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From: robert_dewar@my-dejanews.com
Subject: Re: Some GNAT history (was Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long))
Date: 1999/03/09
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In article <7c3dpp$f1g$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>,
  dennison@telepath.com wrote:

> I'm glad you cleared that up. I had heard talk of that a
> few years back, but I had gathered the "acedemic
> compiler" contract was the contract that Gnat was
> developed under, not some separate contract that came
> along later, and that Mike had lost with a bid based on
> Ada-Ed. Boy was I confused!

The academic compiler contract was completely separate from
GNAT except that one bid involved GNAT (from Mike), and
indeed there was an expectation early on that Metroworks
might bid based on GNAT, but Metroworks got cold feet over
GPL issues [they did not want to open source their stuff]
(as best I understand what happened).

There were at least two other bids, and the contract (for
a student compiler for the PC and for the Mac) went to
Intermetrics/Aonix, and is the basis for the current Object
Ada product on the PC.

To give a bit more perspective, we were getting pretty loud
signals that AJPO did not want to put any more government
money into GNAT at that point (there appeared to be
continuing concern with competition with other vendors).
I even had a discussion with one high up official (who I
will not name) in AJPO who got very worried that GNAT might
be validated, and asked me how this could be prevented (!)

> Out of curiosity, were there any other "bids" on the gnat
> contract, or was it just written with NYU in mind?

There were no other bids, and I think it may have been
sole-sourced -- note that we were in a unique position
since this was part of the gcc system, and NYU was the
official maintainer of gcc. Indeed without this
relationship the initial development of GNAT would have
been much more difficult, perhaps impossible.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies

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