The Whitewater Group, founded in 1985, was the first tenant and first graduate of the Technology Innovation Center Small Business Incuba- tor of the Northwestern University/ Evanston Research Park. The flagship product of this small, specialized software company is Actor, described as an “object-oriented programming language and environment” designed to make programmers’ jobs easier when they are creating applications for Microsoft Windows. A “window” is a system in which the computer user calls up, say, a spread sheet by pointing (e.g., with a “mouse”) rather than by typing in a command. In general, windows make computer programs easier to use but more difficult to create in the first place. According to Whitewater, a conventional programming language requires several pages of code (about 300 lines) just to create a window that says Hello. Writing those pages is slow, dull, and error-prone. “With Actor that same window can be created with only two lines of code.”
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Twenty-one-year-old Pansophic Systems, Inc., sold $232 million worth of computer software worldwide in the year ending January 31, making it one of the world’s largest independent software companies. The company started out in a second-floor Lombard storefront in 1969, and had sales of just $28,000 in 1970. Founder Joseph Piscopo, a programmer at Montgomery Ward, had devised a program he called Panvalet, a “library management product” (still sold) that enables mainframe computer users to call up different programs very quickly.
Now headquartered on the East-West Tollway in Lisle, Pansophic employs 1,700 people (750 of them in the Chicago area). Nearly half its sales come from overseas, where it has 26 offices in 14 countries from Brazil to Finland. Piscopo himself retired three years ago at the age of 42.
And Cherry has used its own expertise to retool and automate its manufacturing system, for which it won the 1989 Automated Production Systems World Class Manufacturing Award from a trade group last year. According to Production: The Magazine of Manufacturing Management (December 1989), Cherry’s automated system, involving several robots, can turn out any of 50 varieties of automotive switches at under ten seconds per switch, in quantities that range from fewer than 4,000 to over 100,000. “The entire system is run on a just-in- time basis, with the auto company’s computer placing daily orders directly to Cherry’s computer system.”
The key to the company’s future? Continued adaptability: “The market is changing very rapidly,” says Fleischaker. “It’s difficult to say where the technology is going. But as the market changes, we’ll adapt to that change.”
