Zellis Unipay is one of the granddaddies of them all when it comes to payroll applications in the UK.
Originally conceived, anecdotally, in the garage of the original owners of Peterborough Data Processing Services, the Evans-Gordons, in 1964, it is still around today. It has kept up to date with the power of IBM technology behind it. It is testament both to the quality, flexibility and durability of both the software product and the IBM framework behind it.
Not having even been born at that point, I can’t guess at how they had access to a mainframe in a domestic garage, but I do know that they were successful enough that in 1986 they built the building that homes our current mainframe – Thorpe Park. Having been around so long, it also means that as a company, we have taken advantage of some of the changes in the mainframe landscape to enhance our products and make them accessible to a greater range of mainframe customers. The inventions of CICS (1968), IMS (1968), VM (1972), VSE (1979), DB2 (1983), zOS (2000) all extended our reach.
When we built Thorpe Park, we built two big machine rooms – one of which was dedicated to the IBM mainframe kit of the time. We still have a handful of people who remember the mainframe that went into Thorpe Park in 1986.
Simon told me “I do remember that computer room B was the preserve of the mainframe. There were chillers at both ends for the water-cooled mainframe and there was a power regulator for the 3-phase power supply. There were 3380 disks across the full width of the room nearest the courtyard and the mainframe and other ancillary equipment across the rest of the space.”
Cameron said “We had an IBM 3090 and an IBM 9121 and a System 38. I recall the old 3380 hard drives had breaks to slow them down! Someone told me that the water-cooling used to leak!”
Jon said “I remember in the mid-1980s into the 1990s that supplies (our product releases – source and object on separate tapes) were sent out on reel tape and then this moved onto cartridges. Nowadays, our supplies are sent as text files to be ftp-d to the customers’ mainframes and assembled.”
Aren’t we all glad that we don’t need brakes for hard drives or water-cooling for mainframes anymore!
The first mainframe I remember was the z9 which I had the privilege to oversee the installation of in 2009. This also means that I have no knowledge of life before zOS.
I remember us having to reinforce the corridor for it to be shipped in. It was a slow process to move it the approximate 150 yards from the truck to the machine room – we started at 6pm and it wasn’t in until 9:30pm…
Then we upgraded to a z114.
Less reinforcing required! Also, considerably smaller in size and much easier to get round the corners in the corridor. We learned from the z9 and came expecting another 3.5 hours, but it was much less – roughly an hour.
Then in 2019, to the z14. Smaller again and no reinforcing required at all – just matting to prevent damage to flooring. It zoomed in to the machine room in about 20 minutes!
Each consecutive machine seems to have had a smaller footprint in the machine room. Were it not for its accompanying disk and tape units and the UPS, the z14 would look very lonely now in the same machine room its predecessors inhabited!
How IBM technology has moved on is really amazing. Smaller and smaller, yet more sophisticated and more powerful at each new z. We are looking forward to moving up to a z16 in early 2024. I’m expecting it to come in from the truck in the time that it takes to boil the kettle for the delivery men!