GENSoftware is the software side of GEN, and we were writing software before the web existed. Three engineers started it in 1985, alongside their day jobs. Since then our code has flown on communications satellites, helped build the Channel Tunnel, run industrial control systems, supervised large corporate estates and carried payments for more than 7,500 financial institutions. The founders still run the business.
In 1985 three engineers from three computer companies began working together in their spare time: Richard Taylor from AlphaMicro, Ross Clarke from HP and Steve Smedley from DEC. By 1987 they were writing EDI full time for a single client, and in 1989, with all three employers in difficulty, they left and formed the partnership.
The work was middleware. Supply chains in automotive and retail were trying to pass orders between IBM, ICL, HP, Prime and AlphaMicro machines that shared neither a protocol nor a character set, over X.25 and X.400 circuits whose fastest ran at 256k. We wrote the software in between, so that one company's ERP system could order stock from another's just in time, a job previously done by a room of buyers working from printed reports.
In 1990 we were selected to write the firmware for a series of communications satellites: the software between flight control, the microwave communications hardware, and a computer that could run on its own or take commands from a ground station. It ran on Microware's OS-9000, a hard real-time operating system, on MIPS processors.
Redundancy went all the way down: three backplanes, three processors, three memory cards, three I/O cards and six power supplies. Two racks were identical down to the code, and the third supervised them, able to power each one up or down and reboot it on its own. If the downconverter ever failed, an out-of-band antenna could reach the supervisor directly at 300 baud. The satellites were designed to work for 40 years.
It was a military contract, so nothing left the building: no photographs, no source code and no documentation, and staff were searched on the way in and out. Writing code you can never patch, for a customer who will never let you keep a copy, is a particular discipline, and it has shaped how we have built software ever since. It is still up there, which as far as we know makes us the highest UK business service provider.
Most of our work we cannot name. Confidentiality is written into our framework contracts, so the only names here belong to projects that came before them, for companies that no longer exist.
GEN has always been a partnership, and the partners are jointly and severally liable for what the firm commits to. When we take on your project, it is our own money standing behind it, not a company that can be wound up when the work goes badly and restarted the next month under a new name. Clients have told us for years that this decided it when they had something critical to place.
In that time we have worked in legal, insurance, financial services, energy, contact centres, transport, engineering, aerospace, manufacturing and healthcare. Our confidentiality commitment does not end when a contract does.
Much of this is still in our possession: the machines we ran and the machines our clients ran, from AlphaMicro, DEC and HP minis to the Hayes racks that carried our dial-up network. A good deal of it still works.
The same firm, still writing production software every day. If you have a system to build, rescue or keep running, tell us about it.