30 Years

tamhas

ProgressTalk.com Sponsor
From Gus on PEG:

Today is the 30th anniversary of the birth of Progress product.

*****

"Data Language Corp. has released Progress, a high-performance application
development system. In use now on AT&T, Fortune Systems, and Convergent
Technologies machines, Progress will soon be available for the IBM PC AT
under MS-DOS and Xenix.
Progress combines a powerful data base management system, application
language, and an advanced user interface. Automatic screen and report
generation, error recovery and an on-line tutorial are featured.

Prices start at $ 1 ,450 for single users and $ 1 ,950 for multi-user
systems. Query/run-time and plain run-time systems are available for sale
with applications. A Progress Introductory System is available for $295,
including on-line tutorial, full documentation, and all Progress
facilities for building a working application limited only by data base
size."

*****

That was thirty years ago today, when on August 8, 1984, the hitherto
little known Data Language Corporation (aka DLC) made its first product
available for sale. That was Progress Version 2.2.

DLC had shown the Version 1 prototype of Progress at the Fall COMDEX show
in Las Vegas at the end of November 1983. Founder Mary Szekely's two
daughters were there in the DLC booth to demonstrate the product. At the
time the company could ill afford to send people to Las Vegas and several
who had seen the prototype went to the show at their own expense to help
show the product.

In early 1984, Jon Roland wrote in UNIX Review about Progress after having
seen it at COMDEX. "As this is written, this is not yet a released
product, but it has been shown at COMDEX and will have been shown at
Uniforum. The pre-release beta version works well enough to include it
here. It is being developed by some of the same people who developed the
MIMS[R] system on IBM mainframes, which is now supported by General
Electric Information Services Company for manufacturing management and
material requirement planning (MRP). They are trying to develop a package
that will permit non-programmers to write complex applications without
having to resort to lower-level programming. It is functionally a
relational DBMS, but has an easy-to use record-level procedural language
that combines all but DDL functions. When released, it is likely to become
a very popular product.".

Indeed, it soon became /very/ popular. 175 copies of the first release
were purchased by John Harlow, then working at Bell South. Many more were
soon in the hands of others.

A few years later, in 1987, the name of the company was changed from DLC
to Progress.

There are various histories of Progress Software on the Internet. One of
those is former employee Patrick Lannigan's which you can find at
http://www.lannigan.org/progress_software_history.htm
 

tamhas

ProgressTalk.com Sponsor
and

Yes. There was an earlier company, named Mitrol. That one was started by a
gentleman named Harold Adler. Arthur got to know the Mitrol folks.

John Campbell, in his book "Making Good Progress" wrote:

"At the same time that he was finishing his studies, Chip began his
association with Mitrol (which is an acronym for Manufacturing Information
Control with a nod to MIT). Chip joined the development team which
included some of the other founders of Progress. Together, they created a
wonderfully rich development called MIMS. (Mitrol Industrial Management
Systems). As a company, Mitrol became quite successful with clients such
as Philips, Shell and other international corporations. Although Mitrol
was purchased by GEISCO, MIMS survives to this day, which says a good deal
for the quality of the work done back in the '70's.

MIMS was written for the VM and MVS mainframe environments. It uses a
CODASYL network database, and is written in PL/1. MIMS as a language was
designed to handle manufacturing problems and has many unique features,
such as the ability to do MRP planning with a single command (albeit with
72 arguments) called PLAN. It also contains such unique features as the
ability to automatically sum a column of values in a set of detail records
and place it into a calculated field in the parent. The combination of
talented developers, entrepreneurial spirit of Adler, and that little bit
of luck assured the success of Mitrol in its early days.

Mitrol's success spurred several of its employees to begin to think about
developing an environment for open systems that would not only be good for
manufacturing, but would be a general development language. One part of
the challenge was to be able to take something which was proprietary and
make it available to the world. Another part was to take the vast amount
of learning about what worked and what didn't and apply it to a new
language.

In the waning months of the 1970's, the plans for forming the company that
would eventually become Progress Software Corp. (PSC) began to take shape.
Chip recruited two other developers, Clyde Kessel and Mary Szekely, who
were enthusiastic about the idea. It took a lot of planning and a big leap
of faith, so it was almost two years before anything substantive took
place. Realizing that they also needed someone with business savvy, they
began looking for another partner. Eventually, they linked up with Joseph
Alsop who knew of Chip through Joseph's business associations with people
on Mitrol's board of directors. Together in 1980 they decided to create a
company called Data Language Corporation (DLC). The name says a lot about
the original concept of the company: the product was to be both a database
AND a language rather than one or the other.

