DecisionSoft Ltd.

History

Mike Mason — a former Compsoc secretary — went to work at DecisionSoft over the Christmas vacation 1997, during which time he was developing systems using Cold Fusion. When he left to return to college, the management at DecisionSoft decided a good way to access the talented student programmer population of Oxford University would be to foster links with the computer society.

DecisionSoft needed people with Cold Fusion experience, and the best way to do this was to get Compsoc people using it themselves, for their own web pages. Cold Fusion was only available on the NT and Solaris platforms, so DecisionSoft funded a whole new machine, Nutty, for running Cold Fusion. Key players in the liason between Compsoc and DecisionSoft were Andrew Jackson and John Ireland (then President and Secretary, respectively). Philip Allen (managing director of DecisionSoft) also persuaded Allaire Corp., the company behind Cold Fusion, to donate a copy of their $1,000 server software to us.

DecisionSoft have since stopped developing with Cold Fusion, and are now devoloping XML processing tools. They still continue to support Compsoc, and several members have been employed by them, on temporary or permanent bases.

Talks

DecisionSoft employees have given several talks to Compsoc over the past couple of years. At the time of writing, the most recent such talk was given on “Java in the Real World” by Stephen White in Hilary term 2007.

Donation

DecisionSoft donated a a new machine, a Cyrix P200+ M2 with 64MB RAM and a 3.2GB hard drive, to run Windows NT and ColdFusion. This machine has since been swapped with another and served time as the main user box before being replaced by a Sun UltraSparc.