The Early Years
After several years helping Sperry stabilize systems at customers in the West, Joe Dale took a position in Technical Planning and Integration for the County of Los Angeles. There he met future business partners and employees. Joe left in 1978 to form his own company.
He gained contracts in COBOL programming and systems support for Sperry customers in Southern California. Soon FCI acquired the rights to a software tape management system. Joe and his team expanded it to fulfill its commercial potential. STAR-1100 became the preeminent tape management system in the 2200 community—crucial to many customers’ operations.
Helping Clients Succeed
FCI established itself as a top software provider, attracting large computer equipment manufacturers who wanted to attach their specialty peripheral devices to Unisys systems. FCI integrated these leading-edge storage products with both the OS 2200 and A Series mainframes. Highlights include:
- Building the first commercial 2200 TCP/IP stack by adapting university code.
- Expanding data options with parallel processing capability of Teradata’s database system.
- Automating tape operations via the StorageTek robotic products.
- Building internal teams in documentation, quality assurance, training, and support.
Expanding Our Portfolio
Over the years, FCI helped OS 2200 customers improve their security and business continuity by introducing additional key products:
OTS-1100 & IDS-2200
Authenticates authorized users executing permitted transactions, and tracks security-related events on the 2200 system.
Library Manager
Enables the attachment of the DSI virtual tape library to OS 2200 systems.
AccommoDate
Helped customers ensure that their applications would perform without anomalies through the Y2K transition.
ESP-Dorado
Gives customers visibility into their storage resources, with dashboard and interactive interfaces.
