Alpha Microsystems Ltd of Maidenhead, Berkshire is actively seeking dealers for its new applications software development tool, Infinity. The company was approached by one of its US resellers, Applied Information Retrieval Systems, an eight-man operation based in Waltham, Massachusetts, which developed Infinity under the AMOS operating system in 1982. The new fourth generation language product is menu driven, and database layouts are defined in the data dictionary. It enables several programmers to work simultaneously on the same application, and will run applications while development work is being done. The screen builder function defines layouts, and the report builder customises reports to individual requirements. Release Manager enables the developer to edit applications and then place either the whole application or the changed code in the system. Alpha Microsystems believes that Infinity is the first truly effective fourth generation language product to emerge from its stable. It takes 30 days on average to develop an application, and it doesn’t lose the speed that is the claimed key feature of Alpha’s AMOS operating system. The company currently has 18 orders from its UK dealer network, and it will be distributing Infinity on the continent via Omegon, its top Dutch dealer. A run-time licence costs between UKP300 and UKP1,500, and a development licence is between UKP2,500 and UKP6,000. There will be a Unix version from Applied Information Retrieval Systems in the next 12 months, which fits in with Alpha Microsystems’ increasing commitment to Unix, seen in its acquisition of Rexon Business Machines, and the current development of a Posix-compliant version of AMOS. As regards other development work, the company is working with the British Broadcasting Corporation – the Beeb – on possible applications of video-tapes and recorders as a computer back-up medium, the technology that the company pioneered back in the mid-1980s. UK legislation is hindering this, but Alpha Microsystems says that several US companies have adopted the idea wholeheartedly.
