsoft against the then far superior and more expensive Macintoshes and the existing Apples, Ataris, Archimedes etc.

Somewhere around here, give or take a few years, CEGQ appeared. (Computer Education Group Queensland – now QSITE) I believe Tony was involved from the beginning and was an office bearer for many years along with involvement in Conference organization etc.

Again, I emulated the man, taking his job as a Computer Consultant when he joined the Formula team as a consultant. At this time also, we both, along with most of the old Brigade, enrolled in the inaugural Post Graduate Diploma of Computer Education at Kelvin Grove CAE. I believe Tony had some significant role in the instigation/development of the ensuing ITP courses in schools.

Tony wrote the documentation for the Formula project for several years. No on knew more about Word Perfect or Perfect Draw than this man. He was very hamstrung in this work. On the floor below in Ed. House was the Learning Technology Branch, which sensibly had WYSIWYG A4 screen Macintoshes (marvellous technology) but Tony worked on Floor 11 that was the “real” IT hub and if it wasn’t IBM it didn’t happen! Tony also oversaw the processes of tendering for bulk purchases of Formula servers and workstations.

Somewhere about now another bucket saw Business Technology Centres introduced to High Schools. This resulted in rooms of IBM clones mostly, at least one Client-Server Network at Caloundra and a few rooms of Macintoshes – not sure if Tony was too involved here.

In the early Nineties, Tony assumed controlled of the Formula Team due to comings and goings of the IT professionals and Dept. delays associated with restructuring. When it came to formally filling the position that he had admirably held, he was informed that his application was not good enough according to the new selection criteria. So, it was back to the classroom as a maths teacher in the junior school at Ferny Grove SHS for a couple of years where in computing terms, Tony was unusually quiet. A transfer to Mitchelton SHS saw him again become heavily involved in the management of that School’s network.

Fate now dealt Tony a cruel blow with the onset of Motor Neurone Disease, which rapidly progressed. Ed. Qld. was particularly compassionate in their treatment of Tony for which he and his friends were particularly grateful. Glen Stevens (another old Computer Coordinator), the main Systems Administrator at Mitchelton SHS utilised Tony’s expertise in all ways that Tony could manage, even after he could no longer work part time – an act of friendship and collegiate support for which both Tony was, and his friends still are, grateful.

With little movement left in his arms and fingers, Tony was still computer active, having taken delivery of a new Bell computer system (sourced over the Internet) only days before his sudden, but peaceful passing.

Like all of us past and present, Tony was not quite perfect, but for those of us who shared a part of his life where his idiosyncrasies worked in our favour, we remember a man of intelligence, integrity, talent, compassion and utter dependability.