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The firm has a rich heritage in the field of Information Technology, marked by a litany of pioneering milestones and innovations. The partnership was established in 1989 by Richard Taylor (Alpha), Ross Clarke (HP) and Steve Smedley (DEC), and has been integral to the evolution of the internet and IT services in the UK, and we are the UK's oldest Business ISP. We formalised the Partnership and adopted Global Enterprise Network, the name of our EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) solution, which we launched in 1989 and was X25, then X400 over private networks and pads.
As the internet arrived, we changed Network to Networks and adopted GEN Professional in 1992 to signify the new direction and our separation from the domestic markets amid the flurry of early ISPs because we've always been strictly B2B. Over our 37 years of innovation we have had the opportunity to work with some of the biggest names in tech, both past and present, and to participate actively in the UK's technological transformation.
Before the advent of the internet, we specialised in Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) over X.400 and X.25 with leased circuits. Our fastest link was 256k and data payloads were very small. We supported customers with mainframes and mini-computers, such as AlphaMicro (AM100L/AM1000etc), IBM (System360/370/390, Series 1, System 32/34/36/38), Prime (300-600, 750 and 850), HP (1000/3000/9000) etc. This period was characterised by technologies that now seem very antiquated, like the use of VHS tapes for backup solutions, RS232 Terminals, modems and point to point leased circuits often called private wire because that's all you got, wire.
Whilst 'some' of these systems were based on Unix, many were proprietary and their various flavours, technologies and even character sets made interoperability tricky. We provided middleware together with connectivity allowing cross platform messaging and data interchange. This data interchange (EDI) allowed companies to automate order processing between themselves, such as one supplier requesting stock from another based on 'just-in-time' methodologies driven by their ERP system, a job that was previously done manually by a team of buyers working from printed reports. Early EDI was fraught with challenges, but the reward was significant especially in larger supply-chains such as automotive or retail.
GEN witnessed and contributed to the early stages of the Internet, providing one of the first commercial dial-up Internet services, transitioning from older forms of online communication like X25, X400 and Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs). Our initial trial setup consisted of 8 Pace Nightingale modems and a 256k leased line from BT, connected to an IBM 5150 with an 8 port RS232 card, indicative of the technology of the time. This trial was short lived and we quickly moved to E1 based dial-up and a 2Mbps circuit from BTNet.
At this time, PIPEX was our only real competitor, and we enjoyed a friendly rivalry for a time before the market exploded. The consumer providers that arrived alongside us, Demon among them, were serving an entirely different customer. We have never sold a domestic service in our history, and we have never wanted to: business connectivity and consumer connectivity are different disciplines, and trying to do both well has undone a good many providers since.
In the early 90s, GEN launched GENMail, blending X.400, FidoMail and SMTP messaging. This was a significant step in bringing businesses online and popularising email with entry level services provided free of charge to small businesses. GEN also played a role in expanding internet connectivity, exclusively offering services such as toll-free dial-up and 64/128k ISDN internet access long before BTWholesale, even pioneering cellular modem access via BT Cellnet in concert with BT. We were the first ever company to incorporate PGP encryption into email services, which was, at the time, thought to be unnecessary by most, and today we still provide encrypted email.
We became a certified Intel Advanced Networking Partner, writing BIOS code for early intel network cards, and deploying Intel's Network portfolio in our east coast data-centre with some of the very first layer 2ish switches, and we collectively developed Intel Insight, an early forerunner of RMON based on Intel's switches and routers.
GEN's first website hosting platform was based on two DEC AlphaServers and hosted http/1 and served very early HTML and SGML. GEN introduced early Microsoft hosting based on Windows NT and HP LH4 Servers a couple of years later. For a short time an OS2 Warp web server was in operation in co-operation with IBM, but this was short lived. With DEC's financial troubles, we expanded hosting with Sun Microsystems and solaris based web-servers and finally migrated again to early Linux based Servers.
To the left is an advertisement in the Sleaford Standard on 28 November 1996 (full page available on request), which shows our portfolio was already extensive, and touting high level encryption long before anyone else thought they needed it. To the right was an article about GEN from December of the same year. Our directory service (long before Microsoft's Active Directory) was a solution that allowed single sign-on for users to our internet, email, GCS and other systems, and this was unique in the industry at the time. We also had interconnects to networks not on the 'internet' yet, such as BLAZE (The British Library) and JANET (Joint Academic Network) and these could be accessed by dial-in users.
To the right we have an advertisement in the Business Times in April 1997, profiling our all-in-one package for small businesses, offering a high quality website, designed and hosted for a year, a high speed modem (V.92) with unlimited internet access, 5 mailboxes, no connection fee and 24/7 support for just £149.95 and £10 pcm. This was quite disruptive at the time and actually we made a loss in year one on this deal, but this was the decade when there was a land-grab for connectivity customers, and most of our competitors were just pushing internet access.
