Harlequin (software company)
From Free net encyclopedia
Harlequin was a privately funded software company founded by Jo Marks, which had two main lines of business - digital pre-press (primarily ScriptWorks, a 'PostScript language compatible RIP'), and modern language development environments (compilers and IDEs) for Lisp, ML and Dylan. Other products included data analysis tools created using LispWorks, the Lisp IDE.
Harlequin Limited was founded in 1987 in Cambridge, England, with offices initially at the founder's home and then on Station Road. The company moved in 1989 to Barrington Hall, in the village of Barrington near Cambridge, which became the permanent company headquarters.
Expansion followed, and Harlequin Limited became The Harlequin Group Limited, with wholly-owned subsidiaries in the UK (Harlequin Limited), the USA (Harlequin, Inc.) and Australia (Harlequin Australia Pty Limited). The company acquired in February 1995 the rights to the Lisp-related technology Lucid Common Lisp of Lucid, Inc., that went out of business the summer before due to financial hardships. Also many staff from Lucid Inc and Symbolics Inc, when those other Lisp companies failed. In 1997 the group company became Harlequin Group plc.
At its peak in 1997/1998 the company had over 300 staff. Harlequin had offices in: Cambridge, England (including Barrington Hall and Longstanton); Edinburgh; Manchester; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Menlo Park, California, and several other places.
Due to failed expansion plans, the company was declared bankrupt in the summer of 1999 and went into administration. It was acquired by Global Graphics[1], primarily for the PostScript technologies, which Global Graphics continues to develop and market under the Harlequin name (in 2006). Global Graphics created a subsidiary Xanalys[2] for the data analysis and LispWorks businesses.
In January 2005 employees founded the independently-owned LispWorks Limited[3] to focus on the Lisp business. Several of Harlequin's other assets and technologies have also been acquired by companies founded by former Harlequin employees. Functional Objects Inc [4] was founded to continue development and production of the Dylan IDE. Ravenbrook Limited[5] acquired the Memory Management Reference[6], a public resource on memory management and garbage collection, and the Memory Pool System[7], a flexible memory manager and garbage collector now open sourced.