Latest building for LINC already too small

Press, 14 July 1987, Page 28

Latest building for LINC already too small

By

NEILL BIRSS

Christchurch’s Unisys LINC Development Centre has already outgrown the new building opened only a few months ago. It is taking over the building nearby formerly occupied by AGCO, and is converting it into another 39 offices for staff. The centre now has a staff of about 70, and according to Mr Denis Breese, the marketing and public affairs director, has to bring programmers from overseas. It cannot find enough suitable people in New Zealand. This financial year, the centre will have a net income of about $lO million, equivalent to the income of its first four years. Mr Breese dates the age of the centre as five years: the time it has been in Sheffield Crescent, Burnside. If the expanded centre is already bursting with people at its marble and glass seams, it is also packed tight with computer equipment. The centre recently received its eleventh mainframe, a Sperry 2200. Three computer halls are now full. The LINC centre has easily the greatest concentration of computing power in New Zealand, and probably more than any other site in Australasia. The equipment, which is supplied by Unisys, for which the LINC centre is a research and development contractor, is worth about $4O million. The site has about 100 terminals, and numerous microcomputers.

The Sperry is the first mainframe not of Burroughs ancestry to arrive at the site. Its purpose is to allow the centre to convert LINC to run on Sperry hardware. (Burroughs took over Sperry to form the Unisys Corporation.) Mr John Ascroft, senior software engineer, product development, says the centre has a team of six working on the conversion. This includes Sperry staff on secondment from the United States. He expects the task to take about two years. Sperry LINC will be totally compatible with other Unisys LINC. Most of LINC is written in LINC, so subsequent updates on which the centre is working continuously will run on Sperry 2200-1100 equipment. The Sperry 2200 running at the LINC centre has dual processors, 24Mb of memory and runs 3.2 gigabytes of disk. The evolution of Unisys from Burroughs and Sperry has effectively doubled the market for LINC. Sperry has been strong in areas not concentrated on by Burroughs. These include banking, airlines, and Government administration. Sperry had its own program-genera-tor, Mapper, and this has been assessed by LINC staff in Christchurch. Mr Ascroft says it is complementary to LINC. He describes LINC as shining in high-volume processing, while Mapper allows end users to design their own I reporting procedures.