Massachusetts Computer Associates (originally just Computer Associates), also known as COMPASS, was a

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

company founded by Thomas Edward Cheatham Jr. and based in

Wakefield Wakefield is a cathedral city in West Yorkshire, England located on the River Calder. The city had a population of 99,251 in the 2011 census.https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/census/2011/ks101ew Census 2011 table KS101EW Usual resident population, ...

Massachusetts Massachusetts (Massachusett language, Massachusett: ''Muhsachuweesut assachusett writing systems, məhswatʃəwiːsət'' English: , ), officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is the most populous U.S. state, state in the New England ...

from approximately 1961 to 1991, focusing primarily on

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

design A design is a plan or specification for the construction of an object or system or for the implementation of an activity or process or the result of that plan or specification in the form of a prototype, product, or process. The verb ''to design'' ...

and

implementation Implementation is the realization of an application, or execution of a plan, idea, model, design, specification, standard, algorithm, or policy. Industry-specific definitions Computer science In computer science, an implementation is a realiza ...

, especially source-to-source transformation. It was acquired in the late 1960s by

Applied Data Research Applied Data Research (ADR) was a large software vendor from the 1960s until the mid-1980s. ADR is often described as "the first independent software vendor". Founded in 1959, ADR was originally a contract development company. ADR eventually bui ...

. Many well-known computer scientist were employed by, or consulted for, COMPASS at some point in their careers, including

Michael J. Fischer Michael John Fischer (born 1942) is a computer scientist who works in the fields of distributed computing, parallel computing, cryptography, algorithms and data structures, and computational complexity. Career Fischer was born in 1942 in Ann Arbor ...

Stephen Warshall Stephen Warshall (November 15, 1935 – December 11, 2006) was an American computer scientist. During his career, Warshall carried out research and development in operating systems, compiler design, language design, and operations research. War ...

Robert W. Floyd Robert W Floyd (June 8, 1936 – September 25, 2001) was a computer scientist. His contributions include the design of the Floyd–Warshall algorithm (independently of Stephen Warshall), which efficiently finds all shortest paths in a graph and ...

, and

Leslie Lamport Leslie B. Lamport (born February 7, 1941 in Brooklyn) is an American computer scientist and mathematician. Lamport is best known for his seminal work in distributed systems, and as the initial developer of the document preparation system LaTeX and ...

. Some of the systems they worked on include AMBIT/G and IVTRAN, a Fortran compiler for the

ILLIAC IV The ILLIAC IV was the first massively parallel computer. The system was originally designed to have 256 64-bit floating point units (FPUs) and four central processing units (CPUs) able to process 1 billion operations per second. Due to budget con ...

. Leslie Lamport wrote his influential " Time, Clocks" paper while he was at COMPASS. The original vectorizing compiler for the

was written at COMPASS with contributions by Lamport, who worked there part-time. Robert Floyd's ''Treesort'' algorithm was published while Floyd was at COMPASS.

Corporate history

(ADR) bought Massachusetts Computer Associates in the late 1960s.Rosemary Hamilton, "Computervision turns believer after Compass helps convert software", ''Computerworld'', July 14, 1986
p. 20
/ref> ADR was sold to

Ameritech AT&T Teleholdings, Inc., formerly known as Ameritech Corporation (and before that American Information Technologies Corporation), is an American telecommunications company that arose out of the 1984 AT&T divestiture. Ameritech was one of the se ...

in 1986 and then by Ameritech to the (unrelated)

Computer Associates CA Technologies, formerly known as CA, Inc. and Computer Associates International, Inc., is an American multinational corporation headquartered in New York City. It is primarily known for its business-to-business (B2B) software with a product po ...

of New York.Applied Data Research, Software Products Division Records, 1959-1987

Charles Babbage Institute The IT History Society (ITHS) is an organization that supports the history and scholarship of information technology by encouraging, fostering, and facilitating archival and historical research. Formerly known as the Charles Babbage Foundation, ...

, University of Minnesota. Shortly after ADR was sold to Computer Associates, Compass was in turn sold to

SofTech SofTech, Inc. was a computer software company with offices in the United States and headquarters established in Lowell, Massachusetts. SofTech was a significant provider of software engineering tools and solutions in the 1970's as well as Product ...

Notes

{{Authority control 1961 establishments in Massachusetts 1987 disestablishments in Massachusetts American companies established in 1961 American companies disestablished in 1987 Computer companies established in 1961 Computer companies disestablished in 1987 Defunct computer companies based in Massachusetts Defunct software companies of the United States Software companies established in 1961 Software companies disestablished in 1987