The other fruit company, Apricot

Consistently overcoming obstacles

Roger Foster was born in 1941 (as far as I can gather), and graduated from grammar school at 16. Foster’s first professional job was as a chartered accountant, at the age of 21, for GKN (an automotive and aerospace conglomerate). At his two year mark in their accounting department, he shifted over the computer side of the company. Third generation mainframe computers were starting to roll out to the market at this time, prices had come down some, and the market had grown dramatically.

Foster founded Applied Computer Techniques in 1965 in Birmingham in the UK. Leveraging his skills in accounting, among the company’s first products were accounting software packages. At the time, most software of this kind was bespoke, but ACT sold the software premade, prepackaged, and for a lower cost than any bespoke package could manage. This simplified support as all of the software was the same, decreased setup time for customers as the software was premade, and increased profits for ACT as the software was only made once and was sold many times. The next major offering from ACT was computer time. Most companies couldn’t afford a computer of their own. ACT couldn’t either. ACT rented time (primarily at night) on a mainframe computer at English Sewing Cotton in Manchester, and they resold that time to their customers. This meant that after work Foster and his work mates would have to drive over to Manchester, run customer programs and data, go home, then come back later in the night or early in the morning to gather all of the output.