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British Inventor Donates Archive to
Brighton UniversityOn
May 12th 2009 Gateshead Council celebrated the 25th Anniversary of
the world’s first online home shopping by Mrs Jane Snowball. Mrs
Snowball was found through research into online shopping for the
digitised Michael Aldrich Archive which has been donated today to
the University of Brighton.
Michael Aldrich invented online shopping in 1979 and from 1980
onwards he designed, manufactured, sold, supported and maintained
online shopping systems for many famous companies including Ford,
Peugeot-Talbot, General Motors and Nissan mainly in the UK. He was
responsible for the world’s first Business-to-Business online
shopping system for Thomson Holidays in 1981 and the world’s first
Business to Consumer supermarket system used by Mrs Snowball in
Gateshead and another ground-breaking Business to Consumer system in
Bradford, England. Online retail shopping in the UK in 2008 was
worth over £50 billion and the worldwide market was probably over
$500 billion. Michael Aldrich also invented the Teleputer in 1980,
wrote the seminal paper on cabling the UK for broadband in 1981 and
co-authored the government report ‘Cable Systems’ in 1982. He also
wrote one of the seminal books on the information superhighway
‘Videotex Key to the Wired City’ published in 1982. He had a 38 year
career in the IT industry including 20 years as Chief Executive of
ROCC Computers. He retired in 2000.
The Michael Aldrich Archive covers the period 1977-2000 and includes
the stories of the inventions, Case Studies of clients, documents,
photo and video reference material and press cuttings. Thousands of
people who were involved with these projects will also be invited to
contribute material. As a website it will be opened in December 2009
and will be publicly accessible.
“This is an important Archive for the British IT industry” said Luke
Aldrich, Chief Executive of ROCC. ”The Archive represents some of
the innovative successes of a small British company. The projects
that are reported in the Case Studies, in turn, show the
achievements of companies and organizations that are household names
in the UK. In many ways the Archive is a Roll of Honour of some of
the leading UK IT pioneers of the last part of the 20th century. To
complement this material we are hoping to build, as a second phase
staring in 2010, a substantial ‘People’ contribution to the Archive
so that it can become not only a technological record but also a
social record of the remarkable achievements of many remarkable
people.”
The span of IT innovation depicted in the Archive from 1977-2000 is
astonishing. From a G8 Summit to the Papal Visit to Poland, from NHS
pathology laboratories to training at Barclays Bank, from selling
cars and Car Finance with real-time credit checks at a garage to
farm management systems, from pricing all UK doctors’ prescriptions
to processing all the UK driving and vehicle licenses, from
electronically reading handwritten timesheets for the British Rail
payroll to electronically processing Cattle Passports in helping to
solve the BSE crisis, Michael Aldrich and his team provided
solutions and documented many of them. His systems changed a number
of industries including retailing, car sales, packaged holidays,
finance houses and credit reference. Around 100 UK case studies are
in the Archive.
In Eastern Europe 1977-2000, Michael Aldrich supplied systems to the
then Czecho-Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and the USSR. From the 1980
Moscow Olympics to the Siberian Gas Pipeline, from steelworks to
truck plants to food processors to chemical companies to paper
industries to banks to breweries to book publishers to railways to
donating computers to Civic Forum to fight the first democratic
election campaign after the Velvet Revolution in Czecho-Slovakia, he
provided IT solutions in the former Soviet bloc for over 20 years
and he had a ringside seat in the decline and fall of the Soviet
Empire.
For further information please contact:-
Philippa Aldrich
Tel: 01273 274705
Email: marketing@rocc.co.uk
