I. P. Sharp Associates

Last updated
I. P. Sharp Associates
Type Private
IndustryComputer software, time-sharing, consulting, services
Predecessor Ferranti, Ferranti-Packard
FoundedDecember 1964;57 years ago (1964-12) in Toronto, Ontario, Canada
FoundersIan Sharp et al.
Defunct2005 (2005)
Fate
Successor Soliton Incorporated
Headquarters
Toronto
,
Canada
Number of locations
59 offices [1]  (1983)
Area served
Products
Owner Reuters Group

I. P. Sharp Associates (IPSA) was a major Canadian computer time-sharing, consulting and services firm of the 1970s and 1980s. IPSA is well known for its work on the programming language APL, an early packet switching computer network named IPSANET, and a powerful mainframe computer-based email system named 666 Box, stylized as 666 BOX. It was purchased in 1987 by Reuters Group, [2] which used them until 2005 as a data warehousing center for business data.

Contents

History

The company's founders worked as a team at the Toronto division of Ferranti, Ferranti-Packard, which sold many products to the Canadian military and large businesses. The team worked on operating system and compiler design for the company's range of mainframe computers, the Ferranti-Packard 6000. In 1964 Ferranti sold off its computing division to International Computers and Tabulators, which almost immediately closed the Toronto office. Ian Sharp, the chief programmer, founded I. P. Sharp Associates in December 1964 with the other members of the team (Roger Moore, Ted McDorman, Don Smith, David Oldacre, Brian Daly, and James McSherry) and David Butler shortly after. [3]

The firm began with contract programming on IBM System/360 series mainframes, and to some degree took over Ferranti's former military work. It became particularly well used by the Canadian Navy, setting up an office in Ottawa near DND headquarters. Ted McDorman and Jim McSherry were lead players in this. At one point IPSA could claim to have played a part in every computer system onboard Canadian Navy ships.

In the early years, IPSA collaborated with its sister company Scientific Time Sharing Corporation (STSC) of Bethesda, Maryland, USA, each retailing the same services in their respective countries. IPSA and STSC jointly developed their software. Eventually they devised separate product names. They separated as Sharp APL and APL*Plus. Initially, IPSA served STSC's customers from its Toronto datacenter. In 1972, STSC built its own datacenter. Afterward, both firms provided disaster recovery for each other: if one of the datacenters could not function, the other datacenter would accommodate both vendors' users. [4]

Timesharing and IPSANET

IPSA sold time on its mainframes by the minute to customers across Canada, and rapidly developed into a major time sharing service in the 1970s. Long before the Internet, IPSA developed IPSANET to provide cheap telecommunications between the Toronto data center and IPSA clients across North America and Europe. Packet-switching also made their transatlantic links much more usable, since on previous equipment, frequent "line hits" would produce user-visible errors. As the network grew, and as Sharp APL was available on in-house computers, Sharp clients with their own mainframes could join the network, access their own or the Toronto mainframe from anywhere on IPSANET, and transfer data accordingly. The network eventually provided "Network Shared Variables" that allowed programs running on one mainframe to communicate in realtime with programs on another mainframe. This was used for file transfer and email services. [4]

I. P. Sharp Associates offered timesharing users access to a variety of databases, plus sophisticated packages for statistical analysis, forecasting, reporting, and graphing data. Databases included historical stock market time series data, econometric data, and airline data. All of these were available from the 39 MAGIC workspace, an easy-to-use time series, query, and reporting language, which among other things featured integrated high-quality business graphics from Superplot. In 1982, IPSA produced its first printed catalog of all online databases and proceeded to document for its customers the content and use of single databases or sets of databases.

APL implementors

IPSA was heavily involved in the development of the APL language, eventually employing APL's inventor, Ken Iverson, in the early 1980s. Roger Moore, a company co-founder and vice-president, won the 1973 Grace Murray Hopper Award for the development of APL\360 (along with Larry Breed and Dick Lathwell). APL\360 was later greatly enhanced and extended to become Sharp APL, stylized as SHARP APL.

IPSA employed a team of expert APL implementors and contributors at its head office in Toronto: including Ian Sharp, in his role as enabler, Roger Moore, Dick Lathwell, Brian Daly in his role as marketing guy in Ottawa, Bob Bernecky, Leigh O. Clayton, Doug Forkes, Dave Markwick, and Peter Wooster. This group was headed by Eric B. Iverson, Ken Iverson's son. It was affectionately termed the "Zoo" and was well-respected inside and outside the firm. The term "Zoo" is attributed to a visitor from The Establishment who witnessed the long hair, beards, and unconventional dress of some in the team. [5] Sharp APL and APL Plus, and variants, were all based on the XM6 IBM program. Further extensive APL development was done in Toronto and elsewhere.

