1985 Birmingham and Bridgewater Building Society placed an order valued at £750,000 for Line One computer systems and paid for the hardware and systems software when they signed the contract.
Olivetti dominated the “Which Computer Show” with two stands and 26 PCs plus a M40 integrated CAD/CAM system and Unix minicomputers on display. Also participating at the show were Accessories Division and CES.
Roger Hargreaves was commissioned to design a new range of “Mr Men” for a series of Olivetti advertisements, this included Miss Calm, Mr Calm, Mr Neat, Miss Trouble and Mr Panic.
BOL continued with their cultural sponsorship with two concerts by the London Symphony Orchestra. The first at the Barbican was conducted by Maxim Shostakovitch, who conducted his late father’s Fifth Symphony followed by Viktoria Mullova playing Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. The second concert at the Royal Albert Hall featured Mahler’s Eighth Symphony.
Once again spring saw the launch of new products, this time it was Videotyping, which extended word processing into the low cost area. The videotyping system comprises an electronic typewriter with a12 inch video screen.
Dixons the high street electrical retailer chose the M24 as its flagship product for a drive into the PC market.
The Lord Chancellor’s Office ordered 150 Line One systems for use at County Courts across the country. The new equipment was compatible with the old A4 accounting machines while providing a growth path for the future.
It was announced in the summer that Olivetti would sponsor the Brabham Grand Prix team run by Bernie Ecclestone. Braham drivers were Nelson Piquet and Francois Hesnault. Nelson went on to win the French Grand Prix in July. Brabham took delivery of a Linea One system for CAD design work plus stock control.
National Westminster Bank placed on order for £250,000 for electronic typewriters and word processors following an eighteen month trail of seven manufacturers’ equipment. Natwest followed this up with a contract for 150 Olivetti “Money Changers” which was a high performance foreign exchange calculator with print out facilities. The “Money Changer” could hold exchange rates for 30 different currencies.
At the end of the year Vincenzo Mancuso took his leave of BOL and was replaced by Paolo Tosi as MD. Previously Mr Tosi had been MD in South Africa.
AT&T set up a Telecommunications Division in Sun Street to sell the System 85 PABX and Premises Distribution System structured cabling. While the System 85 was going through its extensive type approval (which included the installation and maintenance providers) PDS was successfully sold as a stand alone product supporting a wide range of local networking standards. One of the early users of PDS included ICI (who were already users in the USA) to support their Token Ring Network. This was a first for BOL, as AT&T had not ratified this technology at the time of the installation. The first major installation valued at more than £1M was for Citibank’s new dealer
1986 Customer Engineering Services CES won a contract from Britannia Building Society to support 650 Ericsson Terminals over a three year period, the contract was valued at £1.1M. From the receipt of the order to taking over the support, CES was just three months!
The M24 won the prestigious “Recognition of Technology Achievement” award for the “Best Business Computer of the Year”, the announcement had been made at the start of the Which Computer Show. Olivetti launched three new MS-DOS PCs to reinforce their status as Europe’s leading PC supplier.
The Olivetti Brabham GP team had two new drivers for the season, Riccardo Patrese and Elio de Angelis. Unfortunately de Angelis was killed early in the season following a crash, David Warwick replaced him.
By the end of June BOL’s sales had reached £50M, putting the Company on target for the year. Alan Watson rejoined CES as General Manager and David Maroni who joined BOL in 1953 was appointed a Board Director.
Olivetti Peripherals launched the fastest daisywheel printer on the market the DY800 with a peak speed of 100 cps.
1987 Saw Britannia Building Society place an order for a FileNet System valued at £1.5M. The FileNet was installed at the Building Society’s Head Office to handle initially new mortgage applications.
The renamed and focused support division, Customer Support Group CSG had become a one stop service supplier for all customers both direct and indirect. This change was implemented to take advantage of the growing hardware and software contract values while the cost of hardware was expected to decrease in the next decade.
Britannia Building Society placed a second major contract valued at £4M for branch automation equipment, comprising 1100 PC-based workstations.
Paolo Tosi BOL’s MD joined the Board of Acorn Computers plc. Olivetti had earlier purchased a controlling interest in the manufacturer of the “BBC Computer”
The ground floor of “Olivetti House”, by now the location of the Head Office, was badly damaged by fire. Despite damage the to furnishing and fittings the PC in the area, belonging to the Microcomputer Division, worked perfectly after de-shooting by the engineers.
