What was and in
The Ada Home -- 1996

[What kind of descriptions will you find here?]

December 1996

New books featured in the Winter 1996-97 catalogue of the Ada Home Bookworm's Lair. Updated the list of bindings. New introductory Ada 95 book by Fintan Culwin now described in the Ada 95 book reviews.

At TRI-Ada'96 ACM SIGAda gave its "Outstanding Ada Community Contributions" award to Magnus Kempe for his work as editor and publisher of the Ada Home.

November 1996

Inauguration of the Ada Home Bookworm's Lair, the online Ada bookshop with our selection of essential Ada and software engineering books.

Updated information about the Ada Home. New introductory Ada 95 book by John English now described in the Ada 95 book reviews.

October 1996

We're in the process of applying a new design to the whole site. Updated the compilers and vendors, bibliographies, and references sections. Revised and extended the Ada meets Java section.

Version 5.6 of the Lovelace tutorial has arrived, made by David Wheeler.

September 1996

NEWSFLASH To celebrate more than 30 months of existence, and over one million hits, the Ada Home has a new home at http://www.adahome.com/ Please update your bookmarks and links. Many major improvements and additions are coming soon at your Ada Home.

August 1996

Inauguration of The Rogues Gallery, a (still incomplete) who's who of the Ada world. Special thanks to David Wheeler who did all the initial work.

New entries in the Online Ada Papers, covering the Ada vs. C/C++ debates (article by Don Reifer) and providing more resources for teaching Ada (lots of material by Mike Feldman). Added Lovelace book announcement. Several descriptions of Lady Ada Lovelace now accessible in the history of Ada section. Also in this growing section, a nice addition is Stoneman, the original requirements document for Ada Programming Support Environments (February 1980); Clyde Roby has converted it into several electronic formats.

July 1996

Added Steelman, the original requirements document for Ada (June 1978); David Wheeler has converted it into several electronic formats. At the same time, we are pleased to introduce our new section on the history of Ada.

Improved the main entry page and the presentation of the main floors of Ada Home; the entry page is shorter, now that the extensive overview of the Ada Home has become a page of its own, the "Ada Home Guide". Introduced a new, prominent feature, HEADLINES: Ada World, to communicate important news on the entry pages. Boy, we hope you like this new organization. Please let us know! Also improved the table of contents of the online RM 95 (if your browser groks tables).

Aonix (ex-Thomson Software Products) announced on July 23 their first generally available release of ObjectAda for Windows, the first validated Ada 95 compiler for Windows 95 and Windows NT. [details]

The Ada Resource Association announced on July 16 a program to standardize how Ada is used and implemented with external services. The coordination with vendors is designed to make Ada the most portable language.

Added a section of resources to find Ada jobs online. There are now bindings to OS/2 and Win32 for Ada 95; similar bindings to the Mac OS are in preparation. Version 5.5 of the Lovelace tutorial has an improved "look", made by David Wheeler. Some minor changes in the Ada 95 HTML-Hypertext Rationale, contributed by Laurent Guerby.

The Ada 95 book reviews are now located in the Ada Home because the editor has changed. Several new online Ada papers. You can read some notes from Ada-Europe'96 written by Bob Mathis and some more extensive conference notes written by Jim Moore.

June 1996

Netcom, Inc. is one of the largest American retail ISPs [450,000 subscribers, 230 POPs]. As reported in Risks 18.23, their system recently went down for 14+ hours, because of an extra '&' in the "border gateway protocol code". According to Netcom President David Garrison, this error in the DC area killed the whole system. They had to bring down all 100+ routers and flush each one to recover, he reported. An extra '&' not caught by the compiler but crashing the system? Let's guess which language they (ab)use... It makes one wonder if what we face is simply "software stupidity" --rather than a grandiose "software crisis".

In a ruling likely to have a significant impact on the future of the Internet, a special three-judge US federal court declared the "Communications Decency Act" unconstitutional on its face.

Detailed information on how to get Ada compilers for education, donated or with steep discounts. Also many minor updates.