Later, in the 1980s, a branch office in Palo Alto, California, managed by Paul L. Jackson, made significant contributions to APL and later J. This office included Joey Tuttle, Roland Pesch, and Eugene McDonnell.

666 Box, written in APL, was one of the first commercial email services, known colloquially by its users as the "Sharp Mailbox". The original 666 Box was written by Larry Breed of STSC. It was later rewritten for higher security by a student hacker from Lower Canada College, Leslie H. Goldsmith. Eventually it was extended to support transferring email among multiple domains (mainframes) over the IPSANET. [6]

Rise of the personal computer

The profitable timesharing business started to deteriorate in mid-1982, as some key timesharing clients moved their operations from timesharing to in-house Sharp APL. Around that time, IBM started offering smaller mainframes, such as the IBM 4300 series, which could be leased for less than the cost of using external services. Clients who did not depend on the network were the first to migrate to small mainframes. Initially, the presence of the IBM PC posed little threat to the timesharing industry as the computing power and storage capacity offered by these small machines was insufficient. A major part of Sharp's business was buttressed by database business, which had the beneficial effect of delaying the eventual downslide. STSC started to feel the effects of the deteriorating timesharing market one or two years earlier.

Sharp was active in the field of developing APL interpreters for the IBM PC and other computers. Their IBM PC implementation was based on a software IBM System/370 emulator, written by Roger Moore, which ran the mainframe Sharp APL executable on the PC. This product was only used by users exposed to mainframe Sharp APL, never enjoying the commercial success of STSC's APL*Plus/PC product. Sharp also offered their APL interpreter for PC-XT/370 hardware, essentially an IBM PC/XT with IBM 370 hardware emulation cards, but the PC/370 hardware never caught on. Later, Sharp released the SAX (Sharp APL for Unix) interpreter, based on STSC's APL*Plus UNX interpreter, which was a much more complete implementation of Iverson's APL extensions. As of 2016, SAX is available from Soliton Incorporated.

Reuters purchased I. P. Sharp Associates in 1987, partly for the historic financial data. Ian Sharp continued as president until 1989, when he retired. In 1993, IPSA's APL Software Division was purchased by its employees from Reuters and renamed Soliton. Reuters closed the Toronto facility in 2005.

People

IPSA served an important role as an incubator for entrepreneurs and technologists, including:

Timeline

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">APL (programming language)</span> Functional, symbolic programming language for operating on multidimensional arrays

APL is a programming language developed in the 1960s by Kenneth E. Iverson. Its central datatype is the multidimensional array. It uses a large range of special graphic symbols to represent most functions and operators, leading to very concise code. It has been an important influence on the development of concept modeling, spreadsheets, functional programming, and computer math packages. It has also inspired several other programming languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mainframe computer</span> Large computer

A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and large-scale transaction processing. A mainframe computer is large but not as large as a supercomputer and has more processing power than some other classes of computers, such as minicomputers, servers, workstations, and personal computers. Most large-scale computer-system architectures were established in the 1960s, but they continue to evolve. Mainframe computers are often used as servers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of operating systems</span> Aspect of computing history

Computer operating systems (OSes) provide a set of functions needed and used by most application programs on a computer, and the links needed to control and synchronize computer hardware. On the first computers, with no operating system, every program needed the full hardware specification to run correctly and perform standard tasks, and its own drivers for peripheral devices like printers and punched paper card readers. The growing complexity of hardware and application programs eventually made operating systems a necessity for everyday use.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Conversational Monitor System</span>

The Conversational Monitor System is a simple interactive single-user operating system. CMS was originally developed as part of IBM's CP/CMS operating system, which went into production use in 1967. CMS is part of IBM's VM family, which runs on IBM mainframe computers. VM was first announced in 1972, and is still in use today as z/VM.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kenneth E. Iverson</span> Canadian computer scientist

Kenneth Eugene Iverson was a Canadian computer scientist noted for the development of the programming language APL. He was honored with the Turing Award in 1979 "for his pioneering effort in programming languages and mathematical notation resulting in what the computing field now knows as APL; for his contributions to the implementation of interactive systems, to educational uses of APL, and to programming language theory and practice".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IBM 5100</span> Portable computer released by IBM in 1975

