News from Sustaining Members

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 11

APL Impetus Ltd¶

George Macleod has joined APL Impetus as a Director.

For the past nine years George has been responsible for running Boeing Computer Services - Europe. In earlier days at Boeing, George and Cedric Heddle started the development of an APL based product which ran on a series of large IBM mainframes as part of the Boeing Time Sharing service. This is the product that Cedric Heddle ported to the IBM PC and transformed into IMPETUS and which represents the major activity of APL Impetus Limited.

George has a special interest in business graphics and this will result in the next major release of IMPETUS having a significant graphics facility totally integrated into the rest of the package.

IMPETUS is an Application Generator, mostly written in APL*PLUS PC, with assembler where necessary for improved performance. It addresses the type of problem that can be formulated as the relationship between a number, perhaps a large number, of numeric tables that can have complex internal and external relationships. In essence IMPETUS decomposes complex problems into smaller problems that are amenable to solution and manages the interaction of the sub-problems. The data is usually hierarchial and multi-dimensional and extensive report formatting facilities are provided. The system is also self documenting.

IMPETUS addresses a wide spectrum of business problems, ranging from those which require considerable conceptual skill to understand at one end of the spectrum, to relatively straight forward problems which, despite their essential simplicity, are beyond the ability of other simpler PC based tools.

If you want to know more call Cedric Heddle at 0732 885126 or George MacLeod at 0442 833419.

Intelligent Programs Limited¶

The company continues to expand, with an increase in all activities. Demand for support and development work on behalf of our clients has grown, and so we have taken on an additional member of staff since Vector 6.3 came out. We have also taken on more office space, conveniently within a few hundred metres of our present offices.

HMW Computing Limited¶

HMW Computing Limited continue to develop and market "4XTRA" our front end Foreign Exchange Dealing and Position Keeping System. We are currently in the process of re-packaging the product, which will provide us with easier support and installation features.

4XTRA's arbitrage calculation package was installed to run on PS/2s in the London branch of a large American bank at the beginning of the month. The package paid for itself in the first few hours of trading, by allowing traders to identify trading opportunities in the ECU market, and hence increase their profits.

We are currently looking for more staff and would be pleased to talk to anyone interested in joining us. Please call Stan Wilkinson during trading hours on 01-353-4212 or at home on [omitted].

If you would like to see the 4XTRA system, we are exhibiting at a number of exhibitions and would be pleased to offer invitations or if you prefer a demonstration can be arranged at our offices or on your own premises.

Our employment agency for the APL community, HMW EMPLOYMENT, 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 employment 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¶

1990 got off to an excellent start with a bumper crop of attractive vacancies and a record number of people placed in interesting well-paid jobs! Who said APL is dying?!! Signs so far this year have been very encouraging - there are more opportunities for APLers than ever before. This expansion in the usage of APL has been particularly marked in companies servicing the financial community, and there have been some exciting jobs on offer recently (with more to come hopefully!)

We are also involved in helping users of APL and AS (IBM's Application System) to implement an interface between the two (as announced recently in a 'Statement of Intent' issued by IBM). Any AS and APL users reading this who would like to know more about this interface, please contact Jill Moss on 0225 462602.

Those of you who attended a talk given for the British APL Association in February by Tim Perry and Ed Gorochowski from our sister company, Applied Production Logic, may be interested to know that we have now sold our PEFAC estimating system to a wholly-owned subsidiary of a Japanese company! Apparently there is nothing to touch it in Japan, and we are now hoping that this will open up a completely new market for us, selling software to the Japanese manufacturing industry!

Dyadic Systems Ltd¶

Dyadic is pleased to announce a range of APL workstations and multi-user systems based on the exciting new IBM RISC System/6000. This is an extremely powerful Unix-based system which was announced by IBM on 15th. February, and is scheduled for general delivery in June. The company can now reveal that it was invited by IBM to port Dyalog APL to a pre-production machine in January, and has successfully produced a Beta-test version of the product. Dyadic is still not allowed to publish benchmark results; suffice it to say that they were consistent with an amazing 27.5 MIPS and 7.4 Megaflops claimed by IBM for the entry-level system. Dyadic plans to complete the port in April in good time for the general availability of the hardware in June.

