Early years

I am greatly indebted to Jeff Bennett, a former boss and all-round good egg for this bit of history -

Peterborough Data Processing Services Limited was founded in 1963 by Ian Evans-Gordon.

The intention, as the name suggests, was to provide data processing (IT in today’s terms) services to organizations in need.

Such services were data preparation, data entry and bespoke programming.

Data entry/prep was usually on punched cards or paper tape, and a small department was created for just these needs – ruled over by Mrs Mac! and populated by Eileen, Jackie and Anne.

The bespoke programming was handled by EG and he negotiated a deal with Perkins Engines whereby he could use their mainframe for some of his work (compiling and testing programs, and small processing tasks).

This was not, however a payroll bureau in the more modern understanding of the term.

EG soon became aware that a lot of the requirements were payroll needs and he was writing bespoke payroll programs and selling these to the organizations concerned.

EG also noticed that a lot of the payroll requirements were common across organizations, and so started to write common routines to handle these. This concept developed into the ‘two file’ system where a parameter file was used to control the contents of an employee data file and to hold information regarding processing and calculation rules.

This was early Unipay.

Requirements which could not be handled by the Unipay package were still dealt with by (chargeable) bespoke programming changes to the package, but a great deal of this programming was incorporated into the package and parameterised so that it could provide increased functionality to future customers using the ‘standard’ software package.

I remember that a number of non-existent features were sold as standard in order to complete a sale (‘of course Unipay can do that sir!’), resulting in last minute panic programming when the system was due to be installed.

By the time I joined (in 1973) Unipay was on Release 4 and Release 5 was in the pipeline.

Other snippets at this time (1973):

Directors – MR EG – Managing Director
Mrs EG – Company Secretary
John Mills – Marketing Director (or MD as he sometimes referred!)
I think there was also a ‘sleeping’ director but I’m not sure of details.

Offices - The company occupied half of the lower floor of Borough House in Peterborough (7 or 8 rooms as I recall) and a few rooms in an office in the centre of Nottingham.

Employees - I was employee number 18, preceded (just) by Ray Grainger in Nottingham.

Employees included systems engineers Peter and Brian Alldread, David Laking, David Dryden, Bill King, myself, Ian Duffy, aforementioned data prep staff, Min and Doris(?) the tea ladies, Eleanor Railton and a receptionist whose name escapes me. I think there were also a couple of other staff at the Nottingham office and a Marketing Manager based at Borough House. There may also have been a salesman or two.

Finances - Unipay by this time was rented to customers, not sold. I believe it was John Mills who was responsible for this very significant change of strategy and this was the foundation for a steady income stream which was the basis that allowed the company to grow steadily over the following years.

Company Name – Peterborough Data Processing Services Limited became shortened to PDPS and was often referred to as PDP.  This was not a problem until the introduction of the PDP11 computer by DEC, at which time customers occasionally were confused about who we were.

This resulted in an official name change to Peterborough Data (with a change of Logo, stationery, marketing leaflets, etc). I can’t remember the year but I think it was late-70s.

A further change, to Peterborough Software, came later, this time with the pyramid logo, colour coded to the company division and product range. I can’t remember the date for this change – probably late 80s or early 90s.

Customer Support/Training – Systems Engineers did the lot, from initial customer requirements, development and Quality Assurance of new features, installation and testing of the system on customer site, and both technical and user training.

The systems engineers also provided customer support until 1975 when the Customer Services Department was created (Jeff Bennett as Manager of a one man band), initially in Peterborough, providing IBM Unipay support. The department gradually expanded over the following years to include ICL Unipay support, then Unipersonnel and Unipension.

Statutory Maintenance – Once a year (usually) it was all hands to the pumps to visit every customer in order to install the latest fixes and changes due to the government’s Budget (tax rates, bands, new legislation, etc). Lots of travelling and midnight oil burnt in a very short space of time!

Jeff Bennett