Synex Systems Corporation

Last updated
Synex Systems Corporation
Typeindependent
Industrysoftware
Founded1983
Headquarters Vancouver, British Columbia
Key people
Murray Hendren
Subsidiaries Synex International Inc.

Synex Systems Corporation, a subsidiary of Synex International Inc. (Symbol SXI, TSX), was formed in 1983 in an effort to develop software for the microcomputer market and was run by Synex International Vice President Murray Hendren until 1992. [1] In 2002, Synex Systems was acquired by privately owned Lasata Software of Perth, Australia. In 2005, Lasata was acquired by UK based Systems Union. In 2007, Systems Union was acquired by privately held Infor Global Solutions, [2] a U.S. company that specializes in enterprise software.

Contents

What was Synex Systems Corporation now operates as an independent business unit within Infor Global Solutions called F9 and continues to develop and partner with new and existing ERP and Accounting Software solutions. It is located in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Products

Synex Systems products were diverse and targeted accounting, civil engineering, minicomputer thin client, and file compression utility markets. By 2001 the concentration was only on the accounting reporting product F9 and all other products were discontinued or sold.

PK Harmony

PK Harmony was Synex System's first software offering. It is a terminal emulation package that would now be termed a thin client.

PK Harmony provides an interface from a PC to a Pick host by emulating a terminal. Connectivity is achieved by serial port-to-port cabling or a modem.

PK Harmony allows users to transfer data to and from a Pick operating system legacy host and a DOS or Windows based PC. [3] Development started in 1983.

PK Harmony was purchased by Pierre Bourbonnais, a former senior Synex marketing team member, and is now marketed as PK Harmony - PK Term Plus through TechnoDroids CyberCorp.

Original 5.25 floppy disk of a PK Harmony PK Print Module PK Harmony PK Print 525 floppy disk.jpg
Original 5.25 floppy disk of a PK Harmony PK Print Module

F9

F9 Financial Reporting was developed starting in 1986 to allow a non-technical user, typically an accountant, to create a dynamic, customized general ledger financial report using a spreadsheet that is 'hot-linked' to an accounting system's general ledger

This product is currently in wide use, is still being updated, and is the longest lasting and most profitable of the products developed by Synex Systems. [4]

F9 software box with promotional pen Synex F9 software box with promotional pen.jpg
F9 software box with promotional pen

SQZ!

In the late 1980s microcomputer (PC) use in offices was ubiquitous and the most used program was the spreadsheet. Hard drive space was limited and expensive and many businesses found the plethora of spreadsheets they came to rely upon exceeded the space on the drives. SQZ was the first automatic file compression utility when it was introduced as Symantec's second product offering in the mid-1980s [5] [6] through its Turner Hall Publishing division, the first being Note-It, a notation utility for Lotus 1-2-3. [7] [8] SQZ! initially sold for US$79.95 [9] and was a major part of Symantec's early success and helped form the basis of the 1990s acquisitions Symantec grew from. [10] Several people working at Synex involved with SQZ! were hired by Symantec as a result of this success.

SQZ! is a compression utility specifically designed to compress spreadsheet files and was marketed starting 1986. [11] Sqz! is available as an add-in for 1-2-3 Release 2/2.01, and as a terminate-and-stay-resident (TSR) utility for any version of 1-2-3, Symphony or any other programs that read or write 1-2-3 R2 format worksheets.

In 1988 an improved version, SQZ! Plus, was released. This was available as an upgrade priced at US$30. SQZ! was best at compressing complex business spreadsheets and could achieve compressions of between 78% and 90% on large business-analysis worksheets compared to 60% to 65% for competitors like The Worksheet Utilities 123 add-in Fileworks (Funk Software). [12] [13] [14]

At one time in the early 1990s SQZ! was one of the most used utility software programs in the world.[ citation needed ]

SQZ! was also incorporated into Quattro Pro as a built-in utility. A Macintosh version of SQZ! called Mac SQZ! was available for Microsoft Excel. [15] [16]

The primary architect of SQZ! was Dale White, who developed the highly efficient spreadsheet formula-specific compression algorithms.[ citation needed ] He also developed a sophisticated corrupt spreadsheet recovery system that was built into SQZ! Plus. SQZ! Plus was released in 1988 as a replacement for Sqz! Version 1.5.

With the huge leaps in hard drive capacity and lower costs for these ever larger drives, and the building of compression into late versions of DOS and Windows, the need for SQZ! and other file compression utilities disappeared and the SQZ! product was discontinued by the mid 1990s.[ citation needed ]

WaterWorks Analysis Program

Synex's Waterworks [17] is a water distribution network analyzer based on F9 computer spreadsheet add-in technology. Waterworks enhances municipal water distribution design by combining both graphical and numerical results in a single interface and allows data exchange with CAD packages.