GEN was involved in the development of the VideoLink system, which was one of the first video conferencing solutions to be commercially available over IP. The system was designed to be user-friendly and easy to use, and it gained popularity among businesses and organisations looking for a cost-effective way to conduct video conferences.
As dial-up exploded, GEN sourced Hayes Century R/RAS platform for high density connectivity. Each Rack would support 1 E1 circuit and 30 channels (30 analogue dial-in or 15 ISDN2 Bonded Dial in), and GEN had 8 of these allowing for 240 simultaneous connections initially, but as market exploded this was increased up to 80 units in total making GEN the largest operator of Hayes Century products in the world, with dial-up POPs (Point of presence) in 10 countries.
GEN was the first company to offer ISDN2 bonded circuits for aggregating bandwidth over digital dial-up, each channel was 64K, and each NTU could bond two channels to give 128k, and the 'Gateway' service, aptly named 'Office Gateway' or OG could handle up to 8 ISDN2 devices, giving a maximum of 512k. The software on the gateway, which was a caching proxy server running on Windows NT was able to measure network demand and bring up more circuits as needed, which again was a first in the Industry.
When GEN introduced toll-free Dial-in on the Diamond Cable network, customers could keep channels up 24/7 at no cost and this was a year before toll-free dial-up in the UK. For customers outside of the Diamond cable area, we negotiated a deal with Affinity for an ingress cost of 1p/min which was unheard of at the time, allowing businesses to connect at a fixed cost, and this service was offered at a fixed price of £100/pcm, which for 64k access was really keen.
By the time BTWholesale Dial-up became a 'thing' businesses needed more bandwidth than 56k or 64k or even 512k and at the time the cost of private circuits was becoming far more sensible. GEN partnered with BT.net to deliver these fast (relatively at the time) connections from 64k up to 10Mbit before the arrival of DSL.
In 1990, GEN was selected to provide the firmware for a series of communications satellites, interfacing flight control and microwave communications hardware with a computer system that could operate on its own, but also could take commands from a ground station. This ran on Microware's OS-9000, a hard real-time operating system, on MIPS processors. For obvious reasons it had to be able to handle any eventuality, since even our most comprehensive service level agreements didn't include site visits to orbit.
Redundancy went all the way down. There were three OS-9000 backplanes, 3 processors, 3 memory cards, 3 io cards, and 6 power supplies. Two of the OS-9000 racks were duplicates in every way right down to the code, but the third was the monitor, responsible for supervising the other two chassis and it had the ability to power up, power down, reboot, and control each of the chassis individually. The main comms channel was in-band but we also had an out-of-band antenna that could connect directly to the monitor at 300-baud if for some reason the downconverter failed. The satellite had an operating lifespan of 40 years since it was designed to operate over a wide range of frequencies and protocols, which for a satellite is a long time.
This was a military contract, and it is the reason there is so little to show for it here. No photographs, no source code and no documentation ever left the building, and staff were searched going in and coming out. We can tell you it flew and we can tell you how it was built, and that is as far as it goes. There is a particular discipline to writing code you will never be able to patch, for a customer who will never let you keep a copy of it, and it has shaped how we have approached engineering ever since.
It's nice to know that our software is still orbiting the planet, which also makes us the 'Highest' UK business service provider.
GEN was an early adopter of cloud storage and our first data storage solution, GEN Central
Storage (GCS), launched in 1991, was based on Novell Netware 3. This service allowed clients to dial in and
manage files through a primitive interface, or via FTP or Gopher, highlighting GEN's early recognition of
the potential of cloud technologies.
This platform was designed to be text-based, and the backend was written in sh and Perl. We had push and pull
delivery
scheduling and terminal file access was handled by a custom NCP -> Zmodem converter. This service was mainly
used
for text files and some early data files like CSV at its outset.
GCS morphed many times through the following years as internet speeds
increased and technologies evolved moving from Netware 3, to 4, to 5, then to FreeBSD
Our first GCS customer was Radio Rentals. Their mainframe pushed the following day's service schedules, sales visits and collections appointments up to GCS overnight, and each engineer and representative dialled in the next morning to pull down the files allotted to them before hitting the road. It is worth pausing on that: a national field workforce collecting its work from central storage over a dial-up link, in 1991. The idea that your files live somewhere else and your people fetch what they need from wherever they happen to be is sold as a modern one, and we were doing it for a household name before most of the industry had a word for it.
