I. P. Sharp Associates
Encyclopedia
I. P. Sharp Associates, IPSA for short, was a major Canadian computer time sharing, consulting and services firm of the 1970s and 80s. IPSA is particularly well known for its work on the APL programming language
, an early packet switching
computer network
known as IPSANET
, and a powerful mainframe
-based email
system known as 666 BOX. It was purchased in 1987 by Reuters
, which used them until 2005 as a data warehousing center for business data.
division of Ferranti
, Ferranti-Packard
, which sold numerous 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, decided to found his own company, and named it for himself.
The company started 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 smaller offices in the main Navy bases in Victoria, BC and Halifax. 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. branding it separately as Sharp APL and APL*Plus. Initially, IPSA served STSC's customers from its Toronto datacenter. After STSC built its own in 1972, they provided disaster recovery for each other: if one of the datacenters couldn't function, the other datacenter would accommodate both vendors' users.
and email services.
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.
, 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.
Sharp employed a team of expert APL implementors and contributors in its Toronto
head office location, including Ian Sharp, Roger Moore, Dick Lathwell, Brian Daly, 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 known as the "Zoo" and was very well respected inside and outside the firm. Initially, all APL development was done in Toronto.
Later, in the 1980s, a branch office in Palo Alto, California, managed by Paul 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. Leslie Goldsmith, a student hacker from Lower Canada College, joined IPSA and rewrote it for higher security. Eventually it was extended to support transferring email among multiple domains (mainframes) over the IPSANET.
posed little threat to the timesharing industry as the computing horsepower and storage capacity offered by these small machines was insufficient. As a major slice of Sharp's business was buttressed by database business, this 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. SAX is available today from Soliton Incorporated
.
Reuters purchased I. P. Sharp Associates in 1987, partially for the historical 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.
Programming language
A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....
, an early packet switching
Packet switching
Packet switching is a digital networking communications method that groups all transmitted data – regardless of content, type, or structure – into suitably sized blocks, called packets. Packet switching features delivery of variable-bit-rate data streams over a shared network...
computer network
Computer network
A computer network, often simply referred to as a network, is a collection of hardware components and computers interconnected by communication channels that allow sharing of resources and information....
known as IPSANET
IPSANET
IPSANET was a packet switching network written by I. P. Sharp Associates . Operation began in May 1976. It initially used IBM 3705s and Computer Automation LSI-2 computers as nodes. An Intel 80286 based-node was added in 1987. It was called the Beta node.The original purpose was to connect...
, and a powerful mainframe
Mainframe computer
Mainframes are powerful computers used primarily by corporate and governmental organizations for critical applications, bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing.The term originally referred to the...
-based email
Email
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
system known as 666 BOX. It was purchased in 1987 by Reuters
Reuters
Reuters is a news agency headquartered in New York City. Until 2008 the Reuters news agency formed part of a British independent company, Reuters Group plc, which was also a provider of financial market data...
, which used them until 2005 as a data warehousing center for business data.
History
The company started as a team of eight working at the TorontoToronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...
division of Ferranti
Ferranti
Ferranti or Ferranti International plc was a UK electrical engineering and equipment firm that operated for over a century from 1885 until it went bankrupt in 1993. Known primarily for defence electronics, the Company was once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index but ceased trading in 1993.The...
, Ferranti-Packard
Ferranti-Packard
Ferranti-Packard Ltd. was the Canadian division of Ferranti's global manufacturing empire, formed by the 1958 merger of Ferranti Electric and Packard Electric...
, which sold numerous products to the Canadian military and large businesses. The team worked on operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
and compiler
Compiler
A compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a programming language into another computer language...
design for the company's range of mainframe computers, the Ferranti-Packard 6000
Ferranti-Packard 6000
The FP-6000 was a second generation mainframe computer developed and built by Ferranti-Packard in the early 1960s. It is particularly notable for supporting multitasking, being one of the first commercial machines to do so...
. In 1964 Ferranti sold off its computing division to International Computers and Tabulators
International Computers and Tabulators
International Computers and Tabulators or ICT was formed in 1959 by a merger of the British Tabulating Machine Company and Powers-Samas. In 1963 it also added the business computer divisions of Ferranti...
, which almost immediately closed the Toronto office. Ian Sharp, the chief programmer, decided to found his own company, and named it for himself.
The company started 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 smaller offices in the main Navy bases in Victoria, BC and Halifax. 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
Scientific Time Sharing Corporation
Scientific Time Sharing Corporation 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.-History:...
(STSC) of Bethesda, Maryland, USA, each retailing the same services in their respective countries. IPSA and STSC jointly developed their software. branding it separately as Sharp APL and APL*Plus. Initially, IPSA served STSC's customers from its Toronto datacenter. After STSC built its own in 1972, they provided disaster recovery for each other: if one of the datacenters couldn't function, the other datacenter would accommodate both vendors' users.
