Gsi (UK)

Gsi (UK) - stood for the company "Générale de Service Informatique" Limited.

Gsi (UK) was formed when Société Générale acquired the company Cybernetics Research Consultants in London, UK, in (year 1979????). The company was renamed to Gsi and traded as a market research and computer services provider.

The Gsi services included:

• computer bureau (online timesharing services), based on Honeywell and, later, Amdahl mainfraime computer systems.
• turnkey vehicle retail dealership sales systems, based on DEC PDP-11 mini-computer systems.
• market research data gathering and analysis (as had been previously provided by Cybernetics Research Consultants).

The bureau services arm of the company took advantage of the development of commercially available microcomputers, offering them as an alternative to dumb teletype terminals. The microcomputers used the CP/M operating system, and were generally programmed in BASIC, giving customers a potential cost-saving - they could enter new/update data, and batch it up on the microcomputer, and then connect and download it to the mainframe as a batch file, thus minimising online connect time - which was otherwise a significant cost.