Procyon Research Ltd.

Procyon Research Ltd. was a British company founded in 1982 to provide computer hardware and software for the scientific and engineering fields.

History
For the first few years it primarily made hardware interfaces and software for a number of then common computer architectures that allowed them to talk to scientific and engineering instruments via interfaces such as IEEE-488 (GPIB), sold development software for such interfaces and in addition designed similar products for other companies.

In 1985 Richard Barber was hired as a managing director of the company and he decided to refocus the company to a provider of software development tools and he raised additional venture capital to allow the company to hire extra development personnel. The decision was take to focus on Common Lisp as LISP and the upcoming CLOS standards were a hot topic in the mid 80s scientific field, the end result was a system called simply Procyon Common Lisp that is notable for having the first commercially available CLOS implementation and being one of the first if not the first PC LISP system to offer a graphics subsystem and the first PC LISP to take advantage of the Protected Mode on Intel processors.

Although the company managed to generate a considerable interest in the product and made ports available on OS/2, the Apple Macintosh and eventually Microsoft Windows as well, sales were slow, not the least due to amateurish marketing and some less than ideal distribution arrangements, with the company having estimated yearly sales of under 200k UKP. In 1991 Scientia Ltd. took over the company, both to ensure that the development system they used for their classroom scheduling software continued to be available and to gain an experienced development team to allow them to expand their product range. Scientia sold the rights to the Windows version of Procyon Common Lisp to Franz Inc. in mid 1992 for US$ 275k who renamed the product Allegro CL\PC and have been developing it ever since, but Scientia continued selling the Mac, DOS and OS/2 versions for a few years afterwards.

The company still exists technically but has been dormant since about the turn of the century.

Products

 * CST Q-488 - GPIB interface for the Sinclair QL developed by Procyon Research for CST.
 * Procyon Common Lisp - Common LISP system with a CLOS and graphics layers.

Personnel

 * Richard Barber (Managing director 1985~1991)