A home-grown object-oriented development environment called System/4 is about to be released courtesy of a new UK company, Snowbirch Systems Plc, based in Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex. Snowbirch was formed by a small investment company to take over the business of Da Conti International – the company that developed the product; Da Conti is now in receivership. The product, which took four years and UKP1.5m to create, is a successor to Sensible Solutions, one of the early fourth generation languages, developed by US company O’Hanlon. Da Conti was a distributor for the product and decided to put object-oriented technology into it, thereby creating System/4. The first product release will ship sometime this month, but System/4 already boasts a number of users with its pre-release versions. The Bank of England and the Ministry of Defence are both users, and the product also has a couple of value-added resellers: Criterion Ltd of Ilford, which has created an integrated branch banking system, and Chepstow-based Double W Ltd, which has developed an integrated text and database application to implement the new European legislation covering the management of hazardous substances. The minimum single-user configuration for System/4, amazingly, merely requires 640Kb of memory and a standard 80286-based personal computer. The multi-user version runs on standard NetBIOS networks and will migrate to a Unix version by the end of the year.
Unwilling to invest
Graham Brown, managing director of Snowbirch, has a background in information technology management, having managed technology and marketing consultancy Neaman Bond Associates for seven years. He knows that major companies are unwilling to invest in both new software skills and hardware, and that is where he feels that System/4 has the advantage as it runs on hardware that most big firms already have. Snowbirch sees itself not merely as a software publisher, but as a technology enabler offering education in object-oriented techniques. For example, the single-user pack costs UKP1,450 for the licence and the price includes two days attending a public course. The corporate package, which is the main focus of Snowbirch’s marketing effort, costs UKP4,800 and, for that, the organisation gets a multi-user development licence, one year’s support, upgrades and a three-day dedicated workshop. So what is System/4? The core of the product is a proprietary language-based development environment offering 500 functions. The environment has its own three-dimensional relational database that can store objects and offers object linking technology. This means an application object can be created in, say, Lotus Development Corp’s 1-2-3, to then be selected in the database and linked to the agent that created it, so that the object can be edited using the native agent; then, when the developer exits, the agent the changes will be stored in the System/4 database. At the moment, the product is not SQL-compliant but this will be remedied in the third quarter of this year. The environment also has a text processor that has hypertext and some intelligent rules processing, as well as a report writer. The fourth-generation language is written in C, the rest of the product in System/4. The technical team that worked on the product at Da Conti has joined Snowbirch, so ongoing development shouldn’t be a problem; it is being led by Snowbirch technical director Alan Violet. But the visionary behind the product, Don Wood, hasn’t, although he is still committed to the product, having set up his own distribution operation in North America. There is a migration path from the Sensible Solution language to System/4 and, in the US, there are several thousand Sensible users with no migration route – the market Wood hopes to tap…
