Michael Aldrich

Michael Aldrich (22 August 1941 – 19 May 2014) was an English inventor, innovator and entrepreneur.

Michael Aldrich was born on 22 August 1941 in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, England.

He went to school at Clapham College in London and, in 1959, he won a scholarship to the University of Hull to study history.

He became engaged to Sandy Kay Hutchings, a student at Hull Art College, originally named Hull School of Art, in 1960, and they married in 1962, just prior to his graduation.

They had four children and were grandparents to eight grandchildren.

Aldrich spent 15 years with Honeywell and Burroughs in the UK in various sales and marketing roles, where he became known as an innovator, before joining the Board of Redifon in 1977.

In 1979 he invented online shopping to enable online transaction processing between consumers and businesses, or between one business and another, a technique known later as e-commerce.

In 1979, Aldrich invented online shopping by connecting a modified domestic TV to a real-time transaction processing computer via a domestic telephone line.

In 1980 he invented the Teleputer, a multi-purpose home infotainment centre that was a fusion of PC, TV and Telecom networking technologies.

The intellectual basis for his system was his view that videotex, the modified domestic TV technology with a very simple menu-driven human–computer interface, was a 'new, universally applicable, participative communication medium-the first since the invention of the telephone.' This enabled 'closed' corporate information systems to be opened to 'outside' correspondents not just for transaction processing but also for messaging (e-mail) and information retrieval and dissemination (later known as e-business.) His language of 'impacts competitive trading position', 'using IT for competitive advantage', 'externalises labour costs', etc. became commonplace in the management consultancy industry later in the 1980s.

In March 1980 he launched Redifon's Office Revolution.

The Revolution was that corporate computer information systems had hitherto been in-house.

From hereon consumers, customers, agents, distributors, suppliers and service companies would be connected on-line to the corporate systems and business would be transacted electronically in real-time.

During the 1980s he designed, manufactured, sold, installed, maintained and supported many online shopping systems, using videotex technology.

These systems which also provided voice response and handprint processing pre-date the Internet and the World Wide Web, the IBM PC, and Microsoft MS-DOS, and were installed mainly in the UK by large corporations.

In 1980 he invented a system he called the 'Teleputer' by connecting a modified 14-inch colour television to a plinth containing a Zilog Z80 microprocessor running a modified version of the CP/M operating system and a chip set containing a modem, character generator and auto-dialler.

The Teleputer of 1980's operate as a stand-alone colour PC (at a time when computer screens were mainly mono-chromatic), with a full complement of application software and network with other computers via dial-up or leased lines.

The system included two 360 KB floppy disks (later a 20 MB Hard disk), a keyboard and a printer.

The name 'Teleputer' later became synonymous with the fusion of computers, telecommunications and television in a single device.

There were plans to add video-disks which at the time, in prototype form, were 12 inches.

In many ways the Teleputer was the first home media centre concept.

Although the Teleputer had been conceived for mass market home use, it was put into production for business use with the TV tuner removed.

There was no consumer electronics market for it (at the time the consumer electronics market was just waking up to the VCR) but it was relatively easy to cost-justify the Teleputer for business networking.

It was widely used in the UK and, because a Cyrillic version was made, in the then USSR.

The Teleputer was often used with the Online Shopping systems.

Most computer systems by their nature are transient but many of Aldrich's systems were transformative.

A number were recorded for posterity and case studies have survived.

In 1981 he developed the concept of interactive broadband local loop cable TV for mass market consumer telecommunications.

Aldrich had a 38-year career in the IT industry, 20 years of which were spent as CEO of an international computer company, Redifon/Rediffusion/ROCC Computers.

The world's first recorded Business-to-Business (B2B) Online Shopping system was Thomson Holidays (1981).

He has had a long, formal association with the University of Brighton in various capacities since 1982.

He was an IT adviser to British prime minister Margaret Thatcher 1981–86, IT adviser to the Confederation of British Industry January 1982-December 1983, president of the Institute of Information Scientists 1984–85, and chairman of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations 1989–99.

The world's first recorded Business-to-Consumer (B2C) online shopping system was Gateshead SIS/Tesco (1984).

The world's first recorded online home shopper was Mrs Jane Snowball, 72, of Gateshead, England in May 1984.

These ideas fed into the Business Process Reengineering strategies of the 1990s.

His concept of information technology as a mass communications medium is a driver for the contemporary IT industry.

His definition of the new mass communications medium as 'participative' (interactive, many-to-many) was fundamentally different to the traditional definitions of mass communication and mass media and a precursor to the social networking on the Internet 25 years later.

He retired as CEO in 2000 and became non-executive chairman (2000-2014).

He also worked for Honeywell (now Groupe Bull) and Burroughs Corporation (now Unisys).

Aside from his inventions and innovations, he is known for his pro bono public service.