Verdix

» see verdix.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Ada was a procurement decision before it was a language. The Department of Defense wanted one language for the software going into its embedded systems, and by the late 1980s its own directives required it for new mission-critical work. That created a market, and Verdix Corporation was founded straight into it in 1982 by George Cowan and Donn Milton, out of offices in McLean, Virginia. It went public the following year. Over the next decade it moved twice without leaving Fairfax County, to Chantilly and then Herndon, staying inside the stretch of northern Virginia suburb that the defense contracting business is built out of.

The product was the Verdix Ada Development System, and the configuration names say who was buying. VADScross was for code headed into embedded microprocessors. VSLAN was for people working inside secure facilities. The first officially validated Verdix compiler arrived in January 1985, and validation became the whole shape of the company: by 1992 it had 105 different validated Ada compilers on the Ada Joint Program Office's list, easily the most of any vendor, with Alsys in second place at 60. Revenue that year was around 13 million dollars.

In November 1991 Verdix agreed to buy Meridian Software Systems of Irvine, California, a 29-person Ada house whose 15,000 customers included TRW and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The swap was worth about 6 million dollars, paid in roughly 15 percent of Verdix's own common stock, and Verdix's president Ralph Alexander told the Los Angeles Times that the two product lines complemented each other. Meridian's president put the Ada tools market at 500 million dollars. Ada stayed where the mandate put it and never crossed over into general software engineering or into teaching, and the vendors started buying each other. On 15 December 1993 Verdix signed a reorganization agreement with a company called Rational.

~ 105 compilers ~

The number is worth sitting with, because a validated Ada compiler was not a product in the way a word processor was a product. Each one was a specific host paired with a specific target, validated separately, listed separately, bought against a specific requirement. A catalog of 105 is really a catalog of other people's hardware: workstations somebody had already standardized on, boards going into something that flies. Verdix never had to argue that its compiler was the better compiler. Whatever you already ran, there was a validated Verdix for it, and the second-place vendor's list was 45 entries shorter.

None of this could be bought by a person. A cross-compiler went out under a contract number against a requirement written in somebody's program office, and the install base was a list of primes. I work on embedded machine vision now and I still know Ada only as something the older engineers mention, usually about avionics. The company that put more Ada compilers on more real hardware than anyone else was sold and gone four years before I got online.

~ file number 0-12167 ~

The mechanics are in Rational's own later filings. The 15 December 1993 agreement was among Verdix Corporation, Rational Acquisition Corporation and Rational, with a Form S-4 following on 25 February 1994, and the deal completed on 30 March. On the Nasdaq tape it registered as a name change rather than an ending: NASD Notice to Members 94-42, covering changes since 29 March 1994, lists RATL over VRDX, "Rational Software Corporation/Verdix Corp.", with a date of change of 4 April 1994 and no entry in either the additions or the deletions table. A Form S-8 went out under the new name on 6 April. The registrant doing all this filing carries commission file number 0-12167 and incorporates by reference, as its own, the 1983 Incentive Stock Option Plan from Verdix's annual report for the fiscal year ended 31 March 1989.

~ the trademark that stayed ~

Rational's prospectus of July 1996 opens its trademark notice with four marks belonging to the Company, and two of them are Verdix's: "Rational(R), Rational Rose(R), Verdix(R), VADS(R)". That is 27 months after the ticker changed. The Ada work carried on under the new owner. Rational put the Verdix code generators and runtimes under its own environments and sold them for years, and the old customers kept buying against the old validated entries.

The domain outlasted the name too. The first archived copy of verdix.com is from 17 February 1997, and the 30 January 1998 capture is titled "Rational Software Corporation", every image on it named rat_something. No snapshot of a Verdix-branded verdix.com exists anywhere, because the web archive started three years too late to catch one.

IBM bought Rational in February 2003 for 2.1 billion dollars, nine years after a company in Herndon handed over its stock symbol and kept its registration. Today verdix.com sells a dividend portfolio builder, under a brand that found the name sitting free. Verdix got twelve years of its own; the registration it left behind ran another nine under somebody else's name.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »