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Rational Machines was founded by Paul Levy and Mike Devlin in 1981 to provide tools to expand the use of modern software engineering practices, particularly explicit modular architecture and iterative development. Mike Devlin is a US entrepreneur who co-founded Lexington Massachusetts -based Rational Software Corporation, a software development company Rational was sold for US$2. 1 billion to IBM on February 20, 2003. International Business Machines Corporation abbreviated IBM and nicknamed "Big Blue", is a multinational Computer Technology Events 1472 - Orkney and Shetland are left by Norway to Scotland, due to a Dowry payment Year 2003 ( MMIII) was a Common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar.

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Rational Environment

Released in 1985, the Rational Environment was an integrated development environment for the Ada programming language, which provided good support for abstraction through strong typing. R1000 is an Integrated development environment (IDE created by Rational Software for the design documentation implementation and maintenance of large software In Computing, an integrated development environment ( IDE) is a Software application that provides comprehensive facilities to Computer programmers Ada is a structured, Statically typed, imperative, and object-oriented high-level computer Programming language Its goal was to provide the productivity benefits associated with academic single-user programming environments to teams of developers developing mission-critical applications that could execute on a range of computing platforms.

The Rational Environment was organized around a persistent intermediate representation (DIANA), providing users with syntactic and semantic completion, incremental compilation, and integrated configuration management and version control. To overcome a conflict between strong typing and iterative development that produced recompilation times proportional to system size rather than size-of-change, the Rational Environment supported the definition of subsystems with explicit architectural imports and exports; this mechanism later proved useful in protecting application architectures from inadvertent degradation. The Environment's Command Window mechanism made it easy to directly invoke Ada functions and procedures, which encouraged developer-driven unit testing.

The Rational Environment ran on custom hardware, the Rational R1000, which implemented a high-level architecture optimized for execution of Ada programs in general and the Rational Environment in particular. The horizontally-microprogrammed R1000 provided two independent 64-bit data paths, permitting simultaneous computation and type checking. Memory was organized as a single-level store; a 67-bit virtual address presented to the memory system either immediately returned data, or triggered a page fault handled by the processor's microcode. In Computer terminology a virtual address is an address identifying a virtual (non-physical entity

The company's name was later changed from "Rational Machines" to Rational to avoid emphasizing this proprietary hardware.

Rational provided code generators and cross-debuggers for then-popular instruction set architectures such as the VAX, Motorola 68000, and X86; much of this was accomplished through a partnership with Tartan Labs, founded by Bill Wulf to commercialize his work on optimizing code generators semi-automatically produced from architecture descriptions (PQCC). Name "VAX" was originally an Acronym for V irtual A ddress e' X' tension, both because the VAX was seen as a 32-bit The Motorola 68000 is a 16/32-bit CISC Microprocessor core designed and marketed by Freescale Semiconductor (formerly Motorola Semiconductor See also X86 assembly language The generic term x86 refers to the most commercially successful Instruction set architecture in the history of Personal William Allan Wulf (born December 8, 1939) is a Computer scientist notable for his work in Programming languages and Compilers The Production Quality Compiler-Compiler Project (or PQCC was a long-term project led by William Wulf at Carnegie Mellon University to produce an industrial-strength

Organization

Rational's field organization was noteworthy for its team-based approach to customer success. Sales teams were led by an account representative, and included 3 to 5 software engineers referred to as technical representatives (techreps). Sales teams engaged with their customers both pre-sales and post-sales, and were held accountable for customer success as well as for revenue targets. This approach encouraged deep engagement between techreps and customers, which in turn helped Rational develop a significant experience base in the successful development of complex long-lived software. The Best Practices underlying the later Rational Unified Process (RUP) - iterative development, component-based architecture, modelling, continuous developer-driven testing, requirements management, and automated testing -- are all traceable to this experience base. The Rational Unified Process ( RUP) is an Iterative Software development process framework created by the Rational Software Corporation a division

Second-generation products

In 1990, Rational launched three parallel development efforts: re-implementation of the Rational Environment (for Ada) to run on Unix-based workstations from Sun and IBM, development of a comparable Rational Environment for C++ to run on Unix-based workstations from Sun and IBM, and development of a workstation-hosted modeling tool called Rose that supported a graphical notation developed by Grady Booch. Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix with Small caps) is a computer Sun Microsystems Inc ( is a multinational vendor of Computers computer components Computer software, and Information technology services International Business Machines Corporation abbreviated IBM and nicknamed "Big Blue", is a multinational Computer Technology C++ (" C Plus Plus " ˌsiːˌplʌsˈplʌs is a general-purpose Programming language. Grady Booch (born February 27[[ 955]] is a Software designer a software methodologist and a design pattern enthusiast Apex, the Rational Environment for Ada, was launched on Sun and IBM Unix platforms in 1993, and the Rational Environment for C++ followed on the same platforms a year later. A version of Apex that ran on Microsoft Windows NT was successfully developed and released by Rational's Bangalore team. Windows NT is a family of Operating systems produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released in July 1993

Rose 1. 0 was introduced at OOPSLA in 1992, but performed poorly in multiple dimensions and was withdrawn from the market. OOPSLA ( Object-Oriented Programming, Systems Languages & Applications is an annual ACM conference

The development of Rose 2. 0 combined a Windows-based Booch notation editor called Object System Designer (acquired from Wisconsin-based Palladio) with a new intermediate representation, and with new semantic analysis, code generation, and reverse engineering capabilities. Wisconsin ( or wɪˈskɑnsɨn (French Ouisconsin) is one of the fifty United States of America, located in the north central part of the United States The latter, which allowed prospective customers to analyze existing C++ code to produce "as-built" navigable class diagrams, helped overcome Rational's late re-entry into the market for object-oriented modeling tools. Rose 2. 0 ran on Windows PCs and on several Unix-based workstations.

