Jsoftware

Jsoftware Inc. is the vendor for the J programming language and associated database management system Jd. Incorporated in February 1990 by Eric Iverson as Iverson Software Inc. and soon joined by Ken Iverson and Roger Hui, the company is now owned equally by Hui, Eric Iverson, and Chris Burke.

History
Iverson Software Inc. was founded in February 1990 by Eric Iverson, with the intention of offering an improved version of SHARP APL/PC. By this time Eric's father Ken had begun work with Roger Hui on the language J (in fact, the first public demo of J was also held in February 1990); the pair joined Iverson Software in May of that year. Eric adapted his SHARP session manager to work with Hui's J implementation, and J was first released at APL90 in August 1990. Plans for a SHARP APL product were soon discarded. In 1994, the company hired Chris Burke to work on J's environment and libraries. In April 2000, it changed its name to Jsoftware; while the name Iverson Software Inc. is no longer used, it remains in the prefix "isi" used for some J tools.

Ken Iverson died in 2004, leaving Eric, Hui, and Burke as owners of Jsoftware. In 2011, Hui joined Dyalog Ltd., reducing his involvement in J development. J was made open source in March 2011.

Jsoftware held programming conferences in Toronto in 2012 and 2014 for users of J as well as K and APL.

In 2012 Marshall Lochbaum, then a summer intern at ThomasNet, began work on a modification of Chris Burke's JDB database management system to add more powerful features such as joins. Eric Iverson soon joined the project and Jsoftware negotiated with ThomasNet to obtain copyright ownership. JD, or JDB+, was announced on July 23, 2012 at the Jsoftware conference. Now called Jd, it is maintained and sold by Jsoftware.

Henry Rich, a long-time APL and J user, began work with Jsoftware on the J implementation in 2016. Version J805, released December 19, 2016, is the first to feature his work.