In September 1983, in the middle of PNX 2.0 developments, ICL decided to close the Development facility at Dalkeith. This was part of a general reorganisation by Robb Wilmot to achieve Business Centres within ICL responsible for their own budgets and products.
The PERQ Business Centre was the third to be defined and would be located in Kidsgrove. Space was made available in a new open plan area so that all people working on the project would be located together. The decision to close Dalkeith was based on it not being very economic to run (a large rented country house in Scotland).
Roger Batson replaced Chris Barfield as head of the Business Centre with Roger Ashbrooke as Development Manager, Roger Vinnicombe in charge of Project Planning and Reg Chamberlain responsible for Marketing. At that time, Roger Ashbrooke was acting as a liaison person with Three Rivers and the view was that he had been put in to improve relations with Three Rivers (to go full circle, Roger had been in charge of software developments when the project was in Bracknell before it moved to Dalkeith).
The aim was to have a team of 80 at Kidsgrove with hopefully 60% coming from Dalkeith. PERQ3 was still the long-term development aimed at September 1985.
The decision to move turned out to be disastrous initially. Roger Batson made a poor showing at the European PERQ User Group Meeting soon after. It was also believed that the management proposal was failing to attract people from Dalkeith.
Within a month, Roger Batson had been replaced by Charles Hughes and Roger Ashbrooke by Alvar Jones (who had been involved with Three Rivers on PERQ3).
By October, ICL were offering cash incentives to get staff to move from Dalkeith to Kidsgrove. Even so, few of the 77 technical staff moved from Dalkeith. Some were employed by Edinburgh University while others grouped together to join start-up companies such as Spider Systems and OWL.
Later, Roger Vinnicombe and Reg Chamberlain left to set up Advent Systems.
The effect of the move from Dalkeith was to reduce significantly ICL's expertise in the PERQ area and it probably took at least a year to recover from this loss. On the plus side, three companies of ex-ICL employees began to provide added value services to the PERQ product.
Advent Systems went on to market Accent as a rival operating system to PNX!
Although in the long term beneficial, the PERQ product was for a second time faced with a massive change in staff and environment. The new Business Centre had a specific remit to make the PERQ profitable. Due to the change of staff and the need to be a profit centre in itself, a much more hard-nosed attitude prevailed and the Memorandum of Understanding with SERC was effectively torn up as part of this move. SERC continued to receive discounts agreed as part of the MOU but the ability to help with and be a part of ICL developments decreased from this point.
The history of UNIX developments coupled with the two major moves in ICL is given in Figures 38.1 and 38.2.
