Nat Systèmes

Nat Systèmes was a French company also active in Belgium, the UK and the USA that originally specialised in making object-oriented development tools. Founded in 1987 to develop a custom OS/2 based solution for insurance giant AXA but gaining notoriety when Microsoft licensed their C and Pascal compilers in 1988 to market as budget programming tools under the Quick moniker as response to Borlands Turbo line of C and Pascal compilers. While the Quick line was mis-marketed by Microsoft and only sold in limited numbers the company continued to work for Microsoft in modernising their toolchain, much of the work on Visual C++ was actually done by NS and the compiler and toolset is actually based on the Nat Quick C compiler and not the Microsoft one, but after Visual C++ Version 2 had been released, Microsoft abruptly terminated the relationship.

The first product the company marketed themselves was the NS-DK development system introduced in 1989, but that is an object-oriented client/server RAD environment. The company also started to focus on enterprise client/server solutions and later on IT services, they opened a USA office called Nat Systems International in 1995 and in the same year the company introduced NatStar which is a RAD tool that focuses on critical business application and NatWeb was introduced a few years later.

Canadian IT services provider Cognicase aquired Nat Systèmes in 1999, but Cognicase themselves were taken over by their compatriots CGI in 2002, however when CGI withdrew from the European markets a number of ex-NS staff that worked in the services portion of the company went on to form GFI. The development tools portion of NS was bought by the Patrick Atlan investment company and was re-launched in 2003 as Nat System that is still making most of their classic programming tools alongside some new ones but marketing them mainly in the Francophone markets.

Products

 * NatStar
 * NatWeb
 * NS-DK - RAD system
 * QuickC - DOS C compiler
 * QuickPascal - Turbo Pascal compatible compiler for DOS

Personnel

 * Olivier Dellenbach (CEO & founder)
 * Louis-Marie Brierre
 * Pascal Meyers
 * Noel Beckers
 * John Jaumet (Sales)
 * George L. Kozar (USA)
 * Ian Cartwright (Head of the European office post 1995)

Links

 * http://www.natsystem.fr