About Unified Technology Ltd

1985 – 1986. The invention of ‘desktop publishing’

In 1985 Phil Robinson was proprietor of a litho printing business in Manchester, while his brother Andy was a Cambridge and Stanford graduate programmer and artificial intelligence researcher. A friend in the new ‘desktop computer’ business persuaded Phil to buy a computer (an Advance 86B - the first ever IBM PC clone), at which point he discovered that it could do almost nothing useful at all. He started to learn how to write software…

After calling in Andy, Unified Technology Ltd was formed in 1986, initially to manufacture and market ‘TypeCast’, which was the first commercially available desktop publishing system for the IBM PC. We had the only working product at the first London desktop publishing show (1986), and rapidly established distribution in England, Germany, Belgium and the USA. By 1992 we had offices in Frankfurt and New York and 9 UK employees. By 1992 we had also made our big mistake, which was to decide that it wasn’t worth writing a Microsoft ‘Windows’ version of our TypeCast software, since Windows would never be a success. Ahem.

1994 – 1995. NeXT centre Manchester

Unified Technology together with ‘Mintra’ a local computer services company, sank a substantial sum into the ‘NeXT’ computer in order to franchise the ‘Manchester NeXT centre’. The ‘NeXT’ was a Unix based computer which looked like a successor to the Apple Mac, but after a year of marketing and selling enough to cover only direct costs, the machine was effectively withdrawn from sale, leaving the project high and dry.

1992 – 2000. Guy Foam Digital ltd

Guy Foam was formed in 1992 largely to use the skills and equipment that Unified Technology had acquired while also providing a platform for other programming projects. It was a pre-press service provider of image setting and reprographics. It was relatively ‘hands off’ for us, and during its life we wrote ‘Jobtrack’, a job flow control system for pre-press companies which is still in use in the industry today. Version 1 was a client based windows / Mac application, whilst version 2 was our first Linux/cgi based intranet app. Jobs are booked in and out, progressed, and eventually billed via a web browser. Effectively, Jobtrack 2 provided a digital job bag via a web browser. Later, when the internet was capable of doing so, additions enabled a job‘s progress to be entered and tracked by the client over the internet.

We also wrote a CD based electronic directory system during this period for Elsevier publishing’s ‘European electronics suppliers directory’. They had tried the standard ways of doing it (Macromedia et al) and came to us because, with some 12,000 products on the database, they needed a faster search system than they could find 'off-the-shelf'. We wrote the initial version and updated it for the next three years (the directory was released annually), after which Elsevier were sold to Read publishing and the project was taken in house.

During this period (late nineties) we also supplied support and back end software for various websites; notably Manchester's Bridgewater Hall (project management for version 1, web hosting and scripts) and ‘plod.org’. (This project involved writing a SQL server based transaction system for the innovative but now sadly defunct ‘plod’ micro currency). We also produced on CD, floppy disk and website Manchester City Council’s ’Manchester plan’ – a 10 year planning forecast and policy document; forerunner of the Council's current ‘Unitary Development Plan’ (UDP).

In 1998 we were contracted by Dostana Telecommunications to write a networked communication system to facilitate call logging for their premium telephone services. The company had some 200 lines routed to a call centre of 30 to 50 staff at any one time. Our system interfaced to their PBX (switchboard) and put an incoming call through to the first available operator. Various statistics were recorded including call time, duration, operator ID etc. and reports could be produced including analysis by caller ID, operator and call subject.

2000 – current. Press4print.com

In 2000 – the year of the dot.com boom - we were approached by the nascent ‘Press4print’ who wanted a partnership with us to develop a ‘what you see is what you get’ stationery ordering system to enable large multinationals to customise and order stationery items via the web, while effectively controlling their brand assets. Because of our experience in publishing with ‘TypeCast’ and web based job processing with ‘Jobtrack’, we were soon able to come up with a solution.

Investment funding was gained in April 2000 for this project at which point it was named ‘press4print.com’. After a year’s work with web designers and sub-contracting some of the software, the system was up and running fully in June 2001. As a result, we sold off our Guy Foam reprographics business and re-invested in web servers, bandwidth and the rest of the internet infrastructure necessary to host serious web based services.

Today (2010), Press4print.com is providing print ready artwork via a browser interface for some very large international companies. Shell Oil, Lloyds Bank, the NHS, Fujitsu and Airbus are just some of the companies who use our software to deliver customised, print ready pdf files to print centres in London England for European distribution and Houston, Texas for North American customers.

