Systime Computers

~ the last words ~

I was five when this company was taken apart, in a city I have never been to, over a trade dispute between two governments that were not mine. It is still the most alarming story in British computing. Systime Computers Ltd was incorporated in Leeds on 3 October 1973, out of a partnership four men had set up the year before in John Gow's bungalow workshop. Gow was 27, a Leeds engineering graduate who had been a software support manager at Digital Equipment's British subsidiary and had noticed that hardly any of the customers he sold to understood what they had bought.

The company started with £2,800 of capital in a business where a single minicomputer cost £60,000, and it nearly folded immediately. What saved it was a Leeds jukebox firm called Musichire, which had bought a DEC machine and could not make it work. Systime came in as a consultant, sold them software and then replacement hardware, and that became the model for the next decade. The four moved into the canteen of an abandoned mill.

By the early eighties Systime was the second-largest computer manufacturer in Britain, with over 1,300 staff and turnover near £60 million, building minicomputers around DEC's own OEM components and, unlike most systems integrators, actually manufacturing what it sold. In 1979 it worked out that it could buy the identical parts 25 percent cheaper in the United States than DEC's British arm would charge, and filed an anti-trust action in America to force DEC to sell to it at American prices. That is the moment the rest of this becomes inevitable. DEC sued in 1983 over the VAX/VMS license and took $5.5 million in settlement, then came back in June 1984 claiming copyright in the layouts for seven of Systime's circuit boards and asking £5 million more. Those were the lawsuits. The lawsuits were not what killed it.

~ the record ~

~ the kill campaign ~

Because Systime's machines contained American parts, selling one abroad needed an export license from the US Department of Commerce as well as from the British DTI, under rules set by COCOM, the Western committee policing what could be sold to the Eastern Bloc. In 1982 Systime voluntarily admitted it had shipped some systems east without the American license and agreed to a fine. On any ordinary reading that closed the matter. DEC's lawyers in Britain then pressed much harder, alleging that Systime had also concealed the shipment of 400 minicomputers to Switzerland, disguised as jukeboxes and bound onward for the Eastern Bloc.

The directors said this was envy dressed up as law enforcement. In the House of Commons on 25 February 1986, Michael Meadowcroft, the member for Leeds West, put their allegation on the record: that DEC had run a "Kill Systime" campaign using private detectives, surveillance of employees, burglary and the destruction of documents. Some of those claims had already been aired around a January 1983 meeting with Ferranti and STC, and airing them helped make sure no British rescue ever came together. The government did eventually lodge a protest, though about the United States allegedly using the CIA to collect information on British firms rather than about any of this.

~ the fine ~

The American penalty was $400,000, which was not the painful part. It came with a prohibition on Systime using American goods, and Systime was a company whose entire product was built from American goods. The investigation covered exports between 1980 and 1983, and Systime was never accused of selling to the Soviet Union, only of shipping to seven non-aligned countries without the paperwork Washington required. Systime maintained throughout that it had broken no British law.

Corporate investors stopped putting money in. Around 1,000 of the Leeds factory jobs went, leaving roughly 200, and the directors put the total cost to the company's capital and profits at £110 million. One academic account concludes that by 1985, in the aftermath of American sanctions, the company was virtually destroyed. Control Data Corporation had bought a slice in 1983, which is when Gow left and Rod Attwooll came in from Texas Instruments, and in April 1985 it bought the rest, partly as a shield against the investigation that was still running.

~ dismemberment ~

Then February 1986, when DEC bought half of the Systime subsidiary off Control Data and walked away with the Customer Services Division: 250 employees and around 2,500 service contracts on DEC hardware, which was the only reliably profitable thing Systime still had. DEC dropped its £5 million copyright suit as part of the arrangement, and Meadowcroft accused it of having improperly colonized the company. On 21 April 1986 The Guardian gave Systime its front-page lead. One author simply called the company dismembered.

~ what came after ~

Computergram International reported the ending on 2 June 1989: Control Data had finally got shot of its troublesome UK Systime business, and the solution for the once-substantial Leeds systems integrator was dismemberment by management buy-out. Four companies came out of it. Computer Service Technology took the hardware distribution and eventually merged its way into Arrow ECS, while Manufacturing Solutions Group and Streetwise took the factory and retail software. Visionware took PC-Connect, the Windows-to-Unix product Systime had bet its last strategy on, and did well enough to be bought by the Santa Cruz Operation in 1994, ending up inside Oracle by way of Tarantella and Sun.

Control Data kept the Systime name on its paperwork and did nothing with it. Companies House number 01137518 filed its last accounts for the year to 31 December 1996 and its last annual return a year after that. It then sat on the register as a non-trading company, registered to an address on Farringdon Street in London, until it was finally dissolved on 2 February 2015, which is 26 years after the business stopped. Peter Wilkinson started his career there before co-founding Planet Online, and staffed many of his later Leeds ventures with Systime people. The Leeds Industrial Museum keeps some of the machines.

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