Blog: News

Autoscribe Informatics - Celebrating 40 years in business

29th June 2021

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Autoscribe was founded in 1981 as a word processing bureau from which its name originates. In those early years’ computers and software were still in their infancy, and word processing was still very often outsourced. Expanding on this theme other scientific software packages originating in the USA were sold into the UK market. These included one of the very early chemical structure drawing packages, with the ability to embed structures and reactions in word processed documents, thus building on the word processing business.

The founder, John Boother, is a qualified analytical chemist who had worked in sales for Beckman Instruments as the European Manager for Laboratory Automation. With deep knowledge of seeing how multiple laboratories worked he saw the importance of laboratory management and automation systems. Realizing a gap in the market for a PC based LIMS, which were expanding furiously in the mid-1980s, John was keen to expand the Autoscribe operation into this market.

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Today Autoscribe has expanded beyond the UK to have offices in the USA and Australia, as well as distributors across Europe, Africa, South America and Asia, making it a truly global organization. Despite this Autoscribe still has a family feel.

Many of the early Autoscribe customers are still clients today albeit using the latest versions of the software. The heart of this success is a LIMS that enables configuration via built-in configuration tools, allowing the system to be optimized to the exact needs of every laboratory, without the need for programming skills. While most LIMS require software code changes (in C#, Java or HTML) to change the screens within the LIMS, Matrix Gemini LIMS allows these changes to be made using the configuration tools. This allows clients to easily change the system to suit their needs while preserving the ability to upgrade to new versions of the software as released. One unique feature of the Autoscribe approach is that customer changes to a Matrix system by their trained staff using the configuration tools are supported within the annual support agreement. This approach means that system changes, support of those changes and upgrades are easily achieved.

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