CorVision is a fourth generation programming tool (4GL) currently owned by Attunity, Inc. CorVision was developed by Cortex Corporation for the VAX/VMS ISAM environment. Although Cortex beta tested CorVision-10 which was generated for PCs but CorVision itself stayed anchored on VMS. CorVision-10 proved more difficult than hoped, and was never released. Lifecycle The birth of CorVision CorVision can be traced back to 1972 when Lou Santoro and Mike Lowery created INFORM for the newly formed time-sharing company Standard Information Systems (SIS). INFORM contained some of CorVisions basic utility commands such as SORT, REPORT, LIST and CONSOLIDATE. Some of the first users of INFORM were New England Telephone, Polaroid and Temple Barker & Sloan. By 1972 SIS had offices in Los Angeles, Garden Grove, Minneapolis, Chicago, Boston, New York City, District of Columbia, Charlotte, Raleigh, Atlanta and Phoenix. Establishing CorVision Between 1976 and 1977 Ken Levitt and Dick Berthold of SIS ported INFORM from the CDC-3600 to the PDP-11/70 under IAS. They called this new tool INFORM-11. Cortex was founded in 1978 by Sherm Uchill, Craig Hill, Mike Lowery, and Dick Berthold to market INFORM-11. INFORM-11 was first used to deliver a 20-user order entry system at Eddie Bauer, and to deliver an insurance processing system for Consolidated Group Trust. Between 1981 and 1982 Cortex received significant investment from A. B. Dick. Using this new investment, Cortex ported INFORM to Digital Equipment Corporation's new VAX/VMS, adding compiled executables. INFORM-11 was promoted by both Cortex and Digital as a pioneering rapid application development system. In 1984 Jim