History

History of Business Rules!

The language was originally designed as a way for programmers of the 80s to easily port their IBM System/23 programs to the new Personal Computers that were replacing them. Business Rules! has continued to evolve since that time, and the modern language allows you to write fully graphical programs for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux, while still running the same program code (mostly) that worked on your System/23 in the 70s.

This strong commitment to Backwards Compatibility means programmers can keep their legacy code while slowly upgrading parts of it to have a Graphical User Interface.

"When IBM discontinued the System/23 line, as they had several preceding business systems, a group of frustrated developers realized that they were spending more time porting legacy applications to new platforms than they were developing new systems. In order to give the small and medium sized application software houses an alternative to this constant re-coding, Workstation Basic was created as a platform-independent programming environment. It was envisioned as an environment that would be available on a variety of existing and future platforms and operating systems, that would allow developers to bring forward legacy System/36 Basic and System/23 applications, while constantly evolving to also provide the latest technologies for development of new systems. And evolve it has.

Business Rules! is the progeny of Workstation Basic."[1]

"Workstation Basic served the community of small and medium sized application houses for many years under the stewardship of ABC Development Systems, and later Emphasys Software. In 1995, it was purchased by two of it’s original authors who made a renewed commitment to revitalizing the language so that it would continue to fulfill their original vision. Distributed today through Application Development Systems"[2]. In 2012 ADS formerly changed their name to Business Rules Corp to express their commitment to the Business Rules! programming language.