1980 to 1989: The Rise of Personal Computers and Personal Software - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 200

itself. In fact, the name “Fusion Applications” is what the product or products will
be called. Mergers between competitors are sometimes successful, sometimes not
successful. But mergers are a fact of life in the software business.
Rational
Rational is now part of IBM, but it had an eventful history prior to being acquired.
Rational was incorporated in 1981 by Paul Levy and Mike Devlin in Westford,
Massachusetts. Its name at the time of incorporation was Rational Machines and,
in fact, Rational had hardware as well as software.
The original business plan for Rational was to improve software development
practices centering on the new Ada programming language combined with iterat-
ive methods. But code alone is not the only thing that needs to be done well, so
Rational also tackled architecture, requirements, design, quality control, and test-
ing and made useful innovations in all of these disparate fields. It also had a kind
of Ada metalanguage called DIANA , which stood for Descriptive Intermediate At-
tributed Notation for Ada (certainly on a short list of complicated names).
The initial Rational Environment was a combination of a suite of software tools
and a custom workstation called the R1000. Recall that in the early 1980s, high-
end commercial workstations had not yet appeared. When Rational began to port
their tools and methods to other platforms and downplay their own custom hard-
ware, the company changed its name to just Rational and dropped the “Machines”
part.
There were various concepts and tools under the Rational umbrella, but they
came together into a powerful suite of methods and supporting software called the
Rational Unified Process (RUP). Some of the RUP concepts originated in an older
tool called Objectory by Dr. Ivar Jacobsen, who later joined Rational when his
company merged in 1995.
RUP had a pragmatic and empirical basis that it was necessary to concentrate
on risk abatement and quality control (historically weak for software). The RUP
concepts codified many of the principles of iterative and structured development
and surrounded them with tools for requirements analysis, design, coding, testing,
and governance.
Although RUP was developed in the 1990s, it still ranks as a top methodology
today when quality and productivity are accurately measured. For major applica-
tions larger than 1,000 function points, RUP is one of the best methodologies even