News from Sustaining Members

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 19

"Sustaining Membership" of the British APL Association is available to any company trading in APL products or services. It provides a tangible way for such companies to express their commitment to APL and to promote increased interest and activity in APL and in the Association.

As well as receiving public acknowledgement for their sponsorship of the Association, sustaining members receive bulk copies of VECTOR for distribution amongst their customers and are offered the opportunity to submit news material for this section of the Journal. They are also able to submit announcements for Association meetings (subject to the approval of the Activities Officer) and are invited to inform APL users of their products via seminars and articles.

The Committee of the British APL Association would like to acknowledge the generous support of the following organisations that have become Association Sustaining Members.

Since last year we are pleased to welcome a new sustaining member, APL Software Technology, but have unfortunately lost two of last year's members. The APL community is not immune from the harsh realities of industrial life in the 80's.

APL Software Technology (UK) Limited¶

APL Software Technology has been busy extending its areas of activities beyond that of consultancy and support within the insurance and financial world into specific hardware and software products, utilising its extensive experience and knowledge gained across the mainframe, mini and micro scene.

They have just completed an assignment for a major computer manufacturer developing major portions of the MSDOS BIOS for one of their IBM type PCs, and this has greatly improved their understanding of the internals of micros and their operating system requirements and restrictions.

Their appointment as Ericsson dealers has allowed them to put together an 'APL Machine', the Ericsson PC enhanced by the PC Express board providing a speeded-up 8086 CPU and 512KB or 640KB RAM, together with the APL*PLUS/PC offering. This machine will process at speeds up to three times that of the equivalent 8088 CPU powered PC or XT.

In the software arena they can now offer the POWERTOOLS/PC product which has now completed site beta testing. This provides a compact 14K tool box of very fast and efficient assembler written functions that extend and enhance the APL*PLUS/PC product, allowing processing at typically 8 to 10 times the speed of the equivalent APL function.

The main feature of the product is its Forms Processor, which is not an AP124 Screen Manager replacement, but a powerful user / program interface around which to build user friendly window oriented applications, offering fast assembler written data handling facilities.

Cocking and Drury Limited¶

Cocking and Drury have recently taken on new staff. Beverley Satterley and Cindy Bavin join the company as office administrators. Allan Gay, previously with Centrefile, is currently providing support for Cocking and Drury's APL*PLUS mainframe customers. Shumit Rehman who comes from the Overseas Development Agency and Nick Telfer from I.P. Sharp Associates join as consultants. Ian Ford comes to the company to perform an industrial training year as part of his sandwich course at North Staffordshire Polytechnic.

The company successfully launched two software products at the recent PC User Show at Olympia. The long-awaited APL*PLUS PC system is now available on the Apricot, and the powerful statistical graphics package Stratgraphics was announced in the UK.

By the way, if you haven't got your Apricot poster yet — give them a call!

Dyadic Systems Limited¶

Dyadic has announced an implementation of Dyalog APLandDigital's new Microvax 2 running Ultrix-32. This system performs nearly as well as a Vax 780, and costs around £25,000. Dyalog APL is also being implemented on the MG.1 from Whitechapel Computer Works. This British system uses the NS32032 processor and has a built-in floating point unit and high resolution bit-mapped display. A 2Mb system with 22Mb disc and the dyalog APL interpreter costs just over £10,000.

Dyadic has appointed Pecoma BV as its exclusive distributor in Holland. Enquiries should be addressed to F. Smelik, Pecoma, Weesperzijde 84, 1091 EJ Amsterdam, Tel. 020-94 7561.

Dyalog APL has been chosen by BASF to run on its many HP9000 computers. Dyalog APL will be used in 'expert systems' for research chemists; an application for which its nested arrays and capability of interfacing to other languages make it particularly suitable.

MetaTechnics Systems Limited¶

On the new product front MetaTechnics Systems are soon to release MetaScreen II. Based on the successful MetaScreen (AP124 compatible full-screen management system for STSC'S APL*PLUS/PC), MetaScreen II contains a powerful new tool for the design and creation of formatted screens. Totally menu and command driven, the new module provides the ability to create a "panel" by painting it directly on to the screen. Complete editing facilities are available so that it is easy to modify existing screens.

MetaScreen II is now in Beta-test phase and product release is expected to be in July 1985. An upgrade kit will be available for existing MetaScreen users.

An agreement has been reached for Cocking & Drury to become dealers for MetaTechnics Systems' MetaProduct range. The range now includes MetaScreen, MetaPack (the comprehensive utilities package for APL on the PC) and MetaScreen II. Dealers for the MetaProducts are being sought in the USA, Europe and the UK.

MicroAPL¶

MicroAPL's news concentrates on two of their products — the Mirage/APL.68 000 software and the APL on the QL.

They have released the latest upgrades to Mirage/APL.68000, including APL.68000 Version 5.00, additional utility workspaces and Mirage utilities and APLKW — a completely new keyword version of APL.68000. The interpreter has been improved to incorporate significant speed-ups on some frequently-used operations — epsilon, dyadic iota and "and-dot-equals". The supervisor now allows a command line specification of APL, which adds some major new facilities to the APL environment. APL.68000 running under Mirage can now be invoked with a command line which allows a number of APL parameters to be set. This enables the user to specify printers, spoolers autoload workspaces, etc. The additional workspaces provide support for IBM 3270 protocol converters and check the integrity of the APL.68000 filespace.

In the first few months of its existence the symbolic version of APL for the QL has proved to be tremendously popular. It seems that real APL enthusiasts are keen to have access to the language at home for both personal and business use. Many companies too are finding 'real' APL on a cheap machine a welcome addition to their APL system.

I.P Sharp Associates Limited¶

I.P. Sharp are now settled into the new offices in Dean Farrar Street and this gives them much better facilities for demonstrations and courses as well as providing improved working conditions. The 6670 laser printer is operational and is fully integrated into their TEXTEDIT application package.

Sales of their Global Limits exposure management system for international banks are expanding satisfactorily and the product is now recognised as the world market leader.

Their international trading and market information systems of many kinds now provide a significant and growing proportion of their business. They expect the trend to be even more marked in the future due to the requirement for systems created by changes in the organisation of the London securities market.

The latest release of SHARP APL has been shipped to their inhouse sites providing significant improvements in resource usage, documentation and operating procedures as well as giving more facilities to application programmes.