A Working Life in Data

Introduction

I was out walking on the beautiful Nottingham Beeston canal to help celebrate the 40th Birthday of a dear friend of mine. Out on this walk was his father Nick. We got talking and the conversation gravitated to our careers. It transpires that Nick saw a great deal of the evolution of databases and enterprise systems, through the 70’s and 80’s . Nick was kind enough to spend some time with us going through his professional life.

In times when we see great changes afoot in the world of work, it behooves us to reflect on the changes that we have lived through, to give us some context and calibration. That is what the conversation with Nick did for me.

Starting Out Early 70's

Nick studied Physics and Chemistry at the University of Nottingham

He did a little Fortran as part of his studies. He graduated in 1972 and was taken on by Plessey in their graduate training program in London.

For any overseas readers and younger folks, they may not know of Plessey. I certainly remember them being a big electronics, telecommunications and defence company that ended up getting split up and sold off by after being acquired by a Seimens GEC consortium (1)

Nick started his career as a Programmer, coding in Cobol on an ICL Mainframe using the IDMS Network Database (2). I actually interviewed with ICL back in the late 80’s. As I was doing the research to write this up, it made me realize just what a significant player ICL was in the history of computing and the standards around database design.

Upskilling Mid 1970's

This brings us to about 1974 when Nick took 18 months to do his MBA at Bradford.

At this time Plessy had a tie up with Bradford University. It was a Financial Times Top 10 Company and built 50% of the equipment for BT. It had businesses in Military, Avionics and Radar and even had a stake in the Star Wars Program under Reagan.

General Management Late 1970's

Nick’s MBA equipped him to be a General Manager for a stint. He headed up a programming team as the Systems Development Manager, responsible for user contact, specification and ultimately, delivery to Clients.

The unit was based out of Beeston near Nottingham but was responsible for nationwide delivery. This was in the age of Business Process Reengineering.

The team had a mandate to sell the services outside of the group. I was still in school at this point. However, I remember from my accountancy training, lectures on transfer pricing and the need to both expose the supplier to market pressures and pricing, and also to give the general managers of the supplier the opportunity to sell externally, to keep pricing and decision making rational.

Evaluating Young Database Technology Early 1980's

Part of Nick’s role was to keep abreast of new technology. Relational databases were just starting to emerge. Nick’s group purchased a relational database, for evaluation. This brings us to about 1982.

Oracle did not have any European subsidiaries at this time and sold and supported its products through a company called CACI Based in Richmond. They were primarily a Data Analysis company. They had specialists in data modeling and process decomposition.

CACI UK was headed by Geoff Squires MBE who went on to become Managing Director of Oracle UK (3). Both Larry Ellison and Bob Miner, were part of the early user groups.

Rapport by Logica was the runner up in the evaluation. Logica was a UK-based systems integration and software company. The reason that Oracle won was because Oracle had a big user base. There was a lot of American military money going into Oracle.

The reason for moving to a relational database was that Plessey was looking at a more agile development environment. ICL was not a great environment to develop apps. Network databases are less receptive to structure changes.

Those early experiments with Oracle were for what was considered non mission critical at the time. Logging B2B Prospects. Now this would be considered an in house CRM system.

They were using Oracle Forms as a User Interface tool and deployed Oracle on VAX. The system never had a high number of concurrent users.

I did not join the workforce until 1986, but I remember Ashton Tate's dBase III being a database that was popular at the end of my time with Philips Scientific. (4) I was only using it to experiment with departmental applications. Nick stated that some part of his organization used DBase but it was not part of their evaluation as it was not a true relational database.

At the enterprise level within Philips Scientific we used a reporting system called Focus from Information Builders. I was interested if Nick had evaluated Focus, given that it provided some of the flexibility and insulation from changes to the data structure that he needed (5). Focus did not come up. presumably again as it was not a relational database. Interestingly Vista acquired information builders through their ownership of TIBCO in 2020. Having worked for another of the Vista companies myself, it is a nice bit of circularity that I was not aware of.

Building out early applications Late 1980's

GEC Took over Pleasey. Nick was still a systems development manager, building systems for Car and Van Leasing. Later dedicated Fleet Management software emerged. Nick also built out the External Engineering database for Unilever. During my software career, this capability would have been in a category of software called Asset Management. Oracle sells Oracle EAM in which I had some small hand in the early designs.

Most of these systems were originally built in forms but were rewritten in C. Performance challenges were generally in Forms rather than database.

Nick fondly remembers many meetings with Oracle. He states that he got very friendly with the senior Oracle folks.

References

History Of Plessey. https://web.archive.org/web/20040628163409/http://web.ukonline.co.uk/freshwater/histples.htm#plessey Accessed 19/02/2025
IDMS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDMS Accessed 19/02/2025
Geoff Squire OBE - Archives of IT Accessed 20/02/2025
Dbase II.A personnal History of dBASE Accessed 25/02/2025
Focus ibi: The journey from Information Builders to ibi Accessed 25/02/2025

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