The IBM 5100 Portable Computer is a portable computer introduced in September 1975, six years before the IBM Personal Computer, and eight before the first successful IBM compatible portable computer, the Compaq Portable. It was the evolution of a prototype called the SCAMP that was developed at the IBM Palo Alto Scientific Center in 1973. Whether considered evolutionary from SCAMP or revolutionary, it still needed to be plugged into an electric socket.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roger Moore (computer scientist)</span> American computer scientist, 1939–2019

Roger D. Moore was the 1973 recipient of the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). It was given "for their work in the design and implementation of APL\360, setting new standards in simplicity, efficiency, reliability and response time for interactive systems."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roger Hui</span> Canadian computer programmer (1953–2021)

Roger Kwok Wah Hui was a computer scientist who worked on array programming languages. He codeveloped the programming language J.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arthur Whitney (computer scientist)</span> Canadian computer scientist

Arthur Whitney is a Canadian computer scientist most notable for developing three programming languages inspired by APL: A+, k, and q, and for co-founding the U.S. companies Kx Systems and Shakti Software.

IPSANET was a packet switching network written by I. P. Sharp Associates (IPSA). Operation began in May 1976. It initially used the IBM 3705 Communications Controller and Computer Automation LSI-2 computers as nodes. An Intel 80286 based-node was added in 1987. It was called the Beta node.

Rank is a generalization of looping as used in scalar (non-array-oriented) programming languages. It is also a generalization of mapcar in the language Lisp and map in modern functional programming languages, and a generalization of scalar extension, inner (matrix) product, and outer product in APL\360. The canonical implementation of rank may be the language J, but it is also available in Dyalog APL, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) technical standard on Extended APL, and NARS2000.

Since the rise of the personal computer in the 1980s, IBM and other vendors have created PC-based IBM-compatible mainframes which are compatible with the larger IBM mainframe computers. For a period of time PC-based mainframe-compatible systems had a lower price and did not require as much electricity or floor space. However, they sacrificed performance and were not as dependable as mainframe-class hardware. These products have been popular with mainframe developers, in education and training settings, for very small companies with non-critical processing, and in certain disaster relief roles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eugene McDonnell</span> American computer scientist and mathematician

Eugene Edward McDonnell was a computer science pioneer and long-time contributor to the programming language siblings APL and J.

Scientific Time Sharing Corporation (STSC) was a pioneering timesharing and consulting service company which offered APL from its datacenter in Bethesda, MD to users in the United States and Europe.

Shared Variables are a feature of the programming language APL which allows APL programs running on one processor to share information with another processor. Although originally developed for mainframe computers, Shared Variables were also used in personal computer implementations of APL. Shared Variables could be used to control peripheral devices, or to communicate with external files, database management systems, or other users. Shared Variables were first introduced by International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) in their APL.SV software product in 1973, and are still available as of 2017, in APLs from IBM and Dyalog, for the operating systems Linux and Windows.

The history of IBM mainframe operating systems is significant within the history of mainframe operating systems, because of IBM's long-standing position as the world's largest hardware supplier of mainframe computers. IBM mainframes run operating systems supplied by IBM and by third parties.

The programming language APL uses a number of symbols, rather than words from natural language, to identify operations, similarly to mathematical symbols. Prior to the wide adoption of Unicode, a number of special-purpose EBCDIC and non-EBCDIC code pages were used to represent the symbols required for writing APL.

Robert (Bob) Bernecky is a Canadian computer scientist notable as a designer and implementer of APL. His APL career started at I.P. Sharp Associates (IPSA) in 1971.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John M. Scholes</span> British computer scientist (1948-2019)

John Morley Scholes (1948–2019) was a British computer scientist. His professional career was devoted to the development of the programming language APL. He was the designer and implementer of direct functions.

References

  1. ↑ "back cover", I. P. Sharp Newsletter, January 1983
  2. 1 2 "Reuters Set to Acquire I.P. Sharp Associates". Information Today. 4 (6). June 1987.
  3. ↑ Roger Moore (2018-03-09), private e-mail message
  4. 1 2 Roger Moore (2005). "History of I. P. Sharp Associates Timesharing and Network". Rogerdmoore.ca. Roger Moore. Retrieved 2018-03-07.
  5. ↑ Bob Bernecky (2016-10-12). "Zoo Story: How the I.P. Sharp APL Development Group Got its Name". Dyalog '16 User Meeting. Retrieved 2018-03-08.
  6. ↑ Roger Hui (ed.). "APL Quotations and Anecdotes". Jsoftware. Jsoftware Inc. Archived from the original on 2018-07-05. Retrieved 2018-03-08.
  7. ↑ "Stocks - Bloomberg".
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.