The TopSpeed Legend
TopSpeed Corporation was formed in 1992 by the merger of Jensen and Partners, International with Clarion Software Corporation. The two companies were perfectly suited for each other.

Jensen and Partners, International (JPI) had spun out from Borland International in 1987 when Niels Jensen and the entire language development team left in a disagreement over compiler quality. Jensen had previously founded Borland in Copenhagen in 1979 to produce software for the emerging microcomputer market.

Jensen earned his plaque in the computer hall of fame by perfecting the integrated development environment-the underlying framework of all modern software development tools. Drawing on his expertise with word processors and menuing systems, Jensen envisioned a Pascal programming environment consisting of tightly integrated high quality components. Although, the University of California at San Diego had previously combined a Pascal compiler with a source code editor, the results were disappointing. Jensen believed that an intuitive and efficient user interface was the key to improving programmer productivity.

Borland's first hit product, Turbo Pascal, advanced the state of the art of programming tools in much the same way that Lotus 1-2-3 refined computer spreadsheets. Like Lotus 1-2-3, Turbo Pascal proved to be enormously popular, selling 300,000 copies in less than two years.

Jensen's team quickly followed that success with SideKick - another smash hit. In the meantime, the team moved to London and began writing compilers for C, an emerging language standard, and Modula-2, the successor language to Pascal. The three compilers were very similar. So a new design was proposed splitting each compiler into a "front end" and a common language independent "back end" that would produce optimized machine code. In 1989, this approach yielded the TopSpeed line of compilers which proved superior to all other compiler technology at the time.

Clarion Software Corporation was formed in 1982 by Bruce Barrington, also founder of HBO & Company. HBO, a $700 million health services company, had been named for Barrington and his cofounders, Walter Huff, Dick Owens.

The technology that produced HBO's phenomenal growth was a hospital information system built on a proprietary operating system that Barrington developed for the Four Phase line of computers. In 1970, Four Phase, Inc. had introduced the first desktop computer. Barrington, then a software development manager for McDonnell Douglas Corporation purchased the second unit shipped.

In 1973, Barrington left McDonnell Douglas and began writing Medpro on his dining room table. Nine months later, the Medpro hospital information system was installed and fully operational in a hospital in Galesburg, Illinois. In that period of time, Barrington and Owens had written an operating system, a compiler, a hospital information system, and all related documentation and training materials. Ten years later, the Medpro system was installed in more than 300 hospitals making HBO the second largest computer services company in the health care industry.

In 1982, Barrington founded Clarion Software Corporation to apply the rapid application development technology he had created for HBO to the new IBM PC. This was a natural step because the PC was architecturally similar to Four Phase computers which also used memory mapped video displays.

For 3 1/2 years, Barrington's development team worked on a comprehensive set of tools for building commercial quality PC software. In 1986, Clarion Version 1.0 was introduced at the spring Comdex in Atlanta. Two years later, at another spring Comdex, Clarion introduced Clarion Professional Developer Version 2.0. This landmark product included Designer, the first of the template driven application generators that have come to characterize the Clarion product line.

By 1990, Barrington knew that the Clarion product line required a major infusion of new technology. Clarion developers were the most productive in the industry. But the programs they created were big and slow. Clarion needed a new compiler.

Barrington learned that TopSpeed compilers represented the state-of-art. Better yet, the "Back end" of a TopSpeed compiler for the Clarion language was already written. In the summer of 1990, Clarion licensed the TopSpeed compiler technology from JPI and began writing a new compiler. This project drew the two companies tightly together, culminating in a merger two years later.

This Text is (C) Copyrighted by TopSpeed Corporation.

Note: A new company SoftVelocity, Inc. was founded in May of 2000 when it acquired the Clarion line application development tools from TopSpeed Corporation, with company's management team, headed by former TopSpeed Vice President of Product Management Robert Zaunere.