UML and RUP

In 1994, Rational acquired Verdix, a public company that produced a wide array of Ada compilers targeted to many architecture/OS combinations. The resulting entity was named "Rational Software", and promptly integrated the Rational Ada and C++ environments with the code generators and runtimes developed by Verdix.

In 1995, James Rumbaugh joined the company, and Rational acquired Ivar Jacobson's firm Objectory AB from Ericsson. Dr James Rumbaugh is a computer scientist and object methodologist who is best known for his work in creating the Object Modeling Technique (OMT and the Unified Modeling Ivar Hjalmar Jacobson (born in Ystad, Sweden, on September 2, 1939) is a Swedish computer scientist Objectory Systems was a software company based in Sweden that was instrumental in the development of Object-oriented program design Ericsson ( Telefonaktiebolaget L M Ericsson) () one of the largest Swedish companies is a leading provider of telecommunication and data communication systems With Grady Booch already aboard, this brought within one company three of the leading object-oriented software methodologists; these Three Amigos were immediately tasked with the unification of their work. Grady Booch (born February 27[[ 955]] is a Software designer a software methodologist and a design pattern enthusiast ¡Three Amigos! is a 1986 comedy western Film, produced by George Folsey Jr To eliminate the method fragmentation that was impeding commercial adoption of modeling tools, their Unified Modeling Language (UML) was developed openly, providing a level playing field for all tool vendors. Unified Modeling Language ( UML) is a standardized general-purpose Modeling language in the field of Software engineering. At its 1. 0 release, the Unified Modeling Language was contributed to the Object Management Group, which has managed its subsequent development. Object Management Group ( OMG) is a Consortium, originally aimed at setting standards for distributed Object-oriented systems and is now focused

Philippe Kruchten, a Rational techrep, was tasked with the assembly of an explicit process framework for modern software engineering. Philippe Kruchten was formerly the Director of Process Development (RUP at Rational Software. This effort combined the HTML-based process delivery mechanism employed by Objectory with Rational's 15-year experience base in working with customers developing significant software systems. HTML, an initialism of HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant Markup language for Web pages It provides a means to describe the structure The resulting "Rational Unified Process" (RUP) completed a strategic tripod:

Acquisitions

The momentum generated by Rose and the UML enabled Rational to establish a partnership with Microsoft, which then saw model-based development as a means of attracting enterprise-scale developers to the Windows platform; Rational's aim was to secure Microsoft's public support for modelling in the software development process. Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational Computer technology Corporation, which rose to dominate the Home computer This engagement with Microsoft convinced Rational to address the broader Windows-based IT market. With only one Windows-based tool (Rose) supporting RUP, Rational chose to acquire tool companies with Windows-based products that could be integrated to provide comprehensive RUP support. Beginning in 1996, Rational acquired Requisite (Requisite-Pro), SQA (Robot), Performance Awareness (preVue), and Pure-Atria (Purify, ClearCase); these joined the previously-acquired Verdix, Objectory, and Palladio teams to establish a set of business units whose mission was to create individually best-of-breed products that could be combined in interoperating Suites. See also Purification for the sense of Refining. Purify is a Memory debugger program used by Software developers Rational ClearCase is a software tool for Revision control (e The Rational Suite for Windows was introduced in 1999, and drove the company's transition to the Windows platform as its primary source of revenue.

In early 2000, Rational acquired ObjecTime Limited, which resulted in the merging of Rational Rose and ObjecTime Developer to create Rational Rose RealTime. ObjecTime Developer (or ObjecTime or OTD, for short is a Software automation tool designed to meet the development needs of real-time Software development

In 2001, Rational founders Levy and Devlin founded Catapulse -- an independent company aimed at providing hosted software development services using products from Rational and elsewhere. Catapulse was later acquired by Rational.

Rational peaked at $850M in revenues and ~4000 employees. After the dot-com crash, its revenues declined to $650M, but it was dominant, profitable, and cash-rich (~$600M) when its founders chose to sell the company to IBM for $2. The " dot-com bubble " (or sometimes the " IT bubble " was a speculative bubble covering roughly 1995–2001 (with a climax on March 10 International Business Machines Corporation abbreviated IBM and nicknamed "Big Blue", is a multinational Computer Technology 1B. The acquisition was announced on 6 December 2002 and was completed before the market opened 21 February 2003 [1].

See also

External links


IBM Rational free Web-hosted trials

IBM Rational free trial code downloads

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