Six former SD-Scicon Plc managers paid an unspecified sum for the equipment, staff and goodwill of the artificial intelligence software marketing business that has been reborn as Integral Solutions Ltd in Basingstoke, Hampshire (CI No 1,169). The new company also gets the rights to Poplog, and to Rules, another product from Sussex University. Further development work on the products will continue to be done at the university. The company has two distributors for its products in France, one in Japan, one in Finland, and a US one, Computable Functions Inc at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, run by the creator of the Common Lisp-like Pop language that adds Pascal-like syntax, Robin Popplestone. Poplog competes directly with Inference Corp’s ART Automated Reasoning Tool and IntelliCorp’s KEE Knowledge Engineering Environment, but costs about 35% less and also eats up less computer capacity. Versions are available for workstations from Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard Co and Apollo Computer Inc, and an 80386-based version is in beta test on the Sequent Computer Systems and Sun 386i machines. The company says that there are about 800 paid-up Poplog licences out and translates that to about 2,000 users – excluding university students using it in education – colleges get an 85% discount. The buyout actually took place on April 11, and Integral Solutions says that it has taken UKP45,000 in orders since then.
