Historic ZOIS Clients, Product Links and Other Stuff

The site has links, an increasing number of links, to various entities that no longer have a WWW presence, being renamed, taken over or just plain disappeared. This page provides a brief description and links to their new owners and masters.

Clients

ZOIS Clients and other companies that have since been renamed, taken over or just disappeared.

UK Government Department of Social Security

This underwent a merger with Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) in June 2001 and is now styled as the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP).

UK Government Department for Education and Employment

This underwent a merger with Department of Social Security (DSS) in June 2001 and is now styled as the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP).

Andersen Consulting

As a result of split-up of the Andersen partnership into an accountancy arm and a pure IT consulting arm. Andersen Consulting, the IT consulting arm decided to change its name to Accenture.

ITSA

The UK government's Department of Social Security (DSS) had an extensive computing estate which it used to run itself. Government policy dictated that this estate would be concentrated in an agency called ITSA (the letters stood for Information Technology Services Agency or thereabouts). The agency would compete for work both within and outside the DSS creating some kind of market place. However, a subsequent change in government policy saw the outsourcing of all ITSA's work to EDS, who now effectively provide all civil computing to the UK government and ITSA as an organization disappeared, all its staff are now EDS employees.

Index Stores

Index stores were a wholly owned subsidiary of Littlewoods who specialised in Catalogue Shops; where one goes to browse various purchases and then make a selection that then appears from an on-site warehouse. Following Littlewoods' sale by the family who owned it, Littlewoods underwent a severe rationalisation which saw Index being partially closed and partially sold to its more successful rival, Argos. Index as a brand, both in Bricks-and-Mortar and on the Web had gone by 2005.

GSI

GSI, the letters stood for Generale de Systeme Informatique (or thereabouts) was a French based computer consultancy and Systems House. It is now wholly owned by ADP.

Employment Services Agency

Now part of the the UK government's Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), the Employment Services Agency's computer systems have been outsourced by the UK government. They are now owned and operated (almost inevitably) by EDS.

Shandon

Shandon, or Shandon Southern Products Ltd., to give it its full name, was a producer of Pathology Laboritory and Electrophoresis equipment who employed one of ZOIS's principals in the mid-80s. After passing through a number of hands the name and assets are now part of Thermo Electron, who are in a similar line of business.

ICL

ICL was a large computer company based largely in the UK. It was the product of a government inspired merger of a number of smaller British computer companies in the late 1960s forming the then second largest computer company after IBM. ICL was to be an important client of ZOIS in the late 1980s and early 90s when it was a diverse computer company with product lines ranging from PCs through a UNIX based mid-range to its own design of Mainframes. It was purchased by Fujitsu in the early 1990s and although noises were made about publicly floating the company it has remained Fujitsu's ever since. During the years following this purchase it slowly metamorphosed into a service company offering largely Windows NT based solutions (all be it with a large Mainframe service `tail'). In 2001 Fujitsu decided to kill the brand completely and shortly after that ICL's frequently broken web-presence stopped working altogether.

General Magic

General Magic were early exponents of Mobile Agents and some of their employees published papers on the subject (Communications of the ACM (1999) 42(3) p88-89, as an example). General Magic later concentrated on XML based voice recognition and other J2EE technologies and ceased trading September 2002.

Bluestone

A company specialising in middleware who bought Arjuna Limited, the company commercialising Arjuna and were later acquired by HP. HP then "sunset" them (as HP put it) shortly after the Compaq acquisition in Autumn 2002. Arjuna lives on as Arjuna Technologies, however, a company specialising in OLTP Middleware.

Scientific Services Intercomp

This company specialised in mathematical modeling of large (as in hundreds of kilometers long) gas pipelines. They were briefly ZOIS clients in 1994 and since then sold this part of the business. Their web-presence disappeared in late 2003 when their domain name expired and they are presumably no longer trading.

Transarc

Transarc were a software company specialising in enterprise middleware. Basically founded by academics from the local University in Pittsburgh, they were responsible for some DCE ports, two kinds of distributed file-system and Encina. IBM, who were the majority share-holder, formally took them over in the dying days of the last millennium, although their web-site with all its good stuff continued. In late 2003 IBM reorganised that site out of existence, breaking rather more than a few HTML links. The links to IBM's Pittsburgh Laboratory, which is what Transarc had become, stopped working about the same time too. In late 2005 it was noted that the original Transarc web-site, which had been serving (after serveral URL re-writes) an IBM search page, is now serving a directory of "adult" content.

Resolution IT Services

Resolution IT Services was a subsidiary of Lorien plc and offered a range of high technology contract services that augment Lorien's core IT Resourcing business. Their core business was centred around Mobile Telecommunications and a Local Government component (based in the UK). They appear to have stopped trading at some point early in 2005 and their web-presence has now stopped working too.

Aegis

An operating system heavily influenced by early flavours of UNIX, which was non-the-less proprietary and ran on the Apollo workstations. After they took over Apollo, HP released hunks of the Aegis operating system as components of DCE (in particular the RPC mechanism). It can thus be said to have influenced network computing extensively.

Apollo

A range of high-powered workstations based around the Motorola MC68000 and later own RISC CPU. These workstations were connected by Apollo's proprietary token ring technology and used the Aegis operating system. Apollo were taken over in the late 1980s by HP.

Brixton

Brixton was the name of a Systems Network Architecture (SNA) integration product from CNT. This has undergone a number of name changes such as "Propelis EAi" in early 2001. CNT eventually sold some of its Propelis products, to Jacada but not Brixton which it retained (all this happened toward the end of 2001). SUN's SunLink SNA connectivity product is an Original Equipment Manufactor (OEM) version of this software.

Update: (16 December 2002) It would appear that CNT have sold their core SNA business to a company called Dubra who then underwent a number of name changes and "combinations" (their term) to become Alebra. Abracadabra, Alebra have resurrected the Brixton brand. It would also appear that SUN are no longer selling it branded as "SunLink".

Update: (26 January 2003) After feedback from folk at Alebra we stand corrected as to previous owners of Brixton, no doubt the gimlet-eyed will note that we've changed the history to reflect this. Alebra also ask us to point out that SunLink was an OEM Brixton and that Brixton continues to be actively marketed by both SUN and Alebra. More at Alebra's Brixton web-site.

ENTERA

ENTERA was Borland's UNIX based OLTP offering which allowed communication based DCE. It was withdrawn in 2001 and links for it on Borland's web-site gradually disappeared thereafter.

PreVue

PreVue is or was a load-simulation product from the Performance Aware Corporation and then Rational. After capturing traffic between a client and a server the said traffic could be replayed multiply with a random element in order to simulate a population of users. PreVue could thus be used in stress tests and performance studies. Rational are now part of IBM and PreVue seems to be no longer actively sold.

STC

STC are or were an Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) company with a primary produced called E*Gate. This is a data-manipulation software designed to allow various large scale systems to seemlessly `adjust' and reformat data flowing between themselves. Interestingly this product makes extensive use of Scheme, a dialect of Lisp. At the end of 2000 STC was renamed SeeBeyond, apparently because of trademark concerns.

Vulcan

A real-time scheduling operating system produced by Harris, for their range of 24 and then 48 bit mini-computers. This is when Harris still produced their own general purpose CPU designs in the early 1980s.

$Date: 2008/07/03 12:36:10 $