CAREER HIGHLIGHTS:
1980 - 1986 Applied Digital Data Systems Inc.
Technical Support Manager - EMEA & S. Pacific
In the late 70’s and early 80’s ADDS were the largest computer terminal supplier in the world. But I didn’t work for the terminal business. I joined ADDS’ systems division as a field-based electronics engineer, looking after their DR-DOS based computer systems across a lot of the UK. At that time the “System 75” was the flagship product and it was state-of-the-art boasting 2x 500kB 8 inch diskettes and a whole 48kB RAM.
The Systems division went on to launch the ground-breaking multi-user micro system named Multivision and a range of Pick-based mini systems named Mentor. I was able to get very involved with the Pick operating system and started the new software branch of my career by writing a service management control system for use by the UK engineering team.
ADDS newsletter from April 1986. Click it to see an extract about the UK staff.
The Pick environment was both an operating system and a relational database management system (RDBMS) which was used extensively by financial services and other real time database applications. ADDS became one of the “Big 5” Pick providers with it’s Mentor family of multi-user systems. These systems were based on the Zilog Z8000 processor and could service upto 128 simultaneous users. (Pretty damn good in the 1980s !!)
By mid 1984 I had been promoted a few times and was essentially based out of the company’s head office in Long Island, NY where I concentrated predominately on the Pick-based Mentor range of products.
For the next 2 years my job was to travel the world trouble shooting, setting up & supporting exhibitions and writing & running technical training courses for the in-country NCR field engineering teams.
These courses covered hardware maintenance, the Pick operating system & programming language and database maintenance & repair.
ADDS System 75
Show booth at the “Systems” fair in Munich
Eventually NCR decided to consolidate resources and the UK ADDS office was closed on 31 Oct 1986.
This meant I had to decide whether to move to the US and stay with ADDS or join NCR UK. In the end I did neither, choosing instead to keep my family in the UK and see where my new-found “Pick guru” status took me...
ADDS Inc HQ, Hauppauge, Long Island, NY
ADDS Mentor 4000
Setting up a show booth in Madrid (I think)
That’s me in the stripy sweater. Sitting down as usual.
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