BOL had for many years entertained customers at the All England Tennis Club’s Championship, better known as Wimbledon. This year Olivetti’s involvement had extended to the supply of computer hardware in the form of M24 PCs. They were used for administration including players registration details, telephone results service and order of play that showed any conflict in the programme.
At the July “PC Users Show” BOL displayed a new range of multi-tasking PCs using the Intel 386 processor. This included the M380T a tower PC with a small footprint, with a 300MB hard disk it was intended as a network server.
Abbey National Building Society purchased nearly three hundred M24SP PCs for use at branches to provide Computer Based Training CBT. The courses ran included; clerical procedures, product training and management accounting.
The full power of the new Intel 386 chip was not expected to be achieved until Microsoft released the multitasking OS/2 in 1988. In the meanwhile Olivetti customers would benefit from the Company’s own environmental control programme that operated alongside allowing several DOS programs to run simultaneously. Users were then able to migrate to OS/2 when it became available.
Olivetti’s furniture operation Synthesis released Delphos a new range of office products that included desks, the “Flexa” chair and workstations
A Lloyds of London broker, PWS bought a UNIX based system using 3B2/400 and 3B2/600 minicomputers for use at their offices in the City and Cheltenham proving access for 100 users. Remote file sharing was provided using the latest release of UNIX software. The contract also included the installation of PDS cabling system at the Cheltenham location.
The Micro Division and CSG collaborated in providing a network of PCs for the Royal Ocean Racing Club’s Admirals Cup races for ocean going yachts. The PCs used for computing the results were installed at Cowes and Plymouth. Olivetti M15 portables were supplied for use afloat.
BOL’s football team were invited by Olivetti Netherlands to participate in the 15th annual football cup (was this because we had beaten Italy in 1971?). The team from Britain returned home worthy winners having not lost a game.
Olivetti, SEAT and Microsoft set up a joint venture in Rome the Eikon Corporation to develop the new computer memory CD-ROMs. Eikon would design, develop, produce and market application software for this new technology.
Her Majesty the Queen opened the latest exhibition collaboration between BOL and The British Museum “ The Glass of the Caesars”, the display was in London for over three months.
At the Queen Elizabeth Conference Hall on the same day November 19, Olivetti launched to the world press, “Open Systems Architecture”. OSA was to become the Company’s cornerstone for data processing strategy over the coming years. The logo for OSA was the famous “Bridge” that when expanded showed how the complete range of DP products from individual workstations to corporate mainframes could be linked together through hardware, software and networks.
In December a new style newsletter was produced, being both larger than its predecessor and printed on a colour background.
CSG put in motion the first steps for the Company achieving BS5750 Quality Standards. A steering committee was established to ensure that over the following 12 months all parts of the service organisation met the exacting standards required.
The year ended in a in a similar manner to its start with a substantial order from Abbey National Building Society for £20M! This was British Olivetti’s largest order to date. The contract covered the supply of 4000 PCs, 750 LSX3000 the new minicomputer and 2000 printers. The operating system was Olivetti “Personal Banker” that provided multitasking with a migration path to OS/2.
1988 B&Q placed a £3M contract for the supply of ORS500 Point of Sale Terminals, PC Controllers and Starlan (a 1M version of Ethernet). The PC Controllers were also used for kitchen designs, office automation and stock control.
CSG’s push into third party maintenance TPM increased with the setting up of a new BOL subsidiary company to maintain DEC systems. Dec had an installed base of over 20,000 systems in the UK. The new company followed on from CSG acquiring the maintenance operations of Triumph-Adler and systems house Butel. BOL also “bought” the maintenance contracts of First Computer.
A £1M TPM contract was won from Natwest for the support of 10,000 Wyse terminals and 5,000 printers being supplied by BT. The Stock Exchange placed an unique order on CSG to install and maintain “Market Eye” terminals that displayed stock market information via BBC TV screens to anyone with a suitable receiver and aerial.
January had seen Office Systems introduce two fax machines the TLM810 for desk use and theTLM910 designed for centralised applications. Olteco the Olivetti Telecommunications subsidiary in Ivrea who also produced the TE range of telex terminal designed the fax machines.
