4 replies to this topic

[SBKelly]

PRO-IV, 4th generation language was born in 1975 in Hawaii by the company Data Technical Analysts - DTA where Sushil Garg created the product. The first president was Tom Price and the product was brought to market by the president Frank Fukunaka. Suzanne Adam-Kelly and Curtis Goodrich worked at Data Technical Analysts in Hawaii when the product was created.

There were five licenses sold of the product. In 1980, General Automation, a minicomputer manufacturer named PRO-IV, NoCode. Suzanne Adam-Kelly was the first person to work on PRO-IV in the mainland. I moved to California in Nov. 1980 and worked at General Automation and the NoCode product.

Then, the second license was from McDonnell Dougas Computer Systems (Microdata) and I worked on PRO-IV in Marketing until 1987. The third license was C. Itoh, a Japanese company, a PRO-IV product. Sushil Garg and Curtis Goodrich moved to the mainland and worked on PRO-IV. Sushil retained a PRO-IV license. Curtis Goodrich worked in Support and worked in California, St. Louis, MO and then the East Coast and traveling extensively with PRO-IV, but unfortunately has passed away. Northridge in the U.K. bought the McDonnell Douglas Computer Systems license and PRO-IV technology, as it is still running PRO-IV today.

[Chris Pepper]

By Northridge I assume you mean Northgate, now Northgate-Arinso. Microdata was a separate company, later taken over by McDonnell Douglas. The McDonnell Douglas Computer Systems division was eventually separated, renamed MDIS and floated on the UK Stock Market. It then collapsed and was rescued, changing its name to another name it had registered - "Northgate". The Northgate name was originally from a Microdata systems house specialising in ALL (the Microdata name for their ProIV product) which MDIS had previously had to acquire. There are many stories that can be told (some probably can't be told) about the original Northgate Computer Services!

[Rob Fantini]

Suzanne -
That was a very interesting post... Which led me to google to search more on pro4 .... The last time I did so - 4-5 years ago, led me to assume the pro4 was soon going extinct .

This time I was glad to see pro4 usage seems to be growing. I may have read things incorrectly but it looks like pro4 is extensively used in th UK .

Northgate is not a profitable company [per the statements you can download at their site ]. But was purchased by KKR [ http://www.reuters.c...2008+BW20080311 ] in 2008. Coincidently I had happened to see a Bloomberg TV about Kravis [ of KKR ] so learned a little about KKR . Anyways if an investment group like that purchased Northgate then they had to have seen a rock solid base with unfortunately fat to cut. But the base will survive [ software written using pro4 I assume ] and get stronger. However I'm not sure it could have been a comfortable take over for the employees and managers at Northgate.

We are just a small company using pro4 , and I'm the only 'developer' . Pro4 has served us well . We have not renewed a license since 2000 as there was no value in doing upgrades. At that time an upgrade would mean getting a new set of bugs to work around. Usually some of the older bugs would get fixed, causing our work arounds for the original bug to need to be reversed.

I have a couple of questions -
Suzanne: Tell me more about Curtis - he and one or 2 others are the only ones at Pro4 we had contact with. I remember he'd answer tech support questions.. He was always patient and knew how to teach me how to fix things.

And to others - is the part of pro4 needed for 'green screen' much more improved ? Or have most of the changes in the last decade gone to making pro4 more complicated by adding hooks for gui ?

[Chris Pepper]

Sadly Curtis passed away in 2006. You can find some tributes on this forum here .

On the "green screen" question it depends which version of ProIV you are currently using. Some of us are still using it (see my recent post on going to 5.5). The @MOD / @MODX stuff hasn't been developed. There have been several different development environments either bought in or developed by Northgate. There's a much longer post there which I'm too busy to make at the moment!

[Rob Fantini]

Sadly Curtis passed away in 2006. You can find some tributes on this forum here .

thanks I'll check that.

On the "green screen" question it depends which version of ProIV you are currently using. Some of us are still using it (see my recent post on going to 5.5). The @MOD / @MODX stuff hasn't been developed. There have been several different development environments either bought in
or developed by Northgate. There's a much longer post there which I'm too busy to make at the moment!

We use Version : 4.6000 Revision : 2.1.3 , it works great for us. However we are stuck using older linux due to library issues .

It'd be good to have a beer or two to hear more about these things....