News from Sustaining Members

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

Cocking & Drury¶

Cocking & Drury is delighted to welcome Dave Ziemann back to the fold following his round-the-world (or halfway-and-back- again) travels.

We have had a busier summer than expected. STSC have been advertising APL*PLUS heavily in US magazines like Byte and Dr Dobbs Journal. This has led to a large number of leads from their UK readers.

We are also about to ship upgrades to existing APL*PLUS II customers to Version 3.5. This allows users to exploit the multi-tasking Windows environment and is the first step in a process which will lead to a full GUI version of APL*PLUS II, running under the true 32-bit Windows NT environment, together with a Windows toolkit and DDE support. This migration path will maintain compatibility with existing versions of APL at the same time as taking advantage of the Windows environment.

Version 4 - the next step in that development - is already in Beta-test and is expected for release early in 1992.

We also had a busy time at the Software Tools '91 exhibition in June. We met a lot of people - new faces as well as old - and collected a large number of leads both for APL*PLUS and for Smalltalk.

STSC have announced new pricing structures for Run-Time for APL*PLUS PC and II. The price of PC Run-Time falls by over 60% (!) and Developer Kits for both - giving unlimited distribution rights for APL*PLUS Run-Time applications - become more readily available and more affordable. We have also been able to reduce our pricing on most APL*PLUS PC and II System products by up to 34%; details in the next Product Guide.

There is also a limited special offer on APL*PLUS Mainframe add-on software with 50% off the APL*PLUS Compiler and 25% off most other add-ons. Bargain basement time!

Both consultancy and course business are recovering slowly from the effects of the recession with prospects for the final quarter already better than the previous six months.

MicroAPL Ltd¶

At APL91 in August, MicroAPL announced what is probably our most important new product for some years - APL.68000/X for the IBM RISC System/6000. APL.68000/X is the first version of APL.68000 for IBM hardware and the first implementation of our APL windowing interface to run under X-Windows, using OSF/Motif. This marks the culmination of two years' development work on our range of APL interpreters to upgrade them to include second generation features and to allow them to run on computers which use RISC technology.

APL.68000 now conforms closely to the APL2 language specification for second generation APLs. This means that a serious APL user can now standardise on one dialect of APL in the confident expectation of being able to run the same APL code on virtually any hardware platform - a consideration of key importance bearing in mind the current, entirely reasonable, drives towards software standardisation and the 'downsizing' of applications.

Our latest issue of a MicroAPL News, issued to coincide with APL91, discusses how we have managed to port APL.68000 onto RISC systems such as the RISC System/6000 and retain the advantages of Assembly Language source code. We still have one master set of source code for APL.68000, with all the advantages this brings in terms of source code control. As far as the user is concerned, it also means that APL workspaces written using any version of APL.68000 can be immediately loaded and run by any later version of APL.68000.

APL.68000/X is now completing its beta test program and we shall shortly start shipping the first release. We have also announced proposals to cover run-time variants. We shall be supplying developers with a 'packager' which takes an APL workspace and 'packages' it with an interpreter to make a single executable file. Having bought the packager, developers will be free to distribute as many packaged copies of their application as they wish without further licence fees being payable to MicroAPL. We believe that this is the first time such as scheme has been applied to a Unix-based APL. We are confident that, like our free runtime policy on smaller machines such as the Apple Macintosh, this approach will encourage professional software developers to use APL for developing general applications.

Dyadic Systems Limited¶

Those members of Dyadic who took part in the exhibition at APL91 reported a busy stand and a high level of interest from attendees.

Pride of place on Dyadic's stand was given to a PC running an early version of Dyalog APL/W for Windows 3.0. Although the planned release date for this new product is not until January 1992, visitors to the stand were able to gain a very good idea of what it will look like and how it will operate. In particular, the Dyalog APL session, editor and tracer were shown fully operational, popping up and down using genuine windows, and looking just like the X Windows implementation of the product. Being the first APL to be fully integrated with the Windows GUI, Dyalog APL/W generated some excitement and early orders.

Dyadic was also showing Dyalog APL Version 6.1 under DOS and the same version under X Windows on an IBM RISC System/6000 and a Sun SPARCstation 2. The new version includes the facility to display the value of a variable in a window. This lets you browse large arrays in a convenient fashion, and you can watch values change as you execute code. Coupled with the Tracer, this new facility is a great aid to debugging.

On the IBM RS/6000, Dyadic was demonstrating an Auxiliary Processor interface to OSF/Motif. This experimental AP lets you drive all of the Motif widget set and produce end-user applications, written in Dyalog APL, that conform fully to the OSF/Motif Style Guide. Dyadic originally developed this AP to investigate strategies for integrating the Dyalog APL Screen Manager (⎕SM/⎕SR) with Motif and other GUIs such as Windows 3.0 and Presentation Manager. Although integration with ⎕SM is Dyadic's intended direction, the AP can be made available as a stand-alone product if required. Anyone interested in obtaining a copy should contact Dyadic.

Dyadic has announced an implementation of Dyalog APL for the Hewlett-Packard HP9000 Series 700 range. The HP9000-720 delivers 57 MIPS and 17 MFlops, while the 730 is even faster at 76 MIPS and 22 MFlops. In APL benchmarks, the "entry-level" 720 runs 3 times faster than a 25MHz 486 on general operations, and up to 10 times faster on floating-point calculations.

APL People Limited¶

We continue to work towards 1992 and the advent of the Single European Market by cultivating our contacts overseas - we have just helped a major financial institution in Switzerland to recruit an APL specialist from the UK for a year's contract. So come on, all you employers out there looking for skilled APLers in France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain and elsewhere - give me a ring! I've got lots of really good people eager to widen their horizons by working abroad (some already have foreign language skills). The recession in the UK means that many people are prepared to accept very modest rates or salaries at the moment.

However, I'm sure that most of you reading this will be pleased to read that we have detected signs that the economy is starting to pick up at long last. Several companies have been recruiting at graduate trainee level, although at the time of writing, I still have one or two graduates with APL experience yet to be placed, and would be keen to hear from any companies who might be interested.

On the software side. our sister company, APL Manufacturing, looks set to secure a contract to supply £70,000 of software to a manufacturer of Formula 1 Grand Prix racing cars - so we're all hoping to swap our boring old company Fords for something a bit faster!! Going from one extreme to another, PEFAC, the estimating system written in APL, has been sold to a company employing just 8 people! The last time this happened, using PEFAC enabled the company concerned to expand its workforce to 50 within the year! The software has also been sold recently to a furniture manufacturer, employing disabled people, which has resulted in a number of enquiries from similar factories elsewhere.