News from Sustaining Members

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

HMW Computing Limited¶

HMW Computing Limited continue to develop and market "4XTRA" our front end Foreign Exchange Dealing and Position Keeping System. We are exhibiting "4XTRA" at "Computers in The City" on 14-16 November 1989 in the Barbican Centre London. If you would like to visit the exhibition and see our product call Stan Wilkinson on 01-353-4212 for a complimentary ticket.

Our employment agency for the APL community continues to attract permanent positions with a variety of clients throughout the U.K. Currently we have many vacancies for APL technicians from juniors through to consultants with attractive salaries and interesting work content.

To find out what we can offer, please call Val Lusmore on 01-353-4212. If you would prefer to phone out of office hours Val's home number is [omitted].

APL People Limited¶

Attempts to make APL People into THE premier APL recruitment agency in the world continue! Jill's recent visit to New York for the APL '89 Conference proved most useful - she made contact with a number of companies outside the UK who have vacancies for skilled APL programmers. A subsidiary of a major Publishing company in Washington is prepared to explore the possibility of recruiting a non-US National and all the bureaucracy that involves, so if anyone's interested in working in the States, please get in touch!

On the home front, we currently have a number of exciting new openings in the UK for people with between 1 and 5 years' systems development experience in APL - mostly in London and the South East.

In addition, sales of the software marketed by our sister company, Applied Production Logic, are considerably up on last year, and we are anticipating a lot more interest following the Computers Manufacturing Show in October at which we will be exhibiting.

Dyadic Systems Ltd¶

Dyadic is pleased to announce the availability of the DOS/386 version of Dyalog APL that was successfully launched at APL89 in New York. American reactions to the new product were extremely positive, although one well-known user was heard to say "it may be better, but it's a foreign APL!". Dyalog is extremely pleased with the reaction to the ⎕SM screen manager, and the new window-based development environment. Several early customers have already reported significant productivity gains.

Coinciding with the launch of the new product is a new corporate image designed to match that of Dyadic's parent company, Hunting plc. The Dyadic and Dyalog APL logos have been revamped, and brown, cream and gold discarded in favour of blue and white.

The new (blue and white) Dyalog APL manual-set comprises two volumes: a user-guide and a reference manual. These are supplemented with spiral-bound booklets for the CGI Graphics, Oracle, and (forthcoming) X-windows interfaces. It is symptomatic of the trend in APL that the amount of documentation concerned with user and other interfaces dominates the Language Reference Manual.

On the Unix front, Dyadic reports a growing demand for Dyalog APL, especially on high-performance workstations like the Sun SPARC range and the widely rumoured new IBM RISC machine.

I.P.Sharp Associates¶

Our London office has moved to new premises with effect from 4th September. The new address is on the back cover of this VECTOR.

In June, the worldwide launch of AllRound View took place. This product is based on Viewpoint, I. P. Sharp's data management system, and is largely written in Sax - Sharp APL under Unix. AllRound View will be marketed by Philips on its Unix-based P90x0 computers. AllRound View provides end-users with access to corporate data residing on IBM mainframes.

Cocking and Drury Ltd¶

Cocking and Drury are proud to announce ACT-CALC, an APL*PLUS based package for actuaries, which we have jointly developed with Mercer Fraser Ltd. ACT-CALC is a set of actuarial utility functions available on any system on which APL*PLUS is installed, from PC to Mainframe. The product will help the actuary solve everyday calculations within minutes. The functions are named so that they correspond closely with the symbols of standard international actuarial notation and as a result they feel natural to the actuary. The package provides considerable flexibility, combining various mortality and interest assumptions. It may be used stand-alone, or can be incorporated into other applications.

We have been shipping Release 2 of the APL*PLUS II System for 80386 machines since late August. Customers who bought their APL*PLUS II System from us will by now have received their free upgrade.

The company has been using Oracle in the development of further internal PC based computer systems.

Our 2-day "APL*PLUS Nested Arrays" course has been successfully run within the company, and has been improved as a result. The course is now available to customers in-house or in our London office. This course is aimed at APL*PLUS programmers who want to make appropriate use of their nested array environment. When effectively used, nested array structures and techniques can increase programmer productivity, reduce software development costs and increase the maintainability and robustness of APL applications.

Also on the course front, the availablility of IBM's APL2/PC means that it is now possible to offer our standard "Introduction to APL2" and "APL2 In-depth" courses as public courses in our London office. For further information about any of these courses, please contact Beverley Satterley.

MicroAPL Ltd¶

Richard Nabavi and David Eastwood of MicroAPL attended APL89 to give papers on some of our current work. Richard was discussing the design of MicroAPL's WIMP environment and David gave a presentation on one of MicroAPL's programming projects. We also gave a vendor presentation and exhibited our current products in partnership with our US distributors the Spencer Organisation. Our exhibition stand concentrated on the latest Mac software and previewed the APL.68000 Amiga upgrade. We were also showing one of the latest Unix-based versions of APL.68000.

The visit to New York was a welcome chance to meet some of our North American clients and to see what software they are producing. A number of papers at APL89 dealt with applications based on APL.68000 and we were able to look at some of these applications at the show.

MicroAPL is continuing to expand the availability of APL.68000 for Unix-based systems. The latest new port of APL.68000 is for the Nixdorf Targon family. We have also upgraded our NCR Tower release to 7.30 and other ports are in progress. For details of the range of machines that can run APL.68000, contact MicroAPL.

Version 7.30 for the Commodore Amiga is now under final test and we will be mailing users with upgrade details in the near future. In addition to the work on APL.68000, we are recoding some of the Auxiliary Processors which we wrote for the Mirage environment to run in an Operating System independent fashion. This should widen the range of utility software available for our Unix versions - details will be announced in forthcoming issues of Vector and MicroAPL News.

MicroAPL's consultancy section has signed a number of major new contracts to supply systems on DOS, Mirage and Unix machines. We have also entered into software maintenance agreements with a number of clients to maintain and enhance existing APL systems. As usual, we are still looking for APL programmers for our consultancy activities.