APL Wiki
Morten Kromberg
Email: <mkrom@dyalog.com>
I've been the Technical Director of Dyalog since 2005, so I am currently able to spend most of my time thinking about how to make APL easier to use for people who are fortunate enough to have found an interesting problem to solve. Finding ways to sharing ideas and tools is important, and I'm hoping that the APLWiki is going to make this easier.
My APL background started around 1979 when I met some people who were setting up an office for I.P.Sharp Associates in Oslo, Norway. I was allowed to become a piece of furniture in the IPSA office, with unlimited access to APL timesharing. From 1980, I failed repeatedly (Oslo, Trondheim, Copenhagen) in attempts to become an academic, it was much too much fun getting paid to work on implementing databases, crew scheduling systems and modelling North Sea oil production (etc).
I met Gitte Christensen via the IPSA Mailbox (also written in APL, before the Internet) and moved to the IPSA Copenhagen office in 1984. I became a dad and gave up the idea of getting a degree, and learned how to install and maintain SHARP APL applications on mainframe computers - working on this until IPSA was devoured by Reuters - finally leaving to form Insight Systems together with Gitte and Kim Andreasen in 1990. For a while we combined SHARP APL work with work in APL*PLUS and Dyalog APL on PCs.
During a period with little billable work, Insight Systems implemented SQAPL (also known as APL Link Pro in the APL*PLUS community) - the "industry standard" ODBC interface within the APL community (see Chapter 15 of the Dyalog Interface Guide for more details).
Around 1995, Insight Systems became part of Adaytum, taking responsibility for the development of Adaytum Planning, a budgeting and "performance measurement" application which was sold to Cognos in 2002. The product is now available from IBM!
From 2000-2005 I was very fit, racing bicycles every weekend, but then the opportunity to get involved with Dyalog came around, and it was irresistible. Although I am now 7kg heavier and nowhere near as fit as I was, it is a huge privilege to work with the wizards who have been building Dyalog APL for 25 years.