As an APL machine, Dyadic regards the RS/6000 as unrivalled for price/performance, and expects even greater demand than for its precursor, the IBM 6150. Prices for various configurations can be found in Vector's APL Product Guide, but start at only £11,736 for a 27.5 MIPS workstation complete with Dyalog APL.

Having completed Version 6.0 Release 2 of Dyalog APL for DOS/386, Dyadic is turning its attention to porting this version to Unix platforms. The "window-based" development environment takes full advantage of the ability of a DOS program to directly map video output. To achieve the same result on an ASCII termonal or Unix workstation, which forbids such behaviour, is a non-trivial task. Nevertheless, Dyadic is making excellent progress, and expects to deliver Version 6.0 on Unix Systems by early this summer.

In parallel, Dyadic is continuing to enhance the Dyalog APL development environment. Among other developments, the company is investigating facilities to display and edit variables in windows, and the ability to watch variables change as you trace through the execution of a function. It is intended that these new facilities be incorporated in Release 3 in time for APL90.

Cocking and Drury Ltd¶

Cocking & Drury have been chosen by STSC Inc as one of only three dealers worldwide to test market the new developers version of the APL*PLUS II System for the 80386. The Developers version offers unlimited use of Run Time on payment of a one-off license fee.

STSC have also announced a release date for version 3 of the APL*PLUS II system - June 15 1990. Cocking & Drury are currently beta testing this new version.

The enhancements in version 3 are likely to include a ⎕NA Fortran interface; a Lotus import/export tool derived from the PC spreadsheet manager; mouse support; the User Command Processor; a Forms Input tool and the ability to put the Session Manager into memory above 1 Meg - this allows more memory capacity for GSS drivers, network software and TSR programs.

Cocking & Drury's pricing policy on the APL*PLUS II system remains the same - the initial purchase price includes one year's support and free upgrades. So anyone buying now automatically gets a free upgrade to version 3 as soon as it becomes available.

Cocking & Drury's first APL*PLUS Nested Array course takes place on 15/16 May - this is a new two-day course. The APL Systems Design course which Cocking & Drury has been running for several years is to be rewritten and will be broken up into a series of individual units which can be taken separately or as a full course in future.

During the last 9 months Cocking & Drury has been taking part in a Business Growth Training project funded by the training agency. This has allowed the company to devote a higher level of resources to staff training, and to make personal development a key part of employees' career development. The Training Agency funds have enabled training in Sales, Marketing, Management and Project Management skills and in new technical areas including SQL (Oracle and Ingres), C and Focus.

On a less happy note we received notification from STSC recently that support for version 8 of APL*PLUS/PC is discontinued from the end of March 1990. Cocking & Drury will continue to offer support on version 8 for a short time beyond that, though there may be particular problems requiring STSC's technical knowledge which will not be available. The only way to be sure of continuing support is to upgrade to version 9.

MicroAPL Ltd¶

MicroAPL has begun 1990 with a number of software upgrades. Users of APL.68000 for Mirage-based computers will have received note of the current upgrade to version 7.32, together with release notes for some new or upgraded support workspaces. We will shortly be releasing a minor upgrade to the Macintosh version of APL.68000 to accommodate some of the features of the Mac Portable.

We have also now released a new non-APL software product - Micro-TCP/IP. This is an implementation of the TCP/IP networking suite for Mirage-based computers. Micro-TCP/IP is written in 680x0 Assembler and includes all the standard support utilities. Although the product is likely to be of interest only to our Mirage customer base, it does highlight MicroAPL's extensive skills in the area of general systems programming.

Our strong support for STSC products continues and we have been shipping version 9 of APL*PLUS/PC, version 2 of APL*PLUS II for the 80386 and version 4 of Statgraphics for some time now.

MicroAPL's training courses have been heavily booked at the beginning of 1990 and we are planning to extend the range of topics offered to include APL programming techniques and standards. We have also given a number of in-house courses tailored to our customers' requirements, and this remains a very popular option. It can actually be cheaper than going to a scheduled course if more than three people are planning to attend the same course.

For more details, contact David Eastwood at MicroAPL.