Although the product was still a gleam in everyone's eye, they began to
call it Spectrum. Later, it became known by the name Relational Data
Language or RDL. Interestingly enough, the acronym RDL survives in the
computers at PSC as the moniker for the current compiled development
version of Progress. Thus, when Progress is still in its pre-alpha state,
it is called RDL. And when it is compiled it is addressed by the current
revision number, such as RDL8.3A. DLC, as Data Language Corp. came to be
known in those days, was acronymically compliant. (The acronym DLC
survives to this day as the default directory where Progress is installed).

Many of the ideas that went into the early conceptual framework of RDL
were quite radical for their time. In 1978 there was no such thing as a
personal computer and in 1980 Unix had by no means proven that it was
going to be a mainstream operating system. Yet it appeared to the founders
that open systems had a future which would have a broader base than
mainframe computing. It was a big gamble, and yet it seemed to be a risk
worth taking. And so, the company was incorporated in December 1981, and
development began in the spring of 1982 when Mary came to work for DLC.

So while the gentlemen sat around the table planning the scope of RDL,
Mary realized that the nature of the database and many of the other
architectural components would be independent of the compiler and
interpreter upon which the language would be based. In 1982, DLC acquired
a 3-station Wicat‹ the first commercially available Unix system, which
Mary began to use to develop the compiler for RDL. Some of the early
development was also done on Mary's PC, which had only a single floppy
drive.

Chip worked on the design of the language, and Clyde picked the
development language to begin working on the database. At the time, Pascal
was the logical choice for developing an application. Although dBase and
SuperCalc (the two big products of the day) were written in assembler,
both Borland's and Apple Computer's products were all written in Pascal.
Interestingly enough, Clyde picked "C," which was by no means a mainstream
language in 1981.
 

tamhas

ProgressTalk.com Sponsor
To the great credit of the developers, most of the decisions about the
architecture of RDL were very insightful and would prove to have lasting
value as the environment matured. For example, the decision to make RDL
"crash proof" has been one of its strongest suits since the day it was
introduced. Another decision was to separate user functions from database
functions in a manner that we now call client-server. Still another was
the variable length record. The database was designed to be very good for
OLTP (on-line transaction processing) and so there was no question that
the level of granularity for data retrieval should be at the row level
rather than at the page level. Many of the original algorithms which were
written back in the '80's still have some semblance within the product
today. Things have changed, but many of the underlying principles are
still relevant.

The language itself was designed to be highly procedural. MIMS was not,
and a great deal of what people learned came from dealing with the
problems that end users encountered trying to accomplish things with MIMS.
Not that MIMS was inadequate, but like any language it had its
limitations.

The developers were very clear about the strengths that they wanted the
database and language to have. They shared a passion for creating the best
development technology around, and this passion continues to exist in the
company to this day.

One of the earliest decisions that had to be made as far as development
was concerned was what to do about the code that would be executed. An
easier decision was that the code would not be pure executable (binary),
and therefore, the source code could be portable across machines. A more
difficult decision was how to structure the size of that code. These
decisions were made well prior to the implementation of the PC, and before
hard drives were commonplace on small computers. This lack of ample disk
storage left the developers with an interesting trade off. If they used a
two byte offset pointer for the code they could generate object code with
a maximum size that was quite large. However, each individual command
would be tokenized into a slightly greater size than if a single byte
pointer were used, in which case the code would be more compact but could
only have a maximum size of 63K. At that time hard disks were five to ten
megabytes in size, and cost roughly $500 per MB; roughly $12-1300 in
today's money, whereas drives today cost pennies per MB. Not only that,
but most of the commercially available CPUs at the time could not address
more than 64K of memory. Consequently, they decided to use a single byte
pointer and thus make the maximum size of any individual RDL program be
63K; thus allowing "more instructions per megabyte." This was only one of
the many decisions made by the developers of RDL based on the best
information available at the time, but which had consequences that would
be totally unforeseen as the computing environment changed dramatically
over the next several years.

Once the founders decided to begin to build RDL they took an office in the
back rooms of a dentist's practice on the second floor of a small strip
mall in the town of Billerica, Mass. Billerica was geographically central
to the homes of the founders, and PSCs' offices have never been more than
a few miles from those simple beginnings. For the next couple of years
they spent their time busily developing Relational Data Language. The roof
leaked, and the noise of the people coming to the dance studio downstairs
was often distracting, but everybody was filled with the passion of
developing a new product.

