QAS(ID:7121/qas001 )Question answering systemInteractive mathematical problem solving language, forerunner of TK!Solver Related languages
References: in Computer Languages 3(3) view details Nearly two decades ago, while some programmers and mathematicians were working on math software to run on minicomputers, a few visionaries realized that personal computers could bring the computer-aided solution of mathematical problems to a very large audience. One of them was Dr Milos Konopasek, now vice president of Universal Technical Systems Inc (UTS). After developing a mathematical problem-solving program called QAS (question-answering system) that ran in a time-sharing mode on a PDP-10 computer at the University of Manchester, England, in the early 1970s, he emigrated to the US. Konopasek was teaching at Georgia Tech in the mid '70s when he first encountered a personal computer. It came from the now-defunct Intelligent Systems. He rewrote QAS to run on the machine. Basic was the native language of those early PCs, and Konopasek wrote the first microcomputer version of QAS in Basic. The program's essential "backsolving" capability--its ability to accept constraints on previously unconstrained variables and thus produce new and possibly more practical solutions--took fewer than 120 lines of code. Shortly after he wrote the microcomputer version of QAS, Konopasek became aware of Viscalc, the first commercial spreadsheet program. At first, Visicalc ran only on the Apple II, and was a product of a Massachusetts company, Software Arts. Konopasek proposed a numerical solver for scientific and technical problems as an add-on to Visicalc. Software Arts wasn't interested in marketing a special version of Visicalc, though. So a separate product, TK!Solver, the first microcomputer-based numeric solver with backsolving capability, was born. (The "TK" in the name stands for tool kit.) Eventually, Lotus Development (Cambridge, MA) acquired Software Art and TK, but didn't want to market software for technical applications. Lotus sold TK to UTS, which has enhanced the product and now sells it as TK Solver Plus for both the IBM Pc family and the Macintosh. Unlike programs that began as workstation and minicomputer software and migrated downward to microcomputers, TK has migrated upward to such machines as DEC VAXes and Sun and Apollo workstations. TK uses constructs called "sheets." For example, there are rule and variable sheets. In today's software lexicon, TK's sheets hold different classes of objects. This object-oriented structure is well suited to the creation of sets of models that solve classes of problems. UTS sells these model sets as add-ons to TK and calls them TK Solver Packs. One Pack is for electrical engineering. In a recent effort aimed at structural engineers, UTS created a Pack of 800 models that solve the equations in Roark and Young's Formulas for Stress and Strain. TK's backsolving ability, a hallmark of the program from the beginning, is especially useful with structural problems. in Computer Languages 3(3) view details |