Service in Informatics and Analysis (SIA Ltd.) was one of the pioneering
time-sharing
In computing, time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users at the same time by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking.DEC Timesharing (1965), by Peter Clark, The DEC Professional, Volume 1, Number 1
Its emergence ...
service bureau companies in the late 1960s, later known as SIA Computer Services. Its head office was located at
Lower Belgrave Street
Lower Belgrave Street is a street in London's Belgravia district.
It runs north-west to south-east and begins as a continuation of Upper Belgrave Street where it meets Eaton Square. It crosses one through-street, Ebury Street, and ends in a t ...
, close to
Victoria Station in London, and the company had branch offices in Edinburgh, Manchester, the
West End, Paris and (much later) in Hong Kong. SIA offered terminal services via the Post Office telephone network at speeds of 10, 15, 30, 60 and 120 characters per second for
Teletype-style terminals and of 1200
baud, 2400 baud and 4800 baud for
Remote Job Entry terminals. Later with the release of the
IBM PC, systems were developed to emulate the Remote Batch and interactive terminals.
Clients could also visit the head or branch offices to submit their jobs personally or have them accepted and supervised by the production department.
In 1968 the company installed a
Control Data Corporation CDC 6600
The CDC 6600 was the flagship of the 6000 series of mainframe computer systems manufactured by Control Data Corporation. Generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, it outperformed the industry's prior recordholder, the IBM ...
mainframe computer – the first CDC 6600 installed in the United Kingdom.
It was generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, outperforming its fastest predecessor,
IBM 7030 Stretch
The IBM 7030, also known as Stretch, was IBM's first transistorized supercomputer. It was the fastest computer in the world from 1961 until the first CDC 6600 became operational in 1964."Designed by Seymour Cray, the CDC 6600 was almost three t ...
, by about three times. It remained the world's fastest computer from 1964 to 1969, when it relinquished that status to its successor, the
CDC 7600
The CDC 7600 was the Seymour Cray-designed successor to the CDC 6600, extending Control Data's dominance of the supercomputer field into the 1970s. The 7600 ran at 36.4 MHz (27.5 ns clock cycle) and had a 65 Kword primary memory (with a 6 ...
. By 1974 SIA added more processing power by installing a Control Data Cyber-72 at Victoria.
SIA had assembled a comprehensive library of proven software packages drawn from all over the world. They covered a range of disciplines:
electronics, management science, integrated survey and statistical, integrated cluster analysis, segmentation analysis, simulation, financial planning,
production planning and control systems, civil and structural engineering, finite element stress analysis,
box girder bridge design, highway engineering, business systems, business data processing, database management and many others.
Client support groups
SIA's client support groups included:
Technical services
Supported clients writing and running their own programs, whether written in
ALGOL
ALGOL (; short for "Algorithmic Language") is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in 1958. ALGOL heavily influenced many other languages and was the standard method for algorithm description used by the ...
,
BASIC,
COBOL, or
Fortran. They provided training in all user aspects of the Kronos-75 service and on operating various types of terminal.
Commercial team
Supported the SIA sales accounting package and the database management system SYSTEM 2000. They also developed computer systems to meet various business applications to meet the individual needs of client organisations.
Applications covered included invoicing, sales ledger, sales analysis, stock control, bill of material processing,
library information retrieval and a wide range of database implementations characterised by the need to store quantities of data and
to retrieve from it in a number of differing ways.
Management sciences team
Supported the statistics, linear programming, depot location and financial modelling packages offered.
Production scheduling, warehouse siting, cash flow modelling and survey analysis are typical applications.
Engineering
Civil and structural support packages for bridge and building design and detailing, for soil mechanics and for other civil engineering applications.
Offshore engineering
Concentrated on the business of designing structures for use in offshore oil production. Waveloading, static and dynamic analyses,
towing studies and stability problems were also covered.
Advanced structural analysis
Supported clients tackling problems with the help of
finite element
The finite element method (FEM) is a popular method for numerically solving differential equations arising in engineering and mathematical modeling. Typical problem areas of interest include the traditional fields of structural analysis, heat t ...
techniques and other analyses.
Examples are drawn mostly from mechanical engineering – from nuclear power stations through aircraft and satellites to diesel engines.
Chemical engineering
Assisted process designers to use a powerful flowsheet simulator program, arguably the best in the world.
Highway engineering and mapping
Supported and developed a range of programs for use in highway design and in ground modelling and mapping.
Programs developed by this team have helped British and foreign consultants to win highway design contracts in the Middle East
since the design timescale is dramatically shortened by their use.
Transportation
Developed and maintained the TFA suite of programs for transportation planning studies and provided consultancy services.
Systems
The operating systems running on the Control Data
6600, Cyber-72 and later Cyber-175 included
SCOPE,
Kronos and later
NOS.
The source code was heavily modified for the business needs of the company by a team of systems programmers.
Many of the ground-breaking ideas developed at SIA were incorporated in Control Data's later systems.
SIA was a member of J.U.N.K (Joint Users of NOS and Kronos), a user group formed to share ideas and experiences using Control Data's software.
History
* December 1967 – The company formed a subsidiary of the French-owned Metra Group of consultancy companies.
* September 1968 – Doors opened for business on a Control Data 6600, the largest and most powerful computer installed in the UK
* February 1969 – Installation of first RJE terminal linked by private Post Office telephone line – the beginning of SIA's long experience in remote computing.
* May 1970 – Manchester branch office opened.
* December 1970 – Turnover for the year exceeded £1 Million.
* March 1972 – Introduction of INTERCOM service for users with
Teletype-style terminals.
* March 1972 – West End branch office opened.
* May 1973 – Edinburgh branch office opened.
* December 1974 – Second major computer (Cyber-72) installed. Turnover tops £2 Million.
* April 1975 – Launch of
Kronos-75 integrated remote computing service, offering users Timesharing, Batch processing (local and remote) or a mixture of the two in one computer installation.
* August 1978 – SIA ordered a
CDC Cyber-175, to be installed early 1979.
* May 1979 – Installed a high-speed link to CISI's IBM Network in France.
* 1988? – Installed a DEC
VAX 8000
The VAX 8000 is a discontinued family of superminicomputers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) using processors implementing the VAX instruction set architecture (ISA).
The 8000 series was introduced in October 1 ...
, model 8550.
References
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Sources
*Much of what appears in this article has been collated from SIA's own publicity brochures, circa 1975, for example:
Program Development at SIA
Pre–World Wide Web online services
Business services companies of the United Kingdom
Companies based in the City of Westminster
Computer companies established in 1967
1967 establishments in England