Clyde became the hardware maestro, and set up the patch panel for the
three-user system. When it came time to do their first port, the
developers had to write their own programs (a la laplink of today) in
order to be able to transfer the programs which generated the database,
the compiler, etc. It took hours to move the programs, and hours more to
compile and build the application. Some of the early systems in addition
to Wicat were Cadmus, Fortune, Pixel, AT&Ts 3B2 and Plexus ‹all Unix-based
systems.

The developers were quite excited about their product and decided to take
it to Comdex in 1983. This product was the infamous Version 1, which was
never taken to market. Nor was it ever intended for market‹Comdex was for
exposure to potential customers and feedback from developers. Needless to
say, at the point it was time to go to Comdex, Data Language Corporation
still did not have a big budget, and could not pay people to come to Las
Vegas to support the booth. However, the product was so exciting that Glen
Meader (who became one of the earliest employees of DLC) and two or three
others volunteered to go for free to Las Vegas to help show off the
product. Mary Szekely's teenage daughters were recruited to hand out
promotional literature at the booth. The response was encouraging, and
everyone returned to Boston excited about creating a commercial release.
By early 1984, they had pulled in some venture capital, and hired Chad
Carpenter among others to prepare the product for release.
 

tamhas

ProgressTalk.com Sponsor
How should DLC position itself in the marketplace? This was one of the
most important questions the sales and marketing staff had to ask
themselves. Other vendors such as Unify and Informix worked on OEM deals
with the hardware vendors: they provided the software to the vendors at
steep discounts, and the hardware vendors either bundled the software with
their systems or sold it through their own sales force. By this time, many
of the vendors had signed the agreements and weren't looking for new
partners; besides, the discounts weren't appealing to the people at DLC.
As DLC looked at Ashton-Tate, it seemed that selling directly to
developers made more sense than trying to use a hardware resales channel.
The decision was made to market the product to VARs/ISVs as well as
directly to developers.

After the Comdex show, a few astute developers got wind of this nifty new
product in the wings. One of the earliest pieces of publicity was a review
for Byte Magazine by Jon Roland, who is still a Progress programmer today.
Beta copies of the product were distributed to friends and associates such
as Arthur Fink, who had been a colleague at Mitrol. Arthur provided
feedback from a developer's point of view, and eventually built a
consulting practice around Progress which is active to this day. Chip
invited some Scandinavian contacts he knew from Mitrol to visit Boston and
take a look at the product. At the time, the only thing demonstrable was
the syntax analyzer, and yet these Scandinavians were excited enough about
what they saw to consider building a distribution network for this new
product-to-be. This was the beginning of the strong international presence
which Progress Software has always held.

The response to the product was quite gratifying. Among the early
customers was Bell South under the aegis of John Harlow, the founder of
United Systems, who bought over 175 units in 1984. Another big contract
was with a company called Applied Data Research of Princeton. ADR bought
the source code to RDL to distribute on its own proprietary systems. This
brought almost $3 million to DLC in one check and was one of the biggest
and most exciting boosts to the company's early fortunes.

1983 saw the release of Version 2.2 of Progress (it was never released
under the name RDL) with some interesting changes from Version 1. Among
other things, the earliest version of Progress did not have r-code.
However, most of the commands and structure were in place. Although a few
of them were given slightly different names such as prompt-for which
originally was ask-for. Some of the changes between the original and the
released version are somewhat intriguing. Many people know the rules of
Progress blocks and down frames. One of the things that was removed from
the original version was the command no-indent. Originally, Progress was
designed so that each successive frame of nested blocks was indented three
characters from the previous frame to help mimic standard paper forms.
 

tamhas

ProgressTalk.com Sponsor
One of the very earliest employees of Data Language Corp. was Chad
Carpenter, who played the role of Executive Vice President of the company
for many years after its founding. In the early days this meant that Chad
was involved in almost everything at DLC, including providing training
sessions for the early public classes held in Billerica and Bedford,
producing the first training manual, and helping get the product packaged
and out the door. Another early employee was Dean Carmeris who was
involved with tech support, consulting services, manufacturing and almost
everything else to do with customer service.

At the same time that the founders of DLC went to the Comdex Show, they
changed the name of the product from Relational Data Language to Progress,
although they kept the original company name, Data Language Corporation.
They moved out of the strip mall into a commercial building at the end of
a cul-de-sac called Manning Road in Billerica. Clyde, Mary and Chip spent
weekends crawling around the plenum of the new building pulling wires and
setting up a new patch panel before they moved in. The company was still
so small that there was no one else to help with the move, so the founders
rented a truck and did the work themselves.

