Capex Corporation

Capex Corporation was a software house based in Phoenix, Arizona founded by three former employees of General Electric. It was acquired by Computer Associates International, Inc. in 1982.

Products

• Optimizer - Capex's IBM COBOL Compiler optimizer using Peephole optimization - This product had two significant additional components: The first was called Analyzer, and the second was called Detector. The former allowed execution analysis giving a count of the number of times program instructions were executed. This provided a way for the COBOL computer programmer to move source code so the most frequently executed conditions would be found first, thus saving time on needless IF statements. While this may not be significant for a few hundred input file records, it was very important when there were millions of input records. The latter, Detector, trapped execution "abends" (abnormal ends) to the execution of an instruction, displayed the contents of applicable fields, and could be told to apply a fix to the offending field so program execution could continue. The programmer could then correct one or more error conditions later and recompile the program. Both were substantial time savers in IBM mainframe OS/MVS and DOS/VSE COBOL environments. Computer Associates subsequently developed an additional product called CA-OPTIMIZER II for the OS/MVS operating system.
• EZTEST - CICS Interactive testing/debugging tool for OS/MVS and DOS/VSE mainframe environments.
• TLMS II - Tape Library Management System for IBM mainframe OS/MVS environments. This tape library management product was subsequently renamed to CA-DYNAM/TLMS by Computer Associates.
• SCHEDULER - Batch job scheduling product for mainframe OS/MVS environments. This was not the original version of Computer Associates' job scheduling product, CA-SCHEDULER 7.0, which was written from scratch by CA and released in 1985 for the OS/MVS, DOS/VSE and VM/CMS operating systems.
• Manage:DASD - Software to accommodate Direct Access Storage Device maintenance on OS/MVS systems.
• LANPAR - LANguage for Programming Arrays at Random.
• Autotab - an early batch spreadsheet program.
• Autoplan - an early batch spreadsheet program.