The Global Information Centre

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 45

This talk also began with a rather cynical view of information centres and leading up to it was a short history of their beginnings. In the mid-to-late 70’s, at a time when users and DP departments were growing apart, backlogs were getting bigger and users were getting angrier. IBM came up with the concept of the Information Centre and marketed it extremely well. They gathered together a collection of applications software, which, in the hands of the users would put the emphasis back on them, with support being provided by DP. The outcome? — “Never have so many waited so expensively for so little” — according to Fred Perkins. He cited some of the problems associated with IC’s:-

a) user isolation

b) lack of tools to help make systems portable

c) Growth/migration problems

d) tools not part of the IC concept

e) incompatibilities between mainframe and PC’s

f) packages in different languages

g) inability to access data outside the company and across different systems.

The rest of the talk was devoted to the IP Sharp Global Information Centre. It claims to overcome all of these problems mainly due to the following:-

a) Single development language — Sharp APL, identical on the PC to that on the mainframe.

b) Worldwide communications network, with access to the world’s largest on-line library of numeric data bases.

c) Sophisticated applications software products.

d) Full support for a wide variety of hardware devices.