I. P. Sharp Associates

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, and an early packet switching computer networking system known as IPSANET, and a powerful mainframe-based e-mail system ultimately known as 666 BOX. It was purchased in 1987 by Reuters, 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 Toronto 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.

The company started with contract programming on the 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.

Timesharing

In the early years, IPSA cooperated heavily with Scientific Time Sharing Corporation (STSC) of Bethesda MD as they retailed some services to the USA from the Toronto-based computer facility. STSC also provided software development skills and end-user support to their clients in the USA. Until nearly the end, both IPSA's and STSC's systems had a disaster recovery scheme such that in the event that one of the datacentres couldn't function, the other datacentre could accommodate both vendors' users.

Time on IPSA's mainframes was sold to outside companies and rapidly developed into a major time sharing service in the 1970s. Long before the Internet, IPSANET was developed in order to support IPSA clients across Canada and the USA, eventually evolving into a worldwide network connecting additional offices around the world. As the network grew, and as Sharp APL was available on in-house computers, Sharp clients on in-house installations could access their own mainframes through the network, access the Toronto mainframe, and transfer data accordingly.

APL Implementors

IPSA was heavily involved in the development of the APL language, in the later years employing Ken Iverson in the early 1980s. Roger Moore, a company co-founder and vice-president, working with Larry Breed and Richard Lathwell of IBM, won the 1973 Grace Murray Hopper Award for the development of APL360. APL360 was later greatly enhanced and extended to become "SHARP APL".

Along with Roger Moore and Dick Lathwell, Sharp employed a team of expert APL implementors and contributors in its Toronto head office location. This group 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, the branch office in Palo Alto, California, managed by Paul Jackson, allowed Joey Tuttle, Roland Pesch, and Eugene McDonnell, to make significant contributions to APL and later J, using the IPSA network. From this then-remote location McDonnell designed and implemented for IPSA, together with Doug Forkes from Toronto, complex APL. Sharp APL the first APL system that offered it commercially. In later years, IBM, under the guidance of Jim Brown, also offered complex arithmetic in their APL2 program product.

Garth Foster, of Syracuse University, and Jim Brown's thesis adviser, sponsored regular meetings of the APL community at Syracuse's Minnowbrook location, in the upstate New York State area. In later years, Eugene McDonnell organized similar meetings at Julia Morgan's Asilomar location, near Monterey, California. Eugene organized other west coast meetings at Pajaro Dunes, on the Pacific coast.

"666 BOX", written in APL, was one of the first commercial e-mail services, known colloquially by its users as the "Sharp Mailbox." Like APL and IPSANET, Mailbox started as an in-house project, but was eventually opened to its time sharing customers, and then to outside users to run on their own machines.

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 these were available from the "39 MAGIC" workspace, an easy-to-use query and reporting language, which among other things featured integrated high-quality business graphics from "Superplot".

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 4331, which often could be leased for less than the cost of using external services. Clients who did not depend on the network were often the first to migrate to the smaller mainframes. Initially, the presence of the IBM PC posed a very small threat to the timesharing industry as the computing horsepower and storage capacity offered by these small machines was insufficient to warrant any serious migration. As a major slice of Sharp's business was buttressed by database business, this had the beneficial effect of delaying the eventual downslide. STSC, Sharp's US contemporary and competitor, 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 - the IBM PC implementation was based on an IBM 370 emulator, written by APL implementor Roger Moore, which subsequently ran the mainframe Sharp APL executable on the PC. Shortly afterwards, Sharp offered their APL interpreter for PC/370 hardware, essentially an IBM PC/XT with IBM 370 hardware emulation. The PC/370 appeared only briefly in the market and never caught on, consequently the APL implementation for that hardware was not successful. The IBM PC version of the interpreter was widely used by users exposed to Sharp APL, however never enjoyed the commercial success of STSC's APL*Plus/PC product. 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.

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 Incorporated. Reuters closed the Toronto facility in 2005.

Timeline

* 1964 - I. P. Sharp Associates Formed
* 1970 - Dominant player in timesharing business
* 1978 - Arrival of Amdahl 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
* Manugistics: later incarnation of STSC, today supply-chain software