Service in Informatics and Analysis

Service In Informatics And Analysis

Service in Informatics and Analysis (SIA Ltd.) was one of the pioneering time-sharing service bureau companies in the late 1960s, later known as SIA Computer Services. Its head office was located at Lower Belgrave Street, close to Victoria Station in London, and the company had branch offices in Edinburgh, Manchester, the West End, Paris and (much later) in Hong Kong. SIA offered terminal services via the Post Office telephone network at speeds of 10, 15, 30, 60 and 120 characters per second for Teletype-style terminals and of 1200 baud, 2400 baud and 4800 baud for Remote Job Entry terminals. Later with the release of the IBM PC, systems were developed to emulate the Remote Batch and interactive terminals. Clients could also visit the head or branch offices to submit their jobs personally or have them accepted and supervised by the production department.

In 1968 the company installed a Control Data Corporation CDC 6600 mainframe computer – the first CDC 6600 installed in the United Kingdom. It was generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, outperforming its fastest predecessor, IBM 7030 Stretch, by about three times. It remained the world's fastest computer from 1964 to 1969, when it relinquished that status to its successor, the CDC 7600. By 1974 SIA added more processing power by installing a Control Data Cyber-72 at Victoria.

SIA had assembled a comprehensive library of proven software packages drawn from all over the world. They covered a range of disciplines: electronics, management science, integrated survey and statistical, integrated cluster analysis, segmentation analysis, simulation, financial planning, production planning and control systems, civil and structural engineering, finite element stress analysis, box girder bridge design, highway engineering, business systems, business data processing, database management and many others.