20 not out

20 not out!
On 1 August 2005, the McCarthy Taylor Partnership (MTP) marked a significant milestone. Twenty years ago, Bryan Taylor and Shaun McCarthy set up in business based in the front room of Shaun's home in the Cotswolds and the rest, as they say, is history.

Bryan and Shaun had met out in Saudi Arabia where they both worked for the largest firm of consulting engineers in the country. Bryan was running their substantial MOSS installation - in those days on a massive computer housed in its own air-conditioned building - and writing programs to help sort out the burgeoning sewer system in Riyadh. Shaun was their Chief Highways Design Engineer involved with everything from motorways to mountain roads to new city and industrial development. The pressure was constant to carry out large amounts of design to a very restricted timetable and they had to come up with innovative solutions to keep everything on track. This hothouse of activity produced a good working relationship, which they felt should continue when their tenure in Saudi Arabia came to an end.

The original concept of MTP was to combine expertise in programming, terrain modelling and highways engineering to form a consultancy that would be able to efficiently design roads in difficult terrain. At the time, the first technically useful desktop computers were starting to appear and it became feasible to start thinking about having individual design aids rather than being linked up to some remote mainframe, with all the IT overheads and problems that necessarily entailed in those days.

Around about this time, a major project to provide a road along the mountainous border between the Greek and Turkish sectors of Cyprus was mooted. Due to the volatile political situation, aerial photography was apparently not viable and a difficult ground survey would be required. Total Stations were starting to become widely available so MTP determined to commence operations by writing a program that would automatically convert this survey data into a useable ground model, on which a design for the road could be based. So, while Shaun went off to earn the Partnership some spending money by doing contract motorway maintenance work, Bryan set to, with the then unheard of luxury of 20Mb of hard disk space to play with, to write some suitable software.

To set the scene in a little more detail for those of you of less mature years, the typical PC was run by swapping 360Kb floppy disks around and the desirable ones had two floppy drives so you could access both programs and data - a great leap forward! MTP's first computer was a PC AT with the aforementioned 20Mb hard disk and a whole 640Kb of RAM, which fell to about 550Kb once DOS had loaded. The 12” monitor output a sickly green text in conjunction with an insistently flashing cursor and no graphics unless you wrote a suitable program yourself. All this then cost about £6,500 - enough to buy a couple of reasonable cars or a small house in some areas of the country! For a few hundred more, MTP was able to purchase a dot-matrix printer which could write on the continuous fan fold ruled paper that mainframes normally used, which allowed Bryan to keep track of some of the more complicated routines he was writing. The weight of all this kit meant that hernias were a constant threat whenever it was transported to show an interested party what MTP was doing. How times have changed. In common with many endeavours, things never turn out as planned. The Cyprus job did not materialise, the motorway work went on many months over its allotted time and Bryan's software morphed from an in-house aid to designing mountain roads efficiently into a stand alone Land Survey System. This MTP was then fortunately able to sell to various surveying organisations such as BKS, to whom we will be ever grateful for becoming our first customer thanks to the good offices of their then Chief Surveyor, Alan Barrow. Alan now has his own firm, Alan Barrow Associates, and still uses LSS for some challenging projects which keep coming his way.

As a sobering aside, the early manifestations of LSS were in modular form so you could pick the facilities you wanted to add to the basic modelling system, which, by the way, was then able to deal with 32,000 points. To obtain the full suite, it was necessary to part with a cheque for £4000 and an annual sum thereafter of £1600, so purchasing a reasonable computer, ancillaries, plotter and software certainly was not for the faint hearted. This may indicate just what good value LSS now is, particularly bearing in mind the vastly increased and superior facilities now available.

Over the years, the underlying strengths of the original concepts of the software meant it could be developed to perform other tasks and, the original name being therefore no longer appropriate, it became known simply by its initials of LSS. Various liaisons and relationships further developed the product and a separate limited company, now known as McCarthy Taylor Systems Ltd., was formed to separate out the LSS work from other MTP interests. This expanded to include an accident investigation package for the police and, latterly, the Photoscape product which provides affordable aerial views of England and Wales.

At the outset, Bryan and Shaun both believed that they would only have a few years to develop and make a living out of LSS. There were many fledgling companies trying to do similar things and the whole field was wide open. Virtually all of these have now disappeared or been absorbed into larger organisations. In the current vernacular, some got their business model wrong, others tried to expand too fast and lost sight of their original aims while others lacked something unique or the necessary expertise when the going got tough, especially during the numerous recessions experienced in the construction industry.

