Harlequin (software company)

Harlequin (software company)

Trading name	Harlequin
Industry	Software
Successor	Global Graphics

Harlequin was formerly a technology company based in Cambridge, UK and Cambridge, Massachusetts. They specialized in printing applications, graphical applications, law enforcement applications, and programming language implementations. Harlequin employees sometimes referred to themselves as "The 'Late Binding' company" and the company eventually evolved into a Think Tank for advanced technologies.

After Global Graphics^[1] purchased Harlequin, they spun off the Lisp, AI, and law enforcement application groups as Xanalys,^[2] and they spun off the Harlequin Dylan team as Functional Objects. Global Graphics acquired Harlequin primarily for the PostScript technologies, and it still continues to develop and market them under the Harlequin name.

Think Tank products

Harlequin had two main lines of business

• digital pre-press (primarily ScriptWorks, a PostScript language compatible RIP, now selling under the name Harlequin RIP),
• and modern language development environments (compilers and IDEs) for Lisp (LispWorks), ML (MLWorks) and Dylan (DylanWorks).

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.

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.^[4] They renamed the IDE to Open Dylan.^[5][6]
• Ravenbrook Limited^[7] acquired the Memory Management Reference,^[8] a public resource on memory management and garbage collection, the Memory Pool System,^[9] a flexible memory manager and garbage collector (now open sourced), and MLWorks,^[10] a Standard ML compiler and integrated development environment (also open sourced).

History

Harlequin Limited was founded in 1987 by Jo Marks in Cambridge, England, and the first offices were located in the founder's home in Cambridge. The company later moved to an office on Station Road, Cambridge, then in 1989 relocated 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. - office opened in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1993) 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. Many of the newly hired American Lisp staff had previously worked for Lucid Inc. and Symbolics, other Lisp companies which had previously 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,^[11] 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^[12] for the data analysis and LispWorks businesses. In November 2006, Global moved from Barrington Hall to Cambourne Business Park.

In September 2005 CompuDyne Corporation^[13] acquired Xanalys which operated for several years as part of Tiburon, Inc.^[14] the Public Safety and Justice division of CompuDyne. In January 2009 Xanalys was acquired by the UK staff based in Manchester and Cambridge.^[15] The company continues to sell investigation and analysis tools originally developed by Harlequin (such as Link Explorer^[16] and Powercase^[17]) to a worldwide market.

References