Plus Post: Logic Programming Associates 386-PROLOG
Yes, it's here! LPA 386-PROLOG is now available in a version for Windows!
Company
Logic Programming Associates Limited was founded on August 29, 1980 in Nottingham, UK. Professor Bob Kowalski led a “logic programming research team” at Imperial College, London. The software that the team created became the products of LPA, many of which were Prolog related. The company created micro-PROLOG “the world's first Prolog system for micro-computers and implemented on many small micro-computers at the time”. (At least, according to the company’s website.)
micro-PROLOG was written for CP/M and could support up to 64KB of RAM. Brian D Steel, a member of the research team, started porting micro-PROLOG to the Intel 8086 chip in his spare time. At the time, the Victor 9000 was the only system available. The work was finally finished in 1983.
Brian joined LPA full-time in 1984 and worked with Frank McCabe to create what became PROLOG Professional. This could take advantage of the IBM PC’s 640kb of memory and up to 1MB on MD-DOS systems.
The release of the Intel 80386, a compiler was needed to take advantage of the new specs. Brian started the project on early November 1989 and after a year of nonstop work it was ready.
Over the years, Brian continued to add features to 386-PROLOG. In May 2014, Brian acquired the whole LPA PROLOG system “including the 386-PROLOG engine in all its versions and related files and resources, although it will continue be marketed by LPA and to form the basis of the LPA Toolkits, just as before”. (For a full history, got here.)
You can also download an older version of PROLOG Professional, which is based on “historic 8-bit and 16-bit implementations of micro-PROLOG, PROLOG Professional used a revolutionary combination of incremental and optimized compilation to provide interpreter-like flexibility, but with the speed of compiled code”.