Waterworks core functionality was a Fortran coded algorithm developed at the University of British Columbia school of engineering. Much of the parent company Synex International Inc. was concerned with civil engineering and specialized in small hydroelectric projects and a synergy developed between the software and engineering divisions.

Waterworks saw some success being used by various water districts across the United States for water distribution analysis including the Greater Los Angeles Water District. [18]

@trieve

@trieve (pronounced at-reev) was a Synex Systems product [19] developed in 1991 from the F9 project code. It was at first written and used as an internal utility that allowed easy examination of Btrieve database file contents and helped in designing new Btrieve based accounting package interfaces for F9. @trieve allowed the user to read and write the contents of Btrieve files to and from a spreadsheet. Many accounting products marketed at the time used Btrieve as the underlying database engine and developing an F9 interface to these accounting products required highly detailed access to the data structures which easy examination of the data greatly aided.

Because Btrieve is not a true database in that it does not contain a definition of the data being stored @trieve used a data dictionary that was defined in a spreadsheet to determine the structure of the data records.

Although limited in user appeal, @trieve was a useful utility for experts that required detailed access to Btrieve-based data. A Great Plains Accounting edition of @trieve was developed and marketed by Great Plains [20] which was later purchased by Microsoft and became Microsoft Dynamics GP.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lotus 1-2-3</span> Spreadsheet software

Lotus 1-2-3 is a discontinued spreadsheet program from Lotus Software. It was the first killer application of the IBM PC, was hugely popular in the 1980s, and significantly contributed to the success of IBM PC-compatibles in the business market.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft Excel</span> Spreadsheet editor, part of Microsoft 365

Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet editor developed by Microsoft for Windows, macOS, Android, iOS and iPadOS. It features calculation or computation capabilities, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Excel forms part of the Microsoft 365 suite of software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spreadsheet</span> Computer application for organization, analysis, and storage of data in tabular form

A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in cells of a table. Each cell may contain either numeric or text data, or the results of formulas that automatically calculate and display a value based on the contents of other cells. The term spreadsheet may also refer to one such electronic document.

Quattro Pro is a spreadsheet program developed by Borland and now sold by Corel, most often as part of Corel's WordPerfect Office suite.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">WPS Office</span> Office suite software by Kingsoft

WPS Office is an office suite for Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, and HarmonyOS developed by Zhuhai-based Chinese software developer Kingsoft. It also comes pre-installed on Fire tablets. WPS Office is made up of three primary components: WPS Writer, WPS Presentation, and WPS Spreadsheet. By 2022, WPS Office reached a number of more than 494 million monthly active users and over 1.2 billion installations.

Btrieve is a transactional database software product. It is based on Indexed Sequential Access Method (ISAM), which is a way of storing data for fast retrieval. There have been several versions of the product for DOS, Linux, older versions of Microsoft Windows, 32-bit IBM OS/2 and for Novell NetWare.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stac Electronics</span> Defunct American technology company

Stac Electronics, originally incorporated as State of the Art Consulting and later shortened to Stac, Inc., was a technology company founded in 1983. It is known primarily for its Lempel–Ziv–Stac lossless compression algorithm and Stacker disk compression utility for compressing data for storage.

Wingz was a spreadsheet program sold by Informix in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Originally developed for the Macintosh, it was later ported to Microsoft Windows, OS/2, NeXTSTEP and several other commercial flavors of Unix. In spite of many positive reviews, including one calling it "clearly the spreadsheet of the future", the market was rapidly entrenching Microsoft Excel. Informix eventually gave up on the desktop market and reverted solely to database sales in the mid-1990s. Claris licensed and sold an extensively cleaned up version as Claris Resolve in 1991, but it was far too late to market to have any effect.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Norton Utilities</span> Computer utility software

Norton Utilities is a utility software suite designed to help analyze, configure, optimize and maintain a computer. The latest version of the original series of Norton Utilities is Norton Utilities 16 for Windows XP/Vista/7/8 was released 26 October 2012.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Javelin Software</span> Software extending the spreadsheet paradigm

Javelin Software Corporation (1984–1988) was a company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, which developed an innovative modeling and data analysis product, also called Javelin, and later Javelin Plus. Seen as the successor technology to spreadsheet software in reviews of the time, and rival to the then-dominant Lotus 1-2-3, Javelin won numerous industry awards, including beating Microsoft's new Excel for the InfoWorld Software Product of the Year award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PC Tools (software)</span> Collection of software utlities

PC Tools is a collection of software utilities for DOS developed by Central Point Software.

