Pennington Systems

Pennington was founded in 1977, in Pennington, New Jersey, to develop and market software tools and utilities. The founder and President of Pennington is Stephen F. Heffner, who is the inventor, designer, and implementer of most of Pennington's software products and tools. In addition to being a software entrepreneur, Mr. Heffner is an educator and expert witness. Click here for Mr. Heffner's résumé, and here for his Curriculum Vitæ . Our first product, introduced in 1978, was SPEEDSORT, a high-performance sorting utility for the RSX/IAS family of operating systems on Digital Equipment PDP-11 computers. Our next product was XFORM, a screen form programming tool originally written in Digital PDP-11 assembly code for use under the RSX/IAS ofamily of operating systes. We introduced XFORM in 1979, and subsequently ported it to the Digital VAX/VMS computer family in VAX assembly code, and to the PC under MS/DOS in C. We no longer actively market XFORM, but it is still in use in a number of sites both in the United States and abroad. In 1980, we introduced CONPAX, a specialized code translation tool. CONPAX translated Digital PDP-11 assembly code to VAX "native mode" assembly code. CONPAX was used in over forty conversion projects involving millions of lines of code. In 1984, we developed the first release of XTRAN, our software engineering meta-tool, which marries compiler and expert system technologies to provide symbolic manipulation of computer languages. XTRAN's powerful rules language can automate the analysis, improvement, re-engineering, and translation of any computer language, including assemblers, 3GLs, 4GLs, XML, HTML, and proprietary, Web, scripting, data base, and special-purpose languages. We also provide consulting services , primarily in the software engineering area, as we have done throughout the life of the company, as well as expert witness services .