The ground floor of Putney was ready for use in the spring following the fire in May of the previous year.
Barclays Bank placed a significant order valued at £36M with CSG to maintain equipment in the branches, this was BOL’s largest ever contract. The single contract with CSG replaced 270 individual contracts that Barclays had with a plethora of suppliers. 300 new jobs were created by the single order.
BOL won a further order from Dixons for the PC1 home computer made by Prodest who were an Olivetti subsidiary with manufacturing facilities in Pozzuoli near Naples (the telex terminals were also made at the same plant).
A new UK joint venture was established Olivetti-Lee Data to address the IBM 3270 market, the new company was based in Marlow Buckinghamshire. The company was 51% owned by Olivetti and 49% by Lee-Data Corporation of the USA.
In the summer it had been announced that CSG had won a contact to maintain TOPIC share information systems in six regional Stock Exchanges that had been set up after last year’s “Big Bang” when the manner in which the UK Stock Exchange changed dramatically.
The Software Division based in Putney who distributed third party PC software and plug-in boards continued to expand. Having achieved a turnover of more than £7M last year they took on the distribution of Olivetti software.
The back page of the July issue explained the benefits of Olivetti’s Pension scheme compared to SERPs run by the Government, it was also noted that staff may be approached by zealous salesmen trying to sell pensions!
In the summer the launch of the latest version of the Personal Banker PB was announced running on M290/380 PCs. The new PB was directly portable onto MS-OS/2.
The new PC M290 was launched at the PC Users Show this new PC used the popular Intel 80286 and could run either MS-DOS or MS-OS/2. BOL’s view at the time was that users did not need the power of the more expensive 80386 to run their applications.
BOL’s involvement at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships increased with the supply of 20 PCs and 11 printers providing the results and scheduling service.
In October there was a major announcement, the Olivetti Organisation would be restructured from the beginning of 1989 into three discrete companies each specialising in its market area:
· Olivetti Office
· Olivetti Systems and Networks
· Olivetti Information Systems (not operational in the UK).
Details were to follow
BOL became a founding sponsor of the Conran Foundation’s Design Museum being built at Butler’s Wharf near Tower Bridge.
BOL’s football team once again won the International Football Tournament held in Holland.
DHSS placed a further order for the ETV260 video-typing workstations including training and installation. This order, the latest over 18 months, brought the number of ETVs purchased to over 200.
At the end of the year Olivetti was going to increase their attack on the home market prior to the Christmas spending spree, with the introduction of the CWP1 dedicated word processor. The CWP1 would be sold through leading high street stores including, Boots, Dixons, John Menzies and Wildings.
The ET2000 Range of electronic typewriters could now be upgraded to ETV2900 screen based systems with two disk drives.
The Military Work Force who reported to the MOD had taken delivery of an Olivetti based surveying and drafting system. The solution supplied comprised a 3B2 file server, M240 PC and four PE28 personal engineering colour-graphic workstations.
1989 The new structure mentioned above took many months to establish and bed down. Paulo Tosi was Country Manager and MD of Olivetti Systems and Networks OS&N and John Kernick retuned from running Olivetti subsidiaries in Canada and Australia to become MD of Olivetti Office known in house as Oli Office.
Oli Office had four sales divisions, Office Systems, Microcomputers, Supplies (GBD) and Printers. GBD worked through 4000+ dealers selling Olivetti supplies plus those of HP and IBM. They also had a network of consultants selling the Synthesis range of office furniture.
OS&N had five sales divisions: Image Processing selling FileNet, Oliservice (CSG), Systems marketing mini-computers including 3Bs and LSXs, Software Products who were accountable for all software sold by OS&N, this division operated from new premises located at Poyle near Heathrow and finally Major Accounts.
Major Accounts was split into three divisions:
Olivetti Office
Olivetti Systems and Networks
Olivetti Information Systems (not operational in the UK).
Major success for the new OS&N Company included a £20M contract from Leeds Permanent Building Society for 500 LSX3010 minicomputers and 2500PB, this equipment was used to upgrade the existing Olivetti front counter systems.
British Airways subsidiary Travicom purchased PC workstations for the European Reservation system Galileo.
Derbyshire Building Society replaced their Ericsson system with Olivetti front and back systems in an order valued at £2M.
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