This interview with James Hardy Wilkinson will take listeners back to a period, now 50 years ago, when computers were quirky, cantankerous, handbuilt contraptions; duplicate copies of documents were made with carbon paper; trains were pulled by steam locomotives; and (black and white) television was just being introduced. Recorded in July 1984, just two years before Wilkinson"s death, this interview preserves some of the spirit, as well as the facts, of mathematical history. Wilkinson discusses his work, including the building of Turing"s Pilot Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), his involvement in the field of computation, and his personal view of early computational developments in numerical analysis. Educated at Cambridge in mathematics, Wilkinson was drawn into computation as a result of work on ballistics calculations during World War II.