In 1998 we partnered with Nokia to provide a software solution for their new 9000 series of devices, linking our email service and GCS directly into the handsets. This enabled companies to share files from their offices with their representatives in the field, and allowed order taking to be pushed via GCS back to the clients fulfilment system.
In 2008, we phased out GCS in favour of our newer services like WebDAV and SFTP. We still operate cloud based storage solutions today, which are still popular with our clients for things like data-exchange, and off-site backups.
At the end of 1999, the internet was firmly established as a thing, and the need for 'payments' was in its infancy. GEN Invested a considerable sum in the development of GENActive, an online payment platform which integrated with banks for transferring money between companies on the internet. A GENActive account holder would be able to pay for a product or service, and GEN handled the transaction whether that was a credit card (MasterCard/Visa), bank transfer or cheque (yes, it handled cheques). Unfortunately, PayPal and Nochex were already entering the market and quickly took up market share, but the platform continued to handle payments for clients until 2011 when GEN's internal CRM systems were replaced.
At the end of 2000, GEN Purchased an IBM hardware maintenance company (KCL) and then merged their hardware support services into a newly formed company GENSupport, which took on all the staff and contracts for maintenance. The thinking at the time was that hardware maintenance was indeed a separate channel and should be managed as such, whereas the core business was an ISP. 6 years later however, it was clear that the separation was a mistake and internal disputes about whose 'fault' support call-outs were, between GEN (Connectivity and Systems) and GENSupport (Hardware) became a major distraction, and after several restructures the subsidiary was merged back into the main company. We continued to operate the service and maintenance business under the branding of GENSupport even to this day because it had and still does have a strong reputation for delivery.
At the end of 2001, GEN acquired Delta Security, a national alarm installer, with a view to monopolising what was a small trend in very early building automation (automatic lights, heat etc), integrating that and alarm monitoring with GEN's connectivity solutions. The company ran for 9 years until 2010 at which point it was sold wholesale due mostly to its lack of profitability with the 'smart building' not really taking shape as predicted.
Long before Amazon's AWS and Microsoft's Azure, GEN was offering cloud computing services in 2001, with our
first
platform based on VMWare's GSX Server, running on Pentium II and III servers, and from memory we had one
Xeon Netserver, maybe an LH4. Our first virtualisation customer was a company called NExt who hosted a
number of windows
virtual machines.
GSX was a very early type 2 hypervisor, which was tragically slow and fraught with technical issues, but
VMWare
were quick to release their first ESX type 1 hypervisor later that year which was a huge step forward in
both
performance and reliability.
We remained in the VMWare ecosystem until 2024 when the sale of VMWare to broadcom necessitated a move to
the KVM hypervisor.
To the left we have an article in the Business Times in December 2013, discussing the importance of email and communications, and at this time GEN was operating one of the first GroupWare solutions, bringing integrated corporate Calendar, Contacts, and email into one platform. Groupware, at the time was not widely utilised, but we provided it as a standard feature in our GENX messaging platform, which at the time was providing email with POP3, IMAP4, SMTP, Web, BBM and Exchange access for the total of £5 per mailbox.
It is easy to forget how separate all of this used to be. In the early 2000s a typical business kept its email on one system, its diary on paper or in a desktop application that knew nothing about anyone else's, and its contacts in whichever of those two the person using them preferred, or more often in a card index. Booking a meeting meant ringing round to find out who was free. Putting email, calendar, contacts and messaging behind a single login, so that a diary could be shared, a meeting proposed and a contact looked up without leaving the same window, was genuinely novel, and most of the market treated it as a luxury feature for large corporates with a Notes or Exchange budget to match.
We took the opposite view and shipped it as standard on every mailbox. The uptake was swift. Once one department in a company had a shared diary, the rest of the company wanted one within weeks, and the objection we heard most often was not the price but disbelief that it was included at all. Access from any client the customer already owned mattered as much as the features: POP3 and IMAP4 for the desktop, SMTP for anything that needed to send, a web client for staff away from their desk, Exchange access for the offices already committed to Outlook, and BBM for the BlackBerry handsets that were, at the time, how most people first read their mail away from the office.
That combination is now the baseline for every hosted mail platform on the market. It was not the baseline when we built it, and the discipline it taught us, that people will adopt something quickly when it is included, works with what they already have, and does not need explaining, still shapes how we put services together.
By 2010, IT maintenance had settled into a shape that suited everybody except the customer. Support was sold fixed price and multi-year, three years or five, and the commercial logic behind it was bid low, win the account, then find the money later. Agreements were drafted with that second step already in mind: the exclusions, the carve-outs and the careful definitions of what did not count as covered work were where the profit lived, because the price that won the tender was never going to produce any on its own. The client signed for certainty and received a document engineered to produce surprises.
