RHA (Minisystems) Ltd. Company profile, history, past and present activities

Company history

The name seems strange nowadays, but it did not seem so in the early 1970s when the company was founded, the days when Minicomputers were the smallest available and microprocessors as we know them did not exist.

The first product was a compiler for the language Algol-60. The first incarnation ran in 8K words of 12 bits each on the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP8. Today the system is available to run in a Windows DOS box (or plain DOS), you can download it from the Algol-60 page.

The middle years

In the early 1980s it became very difficult for a small company to sell general purpose software. The cost of marketing was so great that only relatively large and expensive programs were profitable. Small companies, including RHA Minisystems Ltd., turned to writing bespoke software. Some of the projects completed during this period were -

• Writing a major component of the Reuters D2000-1 dealing system
• A variable length record multi-user ISAM filing system, implemented on the DEC PDP11 and other processors.
• Porting a COBOL compiler to the PDP11. The runtime library uses the ISAM filing system just mentioned.
• Porting a 16 bit BCPL system from the BBC micro to MSDOS. This was used to run the Doomsday Project on machines supplied by Research Machines PLC, mainly to educational institutions.

More Recently

A suite of interprocess communication controls for Visual Basic and other programs were developed. Unfortunately, technical support is no longer available for these products and therefore the basis on which we are selling them has been changed. We welcome all enquiries by e-mail.

Back to the RHA (Minisystems) Ltd home page
http://www.rhaminisys.com