Mainframe Products

The Mainframe products were the "backbone" of the company from foundation onwards.  People who worked on and with them say they were highly innovative, and at the time of writing (2014, nearly 2015), there are large UK employers still using them.  Not bad for products with their foundations in 1963.

As time passed, additional functionality for items such as reporting, HR (we called it Personnel in those days) was added.  Software was ported and/or specially written for additional platforms too.

Legends abound about the cleverness of some of the early programmers - sadly some of them are no longer with us.

Other products were added in the 1980s as Peterborough Software diversified - but that's for other pages.

I am indebted to Duncan Jolly for the following insights into why Unipay was so special -

"What made Unipay 5.2 special is that not long before Codd and Date had released their research into relational databases and EG everyone was looking to design the first system based on their ideas.

EG was very excited but also saw the problems with their theory.

Several of us would all attend think tank meetings with EG to work out our ideas.

EG being a genius came up with a psuedo relational data base that allowed us to know where every bit of data was, its format, etc using tables of binary code.

Jeff Bennett ,EG, Dean, Graham Empsom and I wrote the software.

It was revolutionary at the time. I later wrote the tech manual and programers guide.

The briliant part was if new data requirements were introduced by the Tax office we simply had to amend the tables and add small pieces of process code.

So development time was slashed.

The next major addition was SSP which was built into Unipersonnel and fed Unipay with data. All other companies added SSP as part of Payroll . Peter Burrell was the core designer/team leader for SSP."