We never worked that way, and we still took business from the firms that did, because we offered something none of them would match. New clients got their first month free. The reasoning was not complicated: nobody should be asked to commit to five years of anything without sampling the merchandise first. It cost us a month of labour on every prospect, and it won us more accounts than any tender we ever entered, largely because the incumbent could not answer it without explaining why they would rather not. It did not make us popular with our competitors.
The deeper problem was the pricing itself, and we knew it because we were doing it too. Quoting a fixed price contract meant working out roughly how many hours a year an estate might need, doubling it, adding something for the things that had not occurred to us, and presenting the result as a price. We had a system to estimate it. So did everyone else. Every one of them produced a confident figure from a foundation of guesswork, and the client paid that figure whether the year turned out quiet or brutal.
It is worth asking why IT alone worked this way. Your solicitor does not sell you five years of legal cover at a fixed monthly fee. You place a sum on account and draw against it as you need it. Your accountant is the same, so is your architect, so is very nearly every professional service anybody buys. Only IT support insisted on the fixed, multi-year model, and it is not there for any good reason. It is inherited, more or less directly, from the way IBM sold maintenance on machines that cost more than the building they stood in.
So in 2010 we stopped. The contracts went, the fixed prices went, and the annual renewal dance went with them. What replaced it is the arrangement we still run today: here are our rates, choose the service level you want, buy a block of hours, and use them as you need them. Anything you do not use carries over. Nothing expires because a date has passed.
Sixteen years on, the multi-year fixed price contract is still being pushed across our industry, clients are still signing them, and we still do not really understand why. Our position has not moved. Buy a hundred hours, use a hundred hours, buy another hundred if you want them. If you would rather go elsewhere, go, at any time, with no termination clause to negotiate your way out of. We can afford to offer that because clients do not leave, and they do not leave because the service is worth staying for. A firm that needs five years of your signature to keep you is telling you something about its service, and about the invoices you have not seen yet.
Much of what is described above is still in our possession. We kept the machines we ran and the machines our clients ran, from AlphaMicro, DEC and Prime minis through to the Hayes racks that carried the dial-up network, and a good deal of it still works. We threw away far more than we saved, usually because it was taking up space a rack needed, and we have regretted most of those decisions since.
The full collection is catalogued on the GEN Museum page, along with our archive of software, source code and manuals on the GEN WIKI. If you are restoring something of this vintage, or you are a museum wanting to borrow a piece for an exhibition, do get in touch.
When we first started, everything was moving so fast that not a day went by without some new
computer company launching with
the very latest this or that, and we had to invest constantly to stay relevant. There was never a dull day,
and our hardware turnover was massive.
We witnessed so many things, the collapse of DEC, the rise and fall of Sun, the failure of Prime,
Alpha, ICL and of course
the growth of Unix and then Linux as the number one platform. I remember having customers with
paper tape readers, and magtape. We had one customer running an IBM series 1, and when it crashed you had
to feed a box of paper cards into a reader to boot it - those were the days, when a hardware fault usually
involved a small fire. Do you remember when Microsoft thought the 'Internet' would never catch on and launched
MSN as the right way to do it.
The last 20 years have seen GEN evolve from an ISP to a full service IT company, offering a range of
services from connectivity to cloud storage, web hosting, and security. We've made mistakes over the years
investing in the wrong technology sometimes, but who didn't? We've survived and grown stronger because of it. Staying as
a Partnership has allowed us to quickly define direction and make rapid course corrections when needed.
There is a harder edged reason for it too, and a great deal of work has come to us on the strength of it. A limited company is a separate legal person, and when one fails
its debts stop there: the people who ran it can wind it up, walk away from what they owe, and be trading again the following month behind a new name. That pattern was
common in IT when we started and it is no less common now. A partnership offers no such shelter. The partners are jointly and severally liable for what the firm commits
to, so when we take on a project it is our own money standing behind it and not a balance sheet that can be closed down when the work goes badly. Clients have told us for
years that this was the deciding factor when they had something critical to place, and we would rather be judged on that than on a logo.
We have continued to innovate and adapt to the changing landscape of technology, and we're proud to
have been a part of the UK's IT industry for 37 years.
We believe things have certainly stabilised over the last decade, with connectivity and virtualisation
becoming a mainstream service that we base other services on.
AI is certainly an evolving landscape, and of course we're investing in that too, but you shouldn't
believe all the crazy claims in the media.
The future is certainly bright, and we very much look forward to it - even on a Monday.
If any of the above sounds like the sort of firm you would rather deal with, we would be glad to hear from you.