Here are some statistics for a full week of the Ada Home operation: 22'274 pages hit (excluding graphics) from 2'449 distinct machines (note: it could sometimes be several users on the same machine, or clusters using a proxy machine), of which only 255 are in .edu domains. It may come as a surprise to many users that .edu and .ac (sub)domains account on average for only 10% of total Ada Home traffic.

During this "poll" week, some of the most popular items (apart from the main entry pages) were: the Lovelace tutorial and the main tutorials section, the online Ada 95 Reference Manual, information on compilers and compiler vendors, reference documents, the Ada programming FAQ, help to move from C/C++ to Ada, binding information, our "Ada meets Java" overview, collected online papers, and tools and software components.

May 1996

Texas Instruments announced on May 6 that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Tartan, Inc., a leading third-party provider of highly optimizing software tools for developers of real-time, embedded DSP applications. The closing is expected to occur by the end of May. Tartan, Inc.'s primary offices are located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and will remain there as part of TI Semiconductor Group's digital signal processing solutions business. [press release]

Thomson Software Products and IDE announced on May 1 that they have signed a letter of intent to merge IDE with Thomson Software Products to form a new company, under a new name (Aonix). The merger will be completed by the end of June. [press release]

Added a Welcome Tour for first-time visitors. Watch a steady stream of new and better bindings for Ada. Always some new online Ada papers. Added lists of Ada vendors (compilers and tools). Update of the Lovelace tutorial (v5.3), (made by David Wheeler) -- now includes a section on Ada and Java. Updates on Ada in academia.

April 1996

A very important paper has been available and neglected for too long now; read "Comparing Development Costs of C and Ada", written by Stephen F. Zeigler, Ph.D., of Rational Software Corporation. If you know someone (programmer or manager) who doesn't understand that Ada is much more efficient, maintainable, and cost-effective than C and its scions, give them this paper to read. Maybe they'll understand the bottom line: Ada is an asset, it is profitable; and by comparison C is a liability--that's a fact.

How to order paper copies of the Ada 95 Reference Manual and Rationale. Update of the Lovelace tutorial (v5.2) and ada2html tool (v1.4) (both by David Wheeler).

March 1996

New FAQ: Learning Ada. Some new Ada WWW sites. More Ada code examples. More and better bindings.

Two years ago, 3 March 1994:
Official announcement of the Home of the Brave Ada Programmers
(HBAP Ada WWW server)
There have been more than 700'000 hits in two years (200'000 during the first year of operation). Usage has steadily increased, today with about 80'000 hits per month -- compare to 43'000 hits in March 1995 and 5'000 hits in March 1994 (note: pictures/graphics are excluded from the counts). A total of 1-2 GB are served each month.

February 1996

Update of the Books section; note the new list of Ada 95 books. New tools. Minor corrections and improvements to the Ada 95 HTML-Hypertext Rationale (contributed by Laurent Guerby); this new version can also be downloaded, see the References section. Some general improvements, e.g. added a global set of common navigation choices at the top of all pages.

The Ada Home (HBAP) has been selected by Point, a free service which rates and reviews only the best, sharpest, and funniest home pages on the World Wide Web. Few Internet sites make it into Point's pretty-darned-prestigious "Top 5% of the Web" directory.

January 1996

Happy New Year (and Happy New Day every day!)

Added a section on Ada meets the WWW and Java. Cross-references (generated by Volker Elling) added to the syntax summary in the online Ada 95 HTML-Hypertext Reference Manual. Some new online Ada papers.

Update of the Lovelace tutorial (created by David Wheeler; now at version 5.1). Both David Wheeler's Lovelace tutorial and Simon Johnston's guide to help C/C++ programmers understand and love Ada will become available in book format; congratulations! The obvious conclusion is that in order to write a new Ada 95 book, it is a positive first step to contribute to HBAP :-).

The Ada Home (HBAP) has been selected by The McKinley Group's professional editorial team as a "4-Star" site. This is the highest rating an Internet site can achieve in Magellan, McKinley's comprehensive Internet directory of over 1.5 million sites and 40,000 reviews.

Page last modified: 1999-01-03