News From Sustaining Members

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 13

“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.

APL People Limited¶

As part of our expansion programme, APL People has taken over Walton Technical Systems Limited, known for their computerised estimating system PEFAC. PEFAC is essentially a multifunctional tool for engineers, which runs on the IBM PC and costs around £4000. It allows an engineer to make fast, consistent estimates of the time taken to manufacture any item, with options for all the usual engineering operations – drilling, cutting, grinding, milling etc., and for a vast range of differing sizes and types of engineering tool – in fact many consider it an ‘expert’ system, having more knowledge built into it than any single industrial engineer. Those who have been with the APL Association for many years will recall Herbert Walton, author of PEFAC, who was Chairman of the user group for two years soon after it started and who can take credit for getting the infant user group organised into a coherent Society with a well-planned annual programme.

APL Software Technology (UK) Limited¶

1985 has been an exciting year, with a healthy expansion of their consultancy services within the Insurance and Banking fields. To cater for this expansion they are now actively looking for new London premises and new staff to resource many interesting projects coming up.

Cocking and Drury are now Dealers for the Powertools/PC product, and work is progressing well on the next release. This product is generating a lot of interest with many enquiries about production run time versions, which are available.

Torus Systems have appointed APL Software Technology as dealers for the Icon and Tapestry networking systems and they are pleased to have this product as part of their armoury.

Another exciting development has been the joining of forces with the cream of the Swedish APL community in the forming of a Sales and Marketing organisation in Scandinavia under the name Metalogic AB. This opens up a whole new market place for them, one that has a large APL usage.

Cocking & Drury Ltd¶

Demand for Cocking & Drury’s new in-house course, ‘APL2 IN DEPTH’, continues to grow rapidly, and at time of writing (December), bookings are being taken for February 1986. As well as being given to IBM, schedules already show demand across Europe. The course is primarily for experienced APLers. A complementary course, ‘INTRODUCTION TO APL2’, is also now available for people getting their first insight of APL through APL2. Both courses focus on commercial use of the language and modular design techniques.

As STSC’s U.K. distributor, Cocking & Drury have launched Release 5 of APL*PLUS.PC. New features include a numeric editor, support for IBM’s Enhanced Graphics Adapter, fast assembler routines, some APL2 primitives and window support. STATGRAPHICS, the comprehensive statistical and graphical package has been extremely favourably reviewed in the November issue of PC USER, and the rapidly increasing sales reflect its success. A series of half-day technical forums on STATGRAPHICS has been scheduled in London and Manchester over the next three months.

On the mainframe side, SHAREFILE/AP has been commercially launched. It offers STSC’s familiar sharefile system under APL2. The first compiler for VS APL code is nearing the end of its beta test period and should be available for in-house purchase shortly.

Dyadic Systems Ltd¶

Dyadic has announced the appointment of VBB as the exclusive distributor of Dyalog APL in Sweden. VBB will also handle sales and support in Denmark and Norway. Interested parties should contact Christer Ulfhielm at VBB in Stockholm on 8-782-7000.

Dyadic has recently completed the ‘port’ of Dyalog APL onto Apollo Domain computers. The new implementation includes an APL font and full window support, and runs on the entire range of Apollo workstations including the 68020-based DN330.

Dyadic has begun work on APL versions of Lynwood’s new j-Series terminals, and intends to produce a new breed of VDU designed specifically for the APL user. The Lynwood j300-APL VDU will be based on the ANSI 3.64 standard and will include an APL Session Manager and Full-Screen Editor, together with sophisticated graphics capabilities.

MicroAPL Ltd¶

The past few months have brought a number of developments at MicroAPL. During October, the company received a substantial venture capital injection from MTI, a partnership formed by Morgan Grenfell, Prudential Assurance and PA Management Consultants. In recent months it has become very difficult indeed for computer companies to raise venture capital from organizations with such a pedigree, and the investment therefore represents a significant vote of confidence both in the company and in the future of APL.

The immediate fruit of MTI’s participation was the purchase during November of APL.68000 from The Computer Company (TCC). This means that MicroAPL is now the world-wide owner of APL.68000, and the transaction puts MicroAPL in a strong position to exploit the new generation of small, 68000-based systems which are now available. These include the Apple Macintosh and the new Atari ST and Commodore Amiga machines, which are attracting a great deal of interest because of their extraordinary speed, excellent graphics, and use of modern windowing, icon and pointing techniques. MicroAPL will also be promoting APL software on larger 68000-based systems such as the NCR Tower and the Wicat range. At the same time, MicroAPL has been continuing its tradition of innovation on the hardware side of its business. Its new 32-bit supermicro, based on the immensely powerful Motorola 68020 true 32-bit processor, will have been launched by the time this issue of VECTOR appears. The new machine, which slots in above the existing Spectrum range, is based on a very advanced architecture which allows a multi-processor configuration. The basic system – with a single 68020 processor – offers a performance improvement of about four times over Spectrum, but this is only the beginning: extra processing power can be added not only by plugging in extra 68020 cpu cards each with up to 8 Mb of memory, but also by adding the new Motorola 68881 floating point processors. In this way, the system can build up to a configuration powerful enough to tackle almost any commercial application of APL – even those which until now had to stay on mainframes because of heavy processing demands.

I.P.Sharp Associates¶

I.P.Sharp has recently introduced an extended Telex link which enables Telex messages to be sent or received directly from the APL system. This has been used to provide the ability to send Telex messages directly from IPSA’s MAILBOX. Incoming Telexes can be routed direct into MAILBOX if the appropriate MAILBOX codes are included as part of the Telex message. They are continuing to use SHARP APL on the IBM PC XT/370 as a way of providing customised solutions often involving downloading of significant sections of code from their standard application products. The same implementation of APL available on both PC and mainframe has major advantages for application development.

As a part of I.P. Sharp’s increasing involvement in the banking and financial business area, Robert Hayim has been appointed as European Manager for Banking and Investment Sales. Robert was previously Manager of Banking Products. The Stock Exchange is now using I.P.Sharp as the database provider to their new technical analysis service called ‘TRADEPLAN’. This is a specialised micro that maintains local databases of price information by auto downloading from IPSA databases as required. It was launched at ‘Computers in the City’ in November and is attracting great interest among stock and commodity analysts. I.P.Sharp has added the EXSHARE database which offers price and other information on over 80,000 securities and bonds throughout the world. This complements its other databases, many of which take information directly from the markets. For example, a real time price is now available to users of MAGIC from the Toronto Stock Exchange.