Applied dimensionality

There’s a story I’d like to tell, especially funny in context with recent merger. I’ve found all this stuff (see links) about a year ago and I imagined the undocumented parts, it’s not official.

In deep 90s a great guy named George Kunzle lead the development of IBM internal budgeting system, called FREGI. It was written in APL and had very good UI, they say.

After some time, Kuntze quit IBM and left for good in the big open world, where he met Guy Haddleton, former SAS captain, at the time a CEO of 2-people company (with Kiwi Sue Strother)  called Adaytum, based in Haddleton’s appartament in Bristol. Adaytum was selling rather cheap spreadsheet budgeting solutions. After some rewrite FREGI became Adaytum Analyst, leading product in the rapid-growing market.
Later, Analyst was rewritten on dyalog apl, giving it a windows gui.

Soon they had to find out how to scale this system to enterprise level. And there appeared Contributor, giving every user a cut-version of analyst written in J (cause it’s free of charge, maybe) and  wrapped in ActiveX to sit in a browser nicely.
And then Adaytum was snapped by Cognos (it was Adaytum 3.0, and Contributor appeared in Adaytum 2.4 (i’ve started with that one)). A tough road of integration BI products with Adaytum was taken and now they are almost inseparable (at least we do not implement “ep only” anymore).

And now Big Blue snapped little Canadian and a loop tied.

I wonder, did anyone welcomed FREGI back?