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UWA graduate Ron Davidson remembers his colleague Brian Horan, a brilliant and idiosyncratic early computer programmer whose life was cut short by a tragic car accident in the 1960s.

During UWA's 100 year history few students have enrolled with so varied a provenance as my friend Brian Horan.But once he was on campus his mind focused then flared so brilliantly that anything seemed possible. Those hopes were snuffed out by a tragic car crash.

Brian Horan was the son of Clayton, a steam loco driver on the Midland line, and Pauline, the maker of the wonderful pies sold at railway refreshment rooms in the 1920s. He had been in the army as WWII ended, been a tram ticket collector, a tram driver, and a bus driver on suburban routes. He stacked timber, ran a shop which fitted Venetian blinds, was an amateur actor, wrote television scripts for the satirical Mavis Bramston show; and lots more. Brian carried a secret which made life difficult for this gentle father of two - and for his young wife Kate. He was a genius, trapped in a tram driver's uniform.

The Horan legend has it that in 1957, when Brian was 33, a ‘breakdown' took him to a psychiatric hospital where someone had the clever idea of giving him an IQ test. The test was too easy: the call went out for more difficult tests. Even the fiendishly difficult Vygotski Blocks test was a breeze and he quickly completed the Raven's Progressive Matrices which was designed never to be finished. Horan's life had changed. The secret was out.

Brian Horan arrived at UWA in January 1958, a gangling figure who was much older and cleverer than the surrounding undergraduate population. He graduated with first class honours in psychology and in 1962 he started his PhD on extensions to psychological scaling methods. At the same time UWA bought its first computer, a small IBM accounting machine with a card output. Horan tinkered. Soon you could type ‘Get one apple' and the computer would come back with ‘No core available'. Horan humour.

Meanwhile Ron Taft, the Psychology Department's controller of post-graduate students, had the difficult task of getting Horan to submit his quarterly PhD reports. Threats were made: an absolute deadline given. The final night I found Horan typing his report on a primitive Remington which pierced the paper with each of his heavy-handed stops and zeros. Next morning he delivered his report to the long-suffering Dr Taft. The report tackled a coterie of the big names in psychological scaling. Scaling had in the 1950s extended from one to many dimensions. But this could only be done for one person at a time. Horan's quarterly report showed he had found a way to do multi-dimensional scaling for several people at once, finding a fundamental structure for the group then deriving individual dimensional structures from that. It was an extraordinary achievement for someone who was still a student.

But Horan was becoming more interested in programming than in his ground-breaking findings in psychological measurement. His supervisor John Ross often had trouble finding him to talk about what he had just done. He dubbed Horan the Phantom. The name stuck.

Fortuitously UWA made a bold move in choosing its next computer. Instead of getting a newer and bigger IBM machine the university went for a research computer, the PDP-6, from a little-known company in Boston. When it arrived in 1965 UWA was the first organization anywhere to have a multi-access time-sharing computer. A light-pen and a high-precision display fostered interaction. The PDP-6 and Horan was a match made in heaven. He spent whole nights in the computing centre working on programs. Computers then had very limited memory and ran at relatively slower speeds. Horan was particularly clever at developing code that got around these constraints and allowed him to write programs which could not have worked otherwise. The director of the computing centre, Dennis Moore, questioned this search for the extra microsecond. Horan rebuffed him. ‘You are a poor programmer saved by my intelligence' he told Moore. Moore offered him a job - as programmer on a project sponsored by British Petroleum to examine management of their refinery.

Brian Horan's fame as the programmer of the new breed of computers was spreading. He programmed the Totalisator Agency Board's (TAB) vast betting network; he also brought considerable expertise as a punter to this task. US scholars arrived with apparently intractable data for Horan to work his magic code, usually after midnight. The Psychology Department benefited with a collection of Horan programs used by staff and students and unlike programs anywhere else. His programs remained idiosyncratic. Sometimes you had to enter an arbitrary bit of information - like the university phone number or the Dewey reference for Jane Austen's novels- to make them work.

Come 1967... Brian told me that for the first time he felt secure; and not just financially. He was almost happy. He was taking his 12-year-old son Terence to see big computers at work at the Carnarvon space tracking station. His car rolled outside Northampton. Horan was killed instantly; Terence was injured but recovered. (Terence and his sister Leda now work with computers.) Horan's paper on extending multi-dimensional scaling, based on the original thesis report, appeared in Psychometrika in June 1969 with a footnote stating Horan had been killed in a car crash and that John Ross had revised the paper. Horan's ideas live on. At last count there had been 143 citations of the paper - which is a lot for a Psychometrika paper.

I shall not look on his like again.

Note: Ron Davidson was born into a Perth newspaper family. He graduated in psychology at UWA and won the British Psychological Society prize for his thesis. He worked as an international journalist before returning to teach psychology at UWA for 25 years. Here he became friendly with Brian Horan. Ron now writes. He has written six books, including Fremantle Impressions , mostly with Fremantle Press, been short listed twice for the Premier's Book Prize and he has won a number of awards.