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Scientia Limited was founded in 1989 to develop artificial intelligence resource scheduling solutions for education, defence and industry.

Scientia’s Syllabus timetabling system for schools was launched in December 1989, in the presence of HRH Prince Michael of Kent and Scientia's Chairman, Baron Bentinck. Syllabus contained the first version of Scientia’s GENIE scheduling engine.

In 1990, Syllabus Plus for Universities and Colleges was developed for Macintosh computers. This product contained a more advanced version of GENIE which was needed to support the complexity of timetabling in higher education. In 1991, the company acquired Procyon Research Ltd based in Cambridge. The company had developed the Procyon Common Lisp development environment which was used by Scientia for its product development. It was felt that it was essential to own the compiler technology in order for Scientia to improve the performance of all its products. The Procyon Common Lisp system for Windows was successfully sold to FranzLisp for $275,000, and Scientia retained the right to use and develop Procyon for its own use.

In 1993, Scientia developed a new GENIE engine with improved performance. Extending the functionality to multiple users, Scientia also developed a scheduling database to allow many schedulers to simultaneously work on the same schedule. In 1994, Syllabus Plus V2 was released. This release was the first multi-user cooperative scheduling system for academic timetabling in the world. It used a client-server architecture and provided both advisory and automatic scheduling. Procaps V1 was also released. This was a real-time planning and scheduling system for make-to-order manufacturing and was developed in collaboration with Rexam Plc. The system used a variant of the GENIE engine to create an optimised machine and tool loading programme for the next manufacturing week, modelling all the processes in the factory including queues.