PowerHouse is a trademarked name for a family of byte-compiled programming languages originally produced by Quasar for the Hewlett-Packard HP3000 mini-computer. It was composed of three components:
- Quiz: a report writer
- Quick: an interactive, character-based screen generator
- QTP, a batch transaction processor.
All three components were dependent upon a central Data Dictionary, QDD and later PDL.
History
PowerHouse was introduced in 1982 by Quasar Corporation and bundled together Quiz and Quick, both of which had been previously available separately, with a new batch processor QTP, now sold as a single product. In 1983, Quasar changed its name to Cognos Corporation and began porting their application development tools to other platforms, notably IBM's series 400 (later rebranded as the AS/400, and Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX range. Cognos also began extending their product line with add-ons to PowerHouse (for example, Architect) and end-user applications written in PowerHouse (for example, MultiView). The PowerHouse language represented a considerable achievement. Compared with languages like Cobol, Pascal and PL/1, PowerHouse substantially cut the amount of labour required to produce useful applications on its chosen platforms. It achieved this through the use of a central data-dictionary, a compiled file that extended the attributes of data fields natively available in the DBMS with frequently used programming idioms such as:
- display masks
- help and message strings
- range and pattern checks
- help and information texts.
In order to support the data dictionary PowerHouse was tightly coupled to the underlying database management system on each of the target platforms. In the case of the HP3000 this was the Image shallow-network DBMS, and the entire PowerHouse language reflected its origins. Like all virtual machine languages PowerHouse is CPU intensive. On machines running at speeds considerably less than 40MHz this produced a visibly negative impact on overall transaction performance, frequently necessitating hardware upgrades. Cognos practice of tying license fees to hardware performance metrics resulted in high licensing costs for PowerHouse users.
Migration to the PC
Cognos attempted to move to the Intel platform in 1988 (PowerHouse PC) but was unsuccessful at that time. However, Cognos eventually produced Axiant (c.1995), which ported PowerHouse-like syntax to an Intel-based Microsoft Windows visual development environment and linked it to SQL aware DBMS running on these machines. The radical changes wrought by the PC revolution, which began just at the time PowerHouse was introduced, eventually brought down the cost of host computers to such an extent that high-priced software development tools such as PowerHouse became unattractive to customers. Although PowerHouse is still available and continues to receive occasional minor updates, by 1999 Cognos had all but ceased further development of PowerHouse on mid-range computers in favour of newer product lines. Around 1999 Powerhouse Web was released in order to support the development web-aware applications. Products like Business Intelligence and Axiant that run on commodity architectures as well as high-end Unix servers now form the core of Cognos Corporation's business.