A disk compression software utility increases the amount of information that can be stored on a hard disk drive of given size. Unlike a file compression utility, which compresses only specified files—and which requires the user to designate the files to be compressed—an on-the-fly disk compression utility works automatically through resident software without the user needing to be aware of its existence. On-the-fly disk compression is therefore also known as transparent, real-time or online disk compression.

A worksheet, in the word's original meaning, is a sheet of paper on which one performs work. They come in many forms, most commonly associated with children's school work assignments, tax forms, and accounting or other business environments. Software is increasingly taking over the paper-based worksheet.

pfs:Write Word processing software

pfs:Write was a word processor created by Software Publishing Corporation (SPC) and published in 1983. It was released for IBM PC compatibles and the Apple II. It includes the features common to most word processors of the day, including word wrapping, spell checking, copy and paste, underlining, and boldfacing; and it also a few advanced features, such as mail merge and few others. The product was considerably easier to both learn and use than its more fully featured and expensive competitors: WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, and XyWrite.

Q&A was a database and word processing software program for IBM PC–compatible computers published by Symantec and partners from 1985 to 1998. It was written by a team headed by Symantec founder Dr. Gary Hendrix, Denis Coleman, and Gordon Eubanks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Integrated software</span>

Integrated software is a software for personal computers that combines the most commonly used functions of many productivity software programs into one application.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fifth Generation Systems</span>

Fifth Generation Systems, Inc., was a computer security company founded October 1984 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, United States by Robert Mitchell, Leroy Mitchell, Roger Ivey, and Bruce Ray. All four later left the company. Fifth Generation's initial commercial product was FastBack, the first practical hard disk backup program for the IBM PC.

F9 is a financial reporting software application that dynamically links general ledger data to Microsoft Excel through the use of financial cell-based formulas, wizards, and analysis tools to create spreadsheet reports that can be calculated, filtered, and drilled upon. The F9 software is developed, marketed, and support by an organization also called F9, a division of Infor Global Solutions (Canada) Ltd. which is headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Software Publishing Corporation (SPC) was a Mountain View, California-based manufacturer of business software, originally well known for its "pfs:" series of business software products, it was ultimately best known for its pioneering Harvard Graphics business and presentation graphics program.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Actian Zen</span>

Actian Zen is an ACID-compliant, Zero-DBA, Embedded, Nano-footprint, Multi-Model, Multi-Platform database management system (DBMS) developed originally by Pervasive Software, which was acquired by Actian Corporation in 2013.

References

  1. Hendren and Associates: Experience
  2. Formation of Infor
  3. comp.databases.pick FAQ
  4. Hendren and Associates Archived 2011-07-11 at the Wayback Machine
  5. Hendren and Associates Archived 2011-07-11 at the Wayback Machine
  6. Gordon Eubanks Oral History, COMPUTERWORLD HONORS PROGRAM, Daniel S. Morrow, November 8, 2000, page 18
  7. Answers.com: Symantec
  8. Company Histories: Symantec Corporation, Funding Universe
  9. Sqz, Stanley Littlefield - North Carolina State University, Social Science Computer Review, Vol. 5, No. 3, 415 (1987)
  10. Gordon Eubanks Oral History, COMPUTERWORLD HONORS PROGRAM, Daniel S. Morrow, November 8, 2000, pages 18–19
  11. Spreadsheet Users Find Extra Space With SQZ, InfoWorld, 8 September, 1986
  12. Sqz! Plus, Lotus Magazine, September 01, 1988, Tom Carlton
  13. SQZ! - Symantec Corp's file compression program, Home Office Computing, Oct, 1991, Henry Beechhold
  14. Building on 1-2-3, Twenty-Three Add-ins for Lotus, InfoWorld Magazine, June 13, 1988, Vol. 10, No. 24, John Walkenbach, Jim Toole
  15. Mac SQZ! fix for Excel 1.5 due, MacWEEK, July 26, 1988
  16. Microsoft Solicits Excel Addons, InfoWorld 28 September 1987
  17. "Waterworks Analysis Program". Archived from the original on 2008-11-19. Retrieved 2010-01-28.
  18. Hendren and Associates Archived 2011-07-11 at the Wayback Machine
  19. Spreadsheet Tools and Their Producers (as of 1997)
  20. ACCOUNTING SOFTWARE BY PUBLISHER'S NAME