Of course, Bryan and Shaun were blissfully unaware of all these potential pitfalls at the time and merely carried on doing what their experience dictated. However, they always believed in taking the time to listen to their customers and trying to provide them with what they really wanted, even if they didn't quite know it themselves. The concept of paying for specialist software as you use it has also stood the test of time and continues to provide a sound financial footing for the future.

The McCarthy Taylor organisation thanks everyone for their encouragement, constructive criticism and support over the years. We welcome our newer users to the fold and look forward to serving you all in the future to ensure a mutually beneficial relationship.

Other events from 1985

Gorbachev became soviet leader in this year.

Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister and the average house price was £34,916. A litre of petrol was just 42.8p and the British singles chart was populated by such acts as The Eurythmics ‘There Must Be An Angel...’, Madonna ‘Into The Groove’ and Paul Hardcastle [Ne ne ne ne] ‘19’

Norman Whiteside scored one of the great FA Cup Final goals to beat newly-crowned League champions Everton 1-0 in extra time, even though Man. U. had been reduced to ten men with the sending off of Kevin Moran.

Sandy Lyle won the Open Golf Tournament at Sandwich, one shot ahead of Payne Stewart.

11th May a fire under one of the stands in the Bradford City football stadium killed 56 supporters and injured 256 others. The resulting inquiry resulted in new legislation governing safety at sports grounds across the UK.

10th July, Greenpeace's ship, Rainbow Warrior was blown up and sunk in Auckland Harbour killing one crew member.

13th July Live Aid was beamed to 1.5 billion people around the world and raised £30m to help the starving in Africa.

This was the year the Sinclair C5 arrived and almost as quickly disappeared.

September. Riots on the streets of Brixton sparked further unrest in Toxteth, Peckham and Tottenham. It all began when armed police raided a house in search of a man in connection with an armed robbery and accidentally shot dead the suspects mother.

In Coronation Street on the 7th August. Hilda gets an estimate for the roof repairs and disappears without telling anyone where she's going. Gail sends Phyllis to nurse Percy Sugden in an attempt to teach him a lesson.
And who said life is boring?

What were you doing in 1985?

Click here to view the entire Anniversary edition Newsletter (1.5Mb PDF document)

