Re: JOVIAL (was Do we need "Mission-Critical" software?)

[jls@sco.com]

In article <3a5f2378$1@news.si.com>,
  carr@falcon.si.com (carr_tom) wrote:
> "Ken Garlington" <Ken.Garlington@computer.org> writes:
>
> >"Robert Dewar" <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote in message
> >news:93ihgp$fah$1@nnrp1.deja.com...
> >: By the way, regarding current activity in the JOVIAL area,
> >: DDCI announces JOVIAL support on their main web page.
>
> >I'm not sure what "announce" means here... according to the
> > description of
> >their JOVIAL product line, their compiler was built in 1983!

That's true, but it's still going!  The bits don't wear out....

> > I don't remember exactly what happened to InterACT, but I
> >couldn't locate them with a web search.
>
> As I remember Advanced Computer Techniques Corp (ACT) was a wholly
owned
> subsidiary of InterACT.  My recollection is not entirely clear, but I
believe
> that InterACT was formed by some guys out of MIT and most of its work
was in
> banking software.  In the late 1980s ACT did the name transition from
ACT to
> NewCO to InterACT thereby being reabsorbed into InterACT.

Not exactly.  Advanced Computer Techniques was a software consulting
house in New York City that wandered into the compiler product business.
It offered compilers for many different languages by the mid-1980s,
which is when I joined them.  (Other parts of the business did indeed
do banking and other commercial software projects.)

In 1987 ACT entered into a joint agreement with LSI Logic to make
a combination hardware/software simulation system called CASHE.  This
joint venture was named InterACT, so ACT owned part of InterACT, not
the other way around.  Because the Ada and JOVIAL compiler products
were used in cross simulation environments, they went into InterACT
as well.

The CASHE product went through several iterations, ending up as a
software framework product named The Integrator with IBM as the other
investor rather than LSI Logic.  In the end, millions of dollars were
poured into this venture with exactly one $5,000 evaluation copy sale
coming out of it.  A great object lesson in where technology without
competent market analysis gets you!

> My best recollection is that ACT/InterACT had some money problems from
their
> Ada compiler development and that they lost several key technical
people
> which made continued support of their JOVIAL and Ada products
untenable.

No, in fact it was the sales of the Ada and JOVIAL compilers that kept
InterACT afloat during this time.  But by 1991, the situation was
hopeless.  Most of InterACT folded, but the Ada and JOVIAL pieces were
bought by DDC-I.  (Advanced Computer Techniques continued on as an
empty shell of a holding company, until its acronym got co-opted by
that Dewar outfit :-)

Since that time DDC-I has continued to maintain and sometimes enhance
both the Ada and JOVIAL compilers that they acquired.  (I left in
1994 but have been in touch since then.)  For example,
the JOVIAL toolset has been rehosted onto several UNIX platforms
during that time, and has also had a new release put out.  And several
pragmas and other enhancements have been added to the Ada MIPS R3000
compiler.

> Seeing as the ACT JOVIAL 1750A compiler was written in Fortran and
assembly
> lanaguage it must be really difficult finding programmers with those
skills.

The JOVIAL compiler was originally written under government contract,
and as a result you had to use a government-approved language to
implement it with.  The choices were COBOL, FORTRAN, and something
else I don't remember; FORTRAN was the closest to being a systems
programming language!  I agree that writing a compiler in a language
that doesn't have recursion or usable string handling is a really
painful prospect, but it was indeed done.

--
Jonathan Schilling		SCO, Inc.		jls@sco.com


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