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 transferFile transfer
File transfer is a generic term for the act of transmitting files over a computer network or the Internet. There are numerous ways and protocols to transfer files over a network. Computers which provide a file transfer service are often called file servers. Depending on the client's perspective the...
and email services.
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 its inventor, Ken IversonKenneth E. Iverson
Kenneth Eugene Iverson was a Canadian computer scientist noted for the development of the APL programming language in 1962. He was honored with the Turing Award in 1979 for his contributions to mathematical notation and programming language theory...
, in the early 1980s. Roger Moore
Roger Moore (computer scientist)
Roger D. Moore was the 1973 recipient of the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery...
, a company co-founder and vice-president, won the 1973 Grace Murray Hopper Award
Grace Murray Hopper Award
The original Grace Murray Hopper Awards have been awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery since 1971. The award goes to a young computer professional who makes a single, significant technical or service contribution.-Recipients:* 1971 Donald E. Knuth* 1972 Paul H. Dirksen* 1972 Paul H...
for the development of APL\360 (along with Larry Breed
Lawrence M. Breed
Lawrence M. Breed is a computer scientist, artist and inventor, best known for his involvement in the APL programming language.- Career :While at Stanford University in 1961, he created the first computer animation language, MACS, and demonstrated it publicly with Earl Boebert.While getting his M.S...
and Dick Lathwell
Richard H. Lathwell
Richard H. Lathwell was the 1973 recipient of the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery....
). APL\360 was later greatly enhanced and extended to become SHARP APL.
Sharp employed a team of expert APL implementors and contributors in its Toronto
Toronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...
head office location, including Ian Sharp, Roger Moore, Dick Lathwell, Brian Daly, 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 known as the "Zoo" and was very well respected inside and outside the firm. Initially, all APL development was done in Toronto.
Later, in the 1980s, a branch office in Palo Alto, California, managed by Paul Jackson
Paul Jackson
Paul Jackson may refer to:*Paul Jackson , British television producer*Paul Jackson , British video game publisher*Paul Jackson , English rugby league player...
, made significant contributions to APL and later J
J (programming language)
The J programming language, developed in the early 1990s by Kenneth E. Iverson and Roger Hui, is a synthesis of APL and the FP and FL function-level languages created by John Backus....
. This office included Joey Tuttle, Roland Pesch, and Eugene McDonnell
Eugene McDonnell
Eugene Edward McDonnell was a Computer Science pioneer and long-time contributor to the programming languages APL and J....
.
666 BOX, written in APL, was one of the first commercial email
Email
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
services, known colloquially by its users as the "Sharp Mailbox." The original 666 BOX was written by Larry Breed of STSC. Leslie Goldsmith, a student hacker from Lower Canada College, joined IPSA and rewrote it for higher security. Eventually it was extended to support transferring email among multiple domains (mainframes) over the IPSANET.
Rise of the Personal Computer
The 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 mainframe computers, 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 PCIBM PC
The IBM Personal Computer, commonly known as the IBM PC, is the original version and progenitor of the IBM PC compatible hardware platform. It is IBM model number 5150, and was introduced on August 12, 1981...
posed little threat to the timesharing industry as the computing horsepower and storage capacity offered by these small machines was insufficient. As a major slice of Sharp's business was buttressed by database business, this 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
Emulator
In computing, an emulator is hardware or software or both that duplicates the functions of a first computer system in a different second computer system, so that the behavior of the second system closely resembles the behavior of the first system...
, 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
PC-based IBM-compatible mainframes
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...
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. SAX is available today from Soliton Incorporated
Soliton Incorporated
Soliton Incorporated was a company formed in 1993 to continue the support and development of Sharp APL, originally developed by I. P. Sharp Associates, and other related products and services.-History:...
.
Reuters purchased I. P. Sharp Associates in 1987, partially for the historical 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.
Timeline
- 1964 - I. P. Sharp Associates Formed
- 1970 - Dominant player in timesharing business
- 1978 - Arrival of AmdahlAmdahl CorporationAmdahl Corporation is an information technology company which specializes in IBM mainframe-compatible computer products. Founded in 1970 by Dr. Gene Amdahl, a former IBM employee, it has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Fujitsu since 1997...
V8, high performance IBM 370 alternative - 1980 - Sharp APL available as an in-house product
- 1984 - Sharp APL for the PC available
- 1987 - Acquisition by Reuters
- 1993 - Soliton formed
- 2005 - Reuters closes Toronto facility
See also
- STSC: US APL timesharing company
- ManugisticsManugisticsManugistics Group, Inc. was a company that developed and marketed software applications, principally for resource planning and supply chain management, with clients around the world....
: later incarnation of STSC, today offering supply-chain software - Soliton IncorporatedSoliton IncorporatedSoliton Incorporated was a company formed in 1993 to continue the support and development of Sharp APL, originally developed by I. P. Sharp Associates, and other related products and services.-History:...
: Continuation of I. P. Sharp software business