Silicon Graphics, Inc.

Success Stories Puzzle Piece Next Generation Ada95 Solutions

Magic Rule

Using Ada for commercial product development

The customer

JEOL USA, Inc. designs and manufactures scientific instruments. Their product lines include analytical instruments (mass spectrometers, nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers), electron microscopes (scanning, transmission), and semiconductor manufacturing equipment (electron beam lithography systems, wafer defect inspection systems).

Their problem

The group developing the software to control the NMR spectrometer was experiencing unacceptable increases in development costs. The DEC software and hardware development environment did little to reverse declining usability of the product. The code complexity was limiting the feature set they could offer. Product reliability was undermined by persistent bugs. Code size was growing dramatically. The JEOL sales force was demanding next generation products for their customers:

The decision

John Malcolmson, Manager of Software Development for the Analytical Instruments Division, was instrumental in making the decision to switch to Silicon Graphics workstations with built-in 3D graphics and Ada83. He researched the special features of Ada (strong types and constraint checking, exception handling, dynamic tasking, packages and information hiding, readable code). Malcolmson felt these qualities would enhance the ability of his small team of developers to focus on the complex problems they were solving. He chose Silicon Graphics as his platform because of the quality of the 3D interactive graphics, the commitment to Ada, the exceptional performance of the hardware, the advanced operating systems, and, yes, the great demos (link to a demo).

The result

Malcolmson admits his judgement was questioned during the learning curve while his programmers made the transition. Silicon Graphics supported him through the process and the investment in Ada paid off. (insert video clip on productivity) Malcolmson enthusiastically signed on as one of the first beta sites for ProDev(tm) Ada95. After ten months of use, his team is even more committed to Silicon Graphics' Ada95 solutions. "We've expanded the capabilities of our product. We've increased the number of instruments. We've included interactive collaboration, simultaneous multiple human languages, and found we can make much better use of the distributed resources on the customer's network. JEOL intends to expand the number of Ada products we develop."

Malcolmson's opinion of SGI support (insert video clip)

Malcolmson's opinion of WorkShop Ada (insert video clip)

JEOL USA, Inc.
11 dearborn Road
Peabody, MA 01960
Phone : 508-535-5900
Fax : 508-536-2205
Email : nmr@jeol.com

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