Page 105 - A Life - my Live - my path

Graduated from ULB

I was personally convinced that the specificities of
radioactive products could not be effectively covered by a
"package" solution. The management of stocks of
radioactive decay products, the quantity of which varies all
the time, and just-in-time production... are points that need
to be dealt with in a specific way.
At the same time, when it came to analysing needs and
implementing solutions, I'd just completed 4 years of
studies, which gave me a very detailed view of the
possibilities. In particular, I had received information about
a new development tool running on IBM S38 machines,
marketed by an English company in London. We were
starting to talk about 4th generation programming
languages and CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering)

development tools.
After gathering the required information, I asked my
close collaborator to join me in London for a detailed
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presentation of the SYNON-2 development tool. By the time
we returned to Fleurus, our choice had been made, and we
were able to convince our boss, the financial manager, to
accept the investment needed to acquire Synon-2, and to
hire the profiles needed to ensure the new development of
our commercial applications.
So we bought Synon-2 and had license 22. Several
thousand licenses were subsequently sold.
The project was planned over 2 years of analysis,
development and testing with a team of 6 people. We applied

90 Pierre GILLARD
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