I. P. Sharp Associates

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I. P. Sharp Associates, IPSA for short, was a major Canadian computer time sharing, consulting and services firm of the 1970s and 80s. IPSA is particularly well known for their work on the APL programming language, an early packet switching computer networking system known as IPSANET, and a powerful mainframe-based e-mail system. They were purchased in 1987 by Reuters, who used them until 2005 as a data warehousing center for business data.

The company started as a team of eight working at the Toronto division of Ferranti, Ferranti-Packard, who sold numerous products to the Canadian military and large businesses. The team worked on operating system and compiler design for the company's range of mainframe computers, the Ferranti-Packard 6000. In 1964 Ferranti sold off their computing division to International Computers and Tabulators, who almost immediately closed the Toronto office. Ian Sharp, the chief programmer, decided to found his own company.

The company started with contract programming on the IBM System/360 series mainframes, and to some degree took over Ferranti's former military work. They became particularly well used by the Canadian Navy, setting up smaller offices in the main Navy bases in Victoria, BC and Halifax.

IPSA was also involved in the development of the APL language, for some time employing Ken Iverson in the early 1980s. Roger Moore, a company co-founder and vice-president, working with Larry Breed and Richard Lathwell of IBM, won the 1973 Grace Murray Hopper Award for the development of APL\360. APL\360 was later majorly enhanced and extended to become SHARP APL.

Time on IPSA's mainframes was rented to outside companies, and developed into a major time sharing service in the 1970s. IPSANET was developed in order to support IPSA's efforts across the country, eventually evolving into a worldwide network connecting additional offices opened around the world. As the network grew it was eventually opened to allow other companies to moved data between accounts rented on IPSA computers, and later between their own computers as well.

The branch office in Palo Alto, California, managed by Paul Jackson, allowed Joey Tuttle, Roland Pesch, and Eugene McDonnell, to make significant contributions to APL and later J, using the IPSA network. From this remote location Eugene designed and implemented for IPSA, together with Doug Forkes, complex APL, the first APL system that supported it. In later years, IBM, under the guidance of Jim Brown, also implemented complex arithmetic.

Garth Foster, of Syracuse University, and Jim Brown's thesis adviser, sponsored regular meetings of the APL community at Syracuse's Minnowbrook location, in the upstate New York area. In later years, Eugene McDonnell organized similar meetings at Julia Morgan's Asilomar location, near Monterey, California. Eugene organized other west coast meetings at Pajaro Dunes, on the Pacific coast.

666 BOX, written in APL, was one of the first commercial e-mail services. Like APL and IPSANET, mailbox started as an in-house project, but was eventually opened to their time sharing customers, and then to outside users to run on their own machines.

Reuters purchased I. P. Sharp Associates in 1987. Ian Sharp continued as president until 1989, when he retired. In 1993, IPSA's "APL Software Division" was purchased by its employees from Reuters and renamed Soliton Associates.