During the Blitz, in 1940–41, Douglas's Home Guard Unit, 'C' Company of the Chelsea and Kensington Battalion of the KRRC, had its headquarters in the basement of the Royal School of Mines, just the other side of Exhibition Road from the museums.
At that time, Cambridge was home to the second stored-program computer, the EDSAC or Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (the first being Manchester University's "Baby", which ran its first program on 21 June 1948).
1953–1957 1953: Elected as a Prize Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Douglas spends a year at the University of Illinois Computation laboratory as assistant Professor.
[citation needed] In June 1960 the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals set up a Working Party to explore the creation of a national system for handling university admissions.
He had previously worked at Leeds with Ronald Kay, who was to become UCCA's general secretary, on "an early and primitive but successful attempt to introduce computer methods into student registration procedures".