TeleSoft

~ the obituary ~

Kenneth Bowles ran the project at the University of California, San Diego that produced UCSD Pascal and the p-System, which let one compiled program run on machines that had nothing else in common. In 1981 he wanted to do the same thing for Ada, the language the United States Department of Defense had commissioned and would later require on its own work. He started a company called Telesoftware, which merged almost immediately with Renaissance Systems, another UCSD spin-off run by Craig Maudlin and Christopher Klein, and the combined firm was TeleSoft.

Its first Ada product shipped in May 1981, before the language standard was finished, and Computerworld covered it that month. That made TeleSoft the first company to sell an Ada compiler to anyone who wanted one. The toolchain for the Pentagon's language arrived out of a university town in California, from a professor who had already built one portable runtime and thought he could build another.

The business held up for most of the decade. Bowles took early emeritus status at UCSD in 1984 so he could run the company full time, and TeleSoft raised two million dollars of venture capital the same year. It sold native compilers and cross compilers aimed at embedded hardware, and the customer list grew to include IBM, Sun Microsystems, Intel, Cray Research, Motorola and Unisys. By 1988 the company was still private, turning over about eighteen million dollars with roughly 235 employees.

Then the market stopped growing. Ada was not a language people chose; it was a language people were issued, which meant the addressable market was contracts rather than programmers. Working engineers outside defense mostly did not take to it, educators taught something else, and by the late 1980s TeleSoft had been through two rounds of layoffs.

~ the case file ~

~ the ada bet ~

The pitch for Ada in 1980 was that software for weapons systems should be written in one language with strong typing and real concurrency built in, instead of the hundreds of incompatible dialects the services had accumulated. Jean Ichbiah's team at CII Honeywell Bull won the competition to design it. The language that came out was large and expensive to implement, which is the kind of language a compiler vendor wants, because nobody is going to write their own over a weekend.

The limit was in who could sign the purchase order. A compiler for a mandated language sells to procurement officers and to the contractors who answer to them, and that population does not expand when the technology is good. It expands when the budget does. Every Ada house in the 1980s ran into the same ceiling, and the survivors spent the next decade merging into one another.

~ sold to a phone company ~

In 1989 the company was bought by Swedish Telecom, the state telephone operator, and merged with its own tools subsidiary Telelogic to form an entity called Telesoft AB, with TeleSoft's president Ben Goodwin put in charge. A state telephone operator buying a San Diego compiler house makes sense only as a tools purchase, and Telelogic soon cut back the Ada development it had just acquired.

~ what survived the merger ~

At the end of 1992 TeleSoft was merged into Alsys, the company Jean Ichbiah had founded after designing Ada, by then owned by the French defense contractor Thomson-CSF. The firm built around the man who wrote the language absorbed the firm that had shipped the first implementation of it, and both of them now answered to Paris. Alsys became Thomson Software Products in 1995 and was absorbed into Aonix the year after.

Ada reached me only as a name. My computer engineering degree in the 2000s was taught on C and Java, and the language turned up the way Fortran turned up, in a paragraph about where things came from. It is still flying, in aircraft avionics and railway signaling, in systems nobody is allowed to rewrite. TeleSoft's name is not on any of it.

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