News from sustaining members

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 17

APL People Ltd.¶

APL People have got off to a good start in 1986 with orders coming in for PEFAC – the computerised estimating system acquired with the takeover of H. Walton Technical Services at the end of 1985. A lot of developmental work has been done since to make PEFAC even more versatile – such as writing microsoftware for PEFAC to run on networked computer systems, and creating the means whereby the engineer can write his own functions.

At the time of writing, APL Tran-Plan is beginning to take off with work already under way on the planning and design of several transportation projects in North America, and a lot more exciting projects set to come up in the near future.

In the guise of APL Software Ltd., APL People have now obtained the agency for a number of software products being offered to companies throughout Europe.

The consultancy side generates a steady flow of work, not only from the London area, but throughout the UK The conversion market in particular is still buoyant, both into APL2 and from VSPC, with customers recognizing that an upgrade to a uniformly consistent and fully documented standard when an upgrade is being carried out can ultimately save them a lot of money.

On top of this activity, APL People somehow manage to find time to offer their placement and advisory service for APLers considering a job move, or simply seeking some unbiased career advice. At the time of writing they have something like a score of vacancies and a similar number of people looking – but of course they don’t all match!

APL Software Technology (UK) Ltd.¶

1986 has got off to a good start for APL Software Technology with the first UK mainframe installation of their APL-based product RDS (Relational DataBase System). Although there are installations in Scandinavia and West Germany this implementation, for a large financial organisation, is seen as the start of yet another major product line here in the UK.

The business growth continues for them and the search is now on for a new London office from which they can base their attack on the international insurance and banking industry which forms the major part of their business.

POWERTOOLS/PC continues to be enhanced with further developments planned. The facilities now offered by this product make the design and running of PC-based applications easy, efficient and effective. Requests for Production Run Time versions continue as more and more applications are developed around the product.

As a result of their extensive experience in the ‘bits and bytes’ level of micro implementations APL Software Technology have been actively involved in the porting of APL onto portable micros and the design and implementation of 80286 and 80386 based micros for a major Scandinavian company. They hope to be able to mention names and make available full details in time for APL 86.

Cocking & Drury Ltd.¶

Cocking & Drury are now installing release 5 of STSC’s Sharefile and Enhancements to VSAPL. This new release includes a library of compiled APL utility functions, many times faster than their interpretive equivalents. It also includes the feature necessary to execute user compiled functions within a workspace.

In addition, they have now launched in the UK, the first COMPILER for APL. Developed by STSC, it is available under both VM/CMS and MVS/TSO. It compiles individual functions written in VSAPL or VSAPL plus APL*PLUS enhancements. Improvements obtainable from compiling APL vary depending on the code, but results to date illustrate that a speed-up of the order 2 is not uncommon.

On the micro products side, as STSC’s UK distributor, they are also launching the latest add-on to APL*PLUS PC, the SPREADSHEET MANAGER. It provides data preparation and analyses in a standard spreadsheet environment using APL formulae. It also includes transfers to and from APL, ASCII and LOTUS.

The company’s in-house ‘Introduction to APL2’ and ‘APL2 In-depth’ courses are still in great demand. The in-depth course has been revised to incorporate a unit on APL2 system design – a badly neglected topic!

Cocking and Drury are proud to announce a new course: ‘Intermediate APL*PLUS PC’. This public 3-day course is designed for existing APL programmers who need to increase their commercial applications development skills in the PC environment.

Inner Product Ltd.¶

Inner Product are maintaining and extending their APL support service, particularly to the financial institutions in the City of London.

Also they are making a major effort to provide, through packages like ALLWAYS and VIEWCOM, flexible communications on the IBM PC family of machines.

MicroAPL Ltd.¶

The Commodore Computer Show (May ’86) may sound like an implausible venue for MicroAPL to display its wares but fighting hard next to “Yie Ar Kung Fu” and “Rambo” was APL.68000. On our stand in the Amiga village we received an encouraging welcome from the over-5s in the Commodore community, obviously hungry for some real software rather than the usual nonsense of games. Being gluttons for punishment the shell-shocked MicroAPL troops voted the show a resounding success and resolved to appear at the Atari Show in September.

Returning to sanity for a while I am pleased to announce that APL.68000 is now available for the NCR Tower-32. MicroAPL’s Managing Director, Richard Nabavi, comments:

“The combination of MicroAPL’s highly optimised APL.68000 product and NCR’s 32-bit supermicro means that there are now very few applications which need the computational power of a mainframe. We come across lots of DP managers wanting to move APL applications off IBM mainframes on to an APL.68000 based system, this trend will accelerate now that our Tower-32 implementation is complete.”

APL.68000 is now available on a wide range of systems other than MicroAPL’s own Spectrum and Aurora supermicros. These include Sun, Hewlett Packard, Fortune, Apple, Wicat, Stride and TDI’s Pinnacle.

Another new product to surface from the depths of MicroAPL’s Research & Development department is Mac-APL, APL.68000 for the Apple Macintosh, the one you’ve all been waiting for, haven’t you? You will be able to see and use Mac-APL on our stand at APL86 in July. If you can’t wait that long then you can place an order with the Sales Department now. Mac-APL costs £295 (inc. VAT).

MicroAPL’s third major announcement concerns support for Motorola’s MC68020 and MC68881 processors from within APL.68000. Version 6.0 of APL.68000 will take advantage of the extended instruction set of Motorola’s new 32-bit microprocessor and implements most floating point operations in hardware using the MC68881 floating point co-processor. Optimisation has also been performed on Boolean, integer and character monadic and dyadic scalar functions. The speed improvements gained are in some cases dramatic. Luan Thompson, Director of Reaserch & Development, says enthusiastically, “On systems of equivalent clock rate integer addition is some 10 times faster, floating point multiplication is 15 times faster and logarithm is some 70 times faster than APL.68000/5.0.” Since the MC68020 processor runs at twice the clock rate of the MC68000 these improvements are at least doubled when run on a 32-bit machine such as MicroAPL’s new Aurora super-microcomputer. Work is still in progress on the upgrade, in such areas as formatting.