But the size of the company was belied by the professionalism it presented
to the outside world. Even though Progress' first set of documentation was
mimeographed and stapled together, its first commercial documentation was
well polished and professionally typeset and printed in two three-ring
binders which were burgundy and silver in color and imprinted with a logo
that was vaguely reminiscent of the pins of a computer chip.

The quality of the documentation, support and training grew in quality and
quantity under the guidance of Chip and Dean; the product development
moved ahead under the guidance of Chip, with the able support of Mary and
Clyde, while the day-to-day management of the company continued to fall to
Joe. The passion for excellence showed through, and more and more people
were getting excited about this new, unknown but highly usable language
called Progress.

Several astute developers saw the potential of Progress in the early days,
and decided to write commercial applications with the language. Most of
the other database vendors did not have a VAR base, but DLC continued to
cultivate this market with a vision of building a strong tier of resellers
who were motivated and qualified to sell the product. The first
applications catalogue that PSC produced was less than 1/4" thick and only
contained about 50 entries. This was the beginning of a long-standing
trend of cultivating resellers which continues to this day. Among the
early pioneers were the founders of Shaker computer, who decided to write
a construction management package in Progress. At approximately the same
time, Paul Guggenheim wrote a sales management package in Progress. Others
began developing accounting, retail management and a host of other
business programs.

A small sandal manufacturer in Southern California decided to create their
own manufacturing software after Hewlett-Packard announced it was dropping
support for their current package. Karl and Pam Lopker now run one of the
biggest VARs for Progress, QAD. The implementation of this package,
mfg/pro, was one of the more encouraging developments for the founders:
since they had come from a manufacturing background, the development of a
manufacturing system was sure to be an acid test of the work they had
done. Needless to say, things worked out well . . . QAD's sales are
sometimes almost as large as Progress'. It is said that over $1 billion of
product written in Progress is sold each year.

During this time, large numbers of distributors in Europe (including the
Mitrol connection) became very interested in Progress and began selling
it. One distributor, in particular, Modern Software Europe, or MSE,
undertook a very aggressive campaign to sell Progress. Unfortunately, this
distributor, with offices in several Scandinavian and Northern European
countries, became so aggressive in their sales that they became
over-extended. Not surprisingly, their primary creditor was DLC. The
business problems of this company were a double-edged sword for DLC. Since
it spelled lost revenue, it hurt Progress' income. In the end, it provided
DLC with the opportunity to acquire the company and turn the
distributorships into several international Progress subsidiaries. Through
a combination of good fortune and astute business dealings, DLC was able
to buy the assets of MSE in 1985, and has had an exceptionally strong
presence in Europe ever since.

Based on their experience of the international success of Mitrol, DLC
cultivated distributors in other parts of the world as well. Some of them
eventually became subsidiaries of DLC, and others remain independent
distributors to this day. Australia and England were two of the major
distributors which DLC acquired during that time. DLC's strong commitment
to the international market has been borne out by the fact that over half
of its revenue has always come from international sales.

By 1985, dBase was the standard for PC-based programmable data bases and
Oracle and Informix were still young companies. Progress was a very
functional language, but there were still many features missing. With the
introduction of Version 3, the developers had added simple networking,
validation, and some nice reporting features like break-by. DLC continued
to grow, particularly with its VAR base and international distribution
channels. The development team had moved from Wicat to Fortune to Plexus
Computers. The number of operating systems that Progress supported began
to diversify‹Sun, Xenix, Pyramid, Convergent. Progress continued to
attract an enthusiastic following of application developers who began to
turn out significant, sophisticated products for resale, thus providing a
ready marketing channel that DLC did not have to cultivate. Throughout
this time, DLC continued to open sales offices across the country and
throughout the world.

Not too many months later, DLC had outgrown their offices on Manning Road,
and began looking around for new space. They found a building in the Oak
Park area and began planning their move for the fall of 1987. Guess who
wired the patch panels for the new offices at 10 Oak Park? Even though
there were more employees, it was still a do-it-yourself affair which had
the air of a party rather than a corporate move. The building was big
enough that the founders needed help in pulling the wires, but it was
still a "family affair." This helped bring people together‹everyone was
used to doing a little bit of everything in the company.

The product had long since been known as Progress, and it had become
evident that this was a highly recognizable name. The decision was made to
change the name of the company from Data Language Corporation to Progress
Software Corporation (PSC). Ironically, although the idea had been
discussed for some time, the move prompted the change, since the company
had to reprint all its stationery anyway. Not surprisingly, the company
grew rapidly over the next few years. Desk space was at a premium: new
employees found themselves in cubicles squeezed into hallways, and the
manufacturing facility, which was in the basement, used the elevator shaft
to store shipping boxes."
 
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