2001 - The ‘socs’ server

One of the spin-offs from the press4print project was that we developed various document management systems, which were spun off into a separate project called ‘socs’ (so called because it was initially envisaged that it would be used by ‘societies’ – groups of people with a common interest).

‘Socs’ is again web-based, and provides dynamic live websites by allowing the designer to interactively edit not only the web page’s content (as would a content management system) but also the structure and design of the site. Websites are built using collections of ‘objects’ rather than using HTML or XML. By adjusting the properties of these objects, all aspects of a website or other data structure can be built from scratch by a web designer. More to the point though, the designer can also ‘design in’ levels of interactivity for the end user.

Socs was first used in June 2001 to produce a system for URBED (Urban and Economic Development Ltd) which allowed them to provide a dynamic and live website by altering and updating its content at will. The software supports multiple organisations and users who can all access the same databases. This is still in use today (2008).

After adding some more object types, socs was used again in 2002 as the basis of a website for ‘Waters North West’. They were previously having to pay their ISP to make even minor changes to their website, so were pleased to be able to keep their site up to date – even add new sections for special projects – themselves.

Various other relatively small web and intranet based systems were worked on during this period. A file swapping area for customers of the Manchester Ad agency ’Barrington Johnson Lorrains’, a selection of South Manchester Civic Societies were ‘socs powered’. A number of simple, non-interactive, web sites were also completed including Seventhstring software; the worlds leading supplier of music transcription software.

2003 – 2004

In 2003 we collaborated in a number of ‘non-socs’ projects including helping Mintra Ltd provide documentation and training for a variety of ISP (internet service providers) in the Gambia and Somalia. This involved installing and producing training materials using ‘moodle’; an open source a course management system (CMS).

In 2004 we worked with US based print suppliers to roll out an expanded coverage of Press4Print in the USA to enable local print of US orders.

We were asked to provide interactive picture library software for Manchester company ‘Pictures for Press’, who provide a web based picture service for the news industry. Again, socs was pressed into service to provide the necessary features and to date (2005), we host this service for them and clients include The Lowry picture collection, the Imperial War Museum North and Manchester City Art Gallery.

We also completed a web publishing project for the Open University which allows their staff to generate on-line training resources interactively.

2005 – 2006

We continued to develop our ‘socs’ server, which formed the basis of a number of new data structures and web sites, working towards a commercial release of socs to other developers in mid 2005. As our existing customers expand, we are continuing to support and develop our services to meet their demands.

2007 – 2008

Our major client 'Press4print' gained a substantial contract to supply business cards for many of the UK's largest organisations. This required automatic on-line processing of some 200 orders per day. Orders are processed up to the point of being automatically imposed ready for print, with flexible imposition schemes, barcoded top sheets and automated despatch systems.

By adding some modules (notably our online imposition system) to Socs, we were able to develop this workflow in less than 3 months from initial discussion to implementation. Our network infrastructure was substantially upgraded in early 2008 to support not only the greater throughput but the 24/7 online and minimal downtime requirements.

2009 - now: Printflo

When Press4print was first conceived back in 2000, its name was 'Printflo'. 2009 marks the release of a totally new version of this product. Over the years we've written a range of pre-press and pdf based products and we have finally put all this together in Printflo 3.

Printflo is a configurable, web-server based workflow with a variety of optional modules, such as online imposition, web2print, editable interactive documents. It uses modern technologies - ajax, xml, ldap, rpc - to deliver on-line document editing and ordering, accept orders from 3rd party systems, online web-based imposition, pdf document server, multi-resolution and colourspace images and much more. See Products/printflo for more information.

2010 - now: DocTk

We were working hard on Printflo throughout 2009 and the early part of 2010, and when we'd finished we realised we needed to do a bit of re-branding. Determined to keep Printflo as flexible as possible, we'd added the ability to 'web scrape' and perform key/val and regular expression substitutions on existing web pages (in order to build their content into printable pdf files). We also added the ability to render our xddf format document files to html (as well as pdf) pages. These and some other features turn out be incredibly powerful when allied to Printflo's ability to make pdf files and inject them into pre-press workflows, so we decided to release the system, rather than just Printflo itself, as the Document toolkit ('DocTk').

We continue to support and host Press4print and Socs for a variety of clients.