20 years of the McCarthy Taylor Partnership
20 not out! On 1 August 2005, the McCarthy Taylor Partnership (MTP) marked a significant milestone. Twenty years ago, Bryan Taylor and Shaun McCarthy set up in business based in the front room of Shaun's home in the Cotswolds and the rest, as they say, is history. Bryan and Shaun had met out in Saudi Arabia where they both worked for the largest firm of consulting engineers in the country. Bryan was running their substantial MOSS installation - in those days on a massive computer housed in its own air-conditioned building - and writing programs to help sort out the burgeoning sewer system in Riyadh. Shaun was their Chief Highways Design Engineer involved with everything from motorways to mountain roads to new city and industrial development. The pressure was constant to carry out large amounts of design to a very restricted timetable and they had to come up with innovative solutions to keep everything on track. This hothouse of activity produced a good working relationship, which they felt should continue when their tenure in Saudi Arabia came to an end. The original concept of MTP was to combine expertise in programming, terrain modelling and highways engineering to form a consultancy that would be able to efficiently design roads in difficult terrain. At the time, the first technically useful desktop computers were starting to appear and it became feasible to start thinking about having individual design aids rather than being linked up to some remote mainframe, with all the IT overheads and problems that necessarily entailed in those days. Around about this time, a major project to provide a road along the mountainous border between the Greek and Turkish sectors of Cyprus was mooted. Due to the volatile political situation, aerial photography was apparently not viable and a difficult ground survey would be required. Total Stations were starting to become widely available so MTP determined to commence operations by writing a program that would automatically convert this survey data into a useable ground model, on which a design for the road could be based. So, while Shaun went off to earn the Partnership some spending money by doing contract motorway maintenance work, Bryan set to, with the then unheard of luxury of 20Mb of hard disk space to play with, to write some suitable software. To set the scene in a little more detail for those of you of less mature years, the typical PC was run by swapping 360Kb floppy disks around and the desirable ones had two floppy drives so you could access both programs and data - a great leap forward! MTP's first computer was a PC AT with the aforementioned 20Mb hard disk and a whole 640Kb of RAM, which fell to about 550Kb once DOS had loaded. The 12” monitor output a sickly green text in conjunction with an insistently flashing cursor and no graphics unless you wrote a suitable program yourself. All this then cost about £6,500 - enough to buy a couple of reasonable cars or a small house in some areas of the country! For a few hundred more, MTP was able to purchase a dot-matrix printer which could write on the continuous fan fold ruled paper that mainframes normally used, which allowed Bryan to keep track of some of the more complicated routines he was writing. The weight of all this kit meant that hernias were a constant threat whenever it was transported to show an interested party what MTP was doing. How times have changed. In common with many endeavours, things never turn out as planned. The Cyprus job did not materialise, the motorway work went on many months over its allotted time and Bryan's software morphed from an in-house aid to designing mountain roads efficiently into a stand alone Land Survey System. This MTP was then fortunately able to sell to various surveying organisations such as BKS, to whom we will be ever grateful for becoming our first customer thanks to the good offices of their then Chief Surveyor, Alan Barrow. Alan now has his own firm, Alan Barrow Associates, and still uses LSS for some challenging projects which keep coming his way. As a sobering aside, the early manifestations of LSS were in modular form so you could pick the facilities you wanted to add to the basic modelling system, which, by the way, was then able to deal with 32,000 points. To obtain the full suite, it was necessary to part with a cheque for £4000 and an annual sum thereafter of £1600, so purchasing a reasonable computer, ancillaries, plotter and software certainly was not for the faint hearted. This may indicate just what good value LSS now is, particularly bearing in mind the vastly increased and superior facilities now available. Over the years, the underlying strengths of the original concepts of the software meant it could be developed to perform other tasks and, the original name being therefore no longer appropriate, it became known simply by its initials of LSS. Various liaisons and relationships further developed the product and a separate limited company, now known as McCarthy Taylor Systems Ltd., was formed to separate out the LSS work from other MTP interests. This expanded to include an accident investigation package for the police and, latterly, the Photoscape product which provides affordable aerial views of England and Wales. At the outset, Bryan and Shaun both believed that they would only have a few years to develop and make a living out of LSS. There were many fledgling companies trying to do similar things and the whole field was wide open. Virtually all of these have now disappeared or been absorbed into larger organisations. In the current vernacular, some got their business model wrong, others tried to expand too fast and lost sight of their original aims while others lacked something unique or the necessary expertise when the going got tough, especially during the numerous recessions experienced in the construction industry. Of course, Bryan and Shaun were blissfully unaware of all these potential pitfalls at the time and merely carried on doing what their experience dictated. However, they always believed in taking the time to listen to their customers and trying to provide them with what they really wanted, even if they didn't quite know it themselves. The concept of paying for specialist software as you use it has also stood the test of time and continues to provide a sound financial footing for the future. The McCarthy Taylor organisation thanks everyone for their encouragement, constructive criticism and support over the years. We welcome our newer users to the fold and look forward to serving you all in the future to ensure a mutually beneficial relationship. Other events from 1985 Gorbachev became soviet leader in this year. Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister and the average house price was £34,916. A litre of petrol was just 42.8p and the British singles chart was populated by such acts as The Eurythmics ‘There Must Be An Angel...’, Madonna ‘Into The Groove’ and Paul Hardcastle [Ne ne ne ne] ‘19’ Norman Whiteside scored one of the great FA Cup Final goals to beat newly-crowned League champions Everton 1-0 in extra time, even though Man. U. had been reduced to ten men with the sending off of Kevin Moran. Sandy Lyle won the Open Golf Tournament at Sandwich, one shot ahead of Payne Stewart. 11th May a fire under one of the stands in the Bradford City football stadium killed 56 supporters and injured 256 others. The resulting inquiry resulted in new legislation governing safety at sports grounds across the UK. 10th July, Greenpeace's ship, Rainbow Warrior was blown up and sunk in Auckland Harbour killing one crew member. 13th July Live Aid was beamed to 1.5 billion people around the world and raised £30m to help the starving in Africa. This was the year the Sinclair C5 arrived and almost as quickly disappeared. September. Riots on the streets of Brixton sparked further unrest in Toxteth, Peckham and Tottenham. It all began when armed police raided a house in search of a man in connection with an armed robbery and accidentally shot dead the suspects mother. In Coronation Street on the 7th August. Hilda gets an estimate for the roof repairs and disappears without telling anyone where she's going. Gail sends Phyllis to nurse Percy Sugden in an attempt to teach him a lesson. And who said life is boring? What were you doing in 1985? Click here to view the entire Anniversary edition Newsletter (1.5Mb PDF document) Copyright McCarthy Taylor Systems Ltd, 2005