Intermetrics, Inc. was a software company founded in Cambridge

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...

, Massachusetts

Massachusetts

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...

 in 1969 by several veterans of M.I.T.'s

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

 Instrumentation Laboratory

Charles Stark Draper Laboratory

Draper Laboratory is an American not-for-profit research and development organization in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Draper focuses on the design, development, and deployment of advanced technology solutions to problems in national security, space exploration, health care and energy.Originally...

 who had worked on the software for NASA

NASA

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...

's Apollo Program

Project Apollo

The Apollo program was the spaceflight effort carried out by the United States' National Aeronautics and Space Administration , that landed the first humans on Earth's Moon. Conceived during the Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Apollo began in earnest after President John F...

 including the Apollo Guidance Computer

Apollo Guidance Computer

The Apollo Guidance Computer provided onboard computation and control for guidance, navigation, and control of the Command Module and Lunar Module spacecraft of the Apollo program...

.

The company specialized in compiler

Compiler

A compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a programming language into another computer language...

 technology. It was responsible for the design and implementation of the HAL/S

HAL/S

HAL/S is a real-time aerospace programming language, best known for its use in the Space Shuttle program. It was designed by Intermetrics in the 1970s for NASA. HAL/S is written in XPL, a dialect of PL/I....

 programming language, used to write the Space Shuttle PASS (Primary Avionics Software System). It participated in the design effort leading to the Ada

Ada (programming language)

Ada is a structured, statically typed, imperative, wide-spectrum, and object-oriented high-level computer programming language, extended from Pascal and other languages...

 programming language effort, designed the Red language, one of the finalists in the design competition, and wrote one of the first production-quality Ada compilers. The large-scale Ada 95 revision of the language was designed at Intermetrics.
Intermetrics merged with Whitesmiths

Whitesmiths

Whitesmiths Ltd. was a software company based in Westford, Massachusetts. It sold a Unix-like operating system called Idris, as well as the first commercial C compiler...

 Ltd. in December 1988. In 1997, Intermetrics merged with computer game developer Looking Glass Studios

Looking Glass Studios

Looking Glass Studios was a computer game development company during the 1990s.The company originally formed as Looking Glass Technologies, when Blue Sky Productions and Lerner Research merged....

 http://web.archive.org/web/19991103003801/www.lglass.com/c_info/merger.html. In 1998, Intermetrics acquired Pacer Infotec, and changed its name to 'AverStar'. AverStar merged with the Titan Corporation in March, 2000; Titan was acquired by L-3 Communications

L-3 Communications

L-3 Communications Holdings, Inc. is a company that supplies command and control, communications, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems and products, avionics, ocean products, training devices and services, instrumentation, space, and navigation products. Its customers include...

in 2005.

External links

• A history of Intermetrics, some subjective notes on Intermetrics in the 1970s and 1980s
• Fourth conference — Intermetrics part of the Apollo Guidance Computer History Project