Harlequin (software company)
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Harlequin was formerly a technology company based in Cambridge, UK and Cambridge, Massachusetts. They specialized in printing and graphical applications, law enforcement applications, and programming language implementations. Harlequin referred to themselves as "The LateBinding company" and was what is sometimes called a Think Tank.
When Global Graphics [1] purchased Harlequin, they spun off the Lisp and AI/law enforcement related groups as Xanalys LLC [2], and the Harlequin Dylan team as Functional Objects. Global Graphics acquired Harlequin, primarily for the PostScript technologies, which Global Graphics continues to develop and market under the Harlequin name (in 2006). These organisational changes also destroyed the Think Tank potential.
[edit] Think Tank products
Harlequin had two main lines of business
- digital pre-press (primarily ScriptWorks, a 'PostScript language compatible RIP'),
- and modern language development environments (compilers and IDEs) for Lisp, ML and Dylan.
Other products included data analysis tools created using LispWorks, the Lisp IDE.
The Think Tank structure of the Harlequin can also be recognized via the development of a flexible and modular memory management system, the Memory Pool System (MPS). MPS was designed
- to support a wide range of requirements from high-speed manual memory management, to complex garbage collection with many different types of reference.
- to support two product ScriptWorks PostScript RIP, and their Harlequin Dylan compiler and IDE for the Dylan programming language.
[edit] Think Tank spin offs
In January 2005 employees founded the independently-owned LispWorks Limited [3] to focus on the Lisp business.
Several of Harlequin's other assets and technologies have also been acquired and open sourced by companies founded by former Harlequin employees.
- Functional Objects Inc was founded in 1999 to continue development and production of the Dylan IDE. In 2004 all code was open sourced to The Gwydion Maintainers. They renamed the IDE to Open Dylan (see Open Dylan entry of wiki.opendylan.org for information about the latest version).
- Ravenbrook Limited [4] acquired the Memory Management Reference [5], a public resource on memory management and garbage collection, and the Memory Pool System [6], a flexible memory manager and garbage collector now open sourced.
[edit] History
Harlequin Limited was founded in 1987 in Cambridge, England, with offices initially at the founder's home Jo Marks and then on Station Road. The company moved in 1989 to Barrington Hall, in the village of Barrington near Cambridge, which became the permanent company headquarters.
Expansion followed, and Harlequin Limited became The Harlequin Group Limited, with wholly owned subsidiaries in the UK (Harlequin Limited), the USA (Harlequin, Inc.) and Australia (Harlequin Australia Pty Limited). The company acquired in February 1995 the rights to the Lisp-related technology Lucid Common Lisp of Lucid, Inc., that went out of business the summer before due to financial hardships. Also many staff from Lucid Inc. and Symbolics, when those other Lisp companies failed. In 1997 the group company became Harlequin Group plc.
At its peak in 1997/1998 the company had over 300 staff. Harlequin had offices in: Cambridge, England (including Barrington Hall and Longstanton); Edinburgh; Manchester; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Menlo Park, California, and several other places.
Due to failed expansion plans, the company was declared bankrupt in the summer of 1999 and went into administration. It was acquired by Global Graphics [7], primarily for the PostScript technologies, which Global Graphics continues to develop and market under the Harlequin name (in 2006). Global Graphics created a subsidiary Xanalys [8] for the data analysis and LispWorks businesses. In November 2006, Global moved from Barrington Hall to Cambourne Business Park.
In September 2005 CompuDyne Corporation [9] acquired Xanalys which now operates as part of Tiburon, Inc. [10] the Public Safety and Justice division of CompuDyne.
