Arity Corporation

A company founded in 1984 by two people that had worked on the Lotus 1-2-3 package at Lotus Development Corporation with 1 million USD finance from that company and U.S. Boston Trust Bank. Founders Peter Gabel and Jim Greene branched out on their own with the simple idea of creating a Prolog compiler, but at the time the company was formed all Prolog implementations were interpreted or compiled to a (slow) virtual machine. Unlike competitor Prolog Development Center, Arity choose not to change the language to facilitate easier compilation but rather provided a Clocksin and Mellish superset, this meant that while their compilers created faster programs than interpreted Prolog, it never reached the speeds Visual Prolog managed but had a much higher compatibility with traditional Prolog software. The Arity/Prolog compiler sold in large quantities and it was one of the three best known Prolog tools throughout the latter half of the 80's and the early 90's.

Interest in the Arity/Prolog package waned through the years, this was not the least due to a commercial faux pas when the company introduced Arity/Prolog32 for OS/2 in 1992 but would only sell it as a bundle package with a "forthcoming Windows NT" version at inflated prices compared to their 16 bit versions, taking the product price wise into competition with industrial strength platforms such as IBM SAA AD/Cycle Prolog/2 and SICStus Prolog that offered all kinds of advanced features and support for exotic platforms that Arity did not offer. In addition to the fact that the Windows version of Arity/Prolog32 was delivered years late with version 1.1, so if you had plunged out for the new version what you got was decent OS/2 32 bit compiler with a host of bundled 16 bit tools and because the compiler differed from the 16 bit versions you had too wait three years until you could do straight port of your code to Windows, using tools you had already paid for.

The company did see the light at the end of the day and split the OS/2 and Windows 32 bit versions into two packages that each retailed for 1/5th of that the original bundle cost. But by that time Arity had completely wasted the advantage of being the fist company to deliver a 386 32 bit Prolog for common OS's. The Windows version chugged on for a few years but never sold in the quantities that the 16 bit tools had and received fairly limited updates, the supplementary tools such as the LINT source code static checker, despite not having a 16 bit origins and having bee developed specifically for Arity/Prolog32, were never delivered in 32 bit versions so the compiler could not be fully used with 64 bit version of windows for instance. And while the company offered its Prolog compiler until it closed down you had by the 21st century to hunt around a bit on their website to find it and it never received any updates.

The company responded to slack in their development tools by focusing on tools for the internet, initially with "Arity Database Publisher", a tool that transformed databases into web pages, and "AdPlace", a program that allowed webmasters to manage small/classified advert listings. In Arity introduced "Arity Information Animator", an updated version of their Database Publisher that allowed dynamic webpage creation in addition to handling all search and forms generation, AIA developed into a full content management system in the next few years.

In 2003 the company delivered an expert system called "Active Knowledge Studio" that is expressly designed to allow you to create expert systems for product support of any kind, this tool was split into three in 2004 with AKS continuing to be sold but a product called "Arity Diagnosis" specially dealt with creating product diagnosis expert systems and "Arity Prognosis" an expert system and search application developed specifically for the pharmaceutical industry. The AIA CMS was dropped in the latter half of the noughties alongside the Prognosis package but AKS developed into more generic systems called "ExpressWay" and "@tlas", with a new domain specific expert system called "LexiLink" focusing on lexicon maintenance.

The company went out of business in 2012, by that time the only products the company was delivering was "ExpressWay" and a development of LexiLink called "Semantic Studio".

Known products

• Arity/Prolog

Personel

• Peter L. Gabel (Founder, ex-Lotus, ex-DEC)
• James B. Greene (Founder, ex-Lotus)
• Paul Weiss (Early Arity/Prolog development)
• Pamela Schaepe (Knowledge systems dev.)

Publications

• An article on the company from InfoWorld - 1987