Talk:PROIV

January 2015
Hi,

I would like to contribute to updating the information on the PROIV wikipedia page. I am an employee of NGA HR so I don't believe I should do this directly, but I would like to suggest a few pieces of neutral information to be included.

Firstly, under Features very little is written:

Features

PROIV supports a wide variety of operating systems by virtue of a write once, run anywhere virtual machine model similar to Java.

I think it might be appropriate to include here the platforms that PROIV does and doesn't support. This information can be found in the link near the bottom of this page, http://www.proiv.com/support

SadieGeen (talk) 11:57, 6 January 2015 (UTC) Sadie Geen

February 2017
As it stands, this Wikipedia entry reads like an advert. It would be interesting to include full details of why McDonnell Information Systems "changed its name" to Northgate. Aside from the problems in the US aerospace industry, the US Information Systems division was performing poorly. A poor decision to port financial applications from Digital Basic to ProIV resulted in a heavily delayed and costly project - the tool was just not suited to the demands of Foreign Exchange and other trading systems. Jerry Causley (the MD at the time) stood up in front of the London City office staff and announced the decision to port the product to ProIV with absolutely no reference to the technical staff whatsoever. Stating "if anyone has a problem with this, speak now" in such a vociferous fashion intimidated those present, who realised any objection would be career-limiting.

I am not aware of the full details as I had left their employment by this time, but I believe Northgate (previously a software house used by McDonnell) bailed them out, in the UK at least.

M J Lambert - Ex-employee — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.13.160.50 (talk) 08:12, 22 February 2017 (UTC)

History and stuff
As of October 2021 the history in this article has been around so long it is basically unchallenged and very hard to RS. Very roughly I am seeming to find the following:

Sources, reliable and unreliable, seem to agree PROIV was developed by Sushil K. Garg in the late 70's / early 80's. Garg founded Pro Computer Sciences (PCS) in 1982 which marketed PRO-IV.   In the mid-1980's there was a sale of PCS to Microdata /CMC/MDIS. which had basis in the US & UK (Hemel Hempstead). After a while the UK Hemel seems to have emerged as the key site, becoming Northgate from 2000. Northgate had also acquired "Peterbourgh Data Systems"+Moorpay. Northgate seems to have sold these to Bain Capital (along with PROIV) which, after acquiring Benelux, was spun out to Zellis; Northgate itself going to NEC Information Systems. (As far as I can tell this is my best OPINION of what happened, with the PROVIV likely remaining at Hemel throughout (barring the c. 2005 Buncefield incident). This was my best guess of what happened.  PROIV jobs seem to have dried up but I have observed a recent? job ad. indicating a major supported user in the Letchworth area. Hope this gives anyone a direction to look if they are interested.  Thankyou. Djm-leighpark (talk) 20:43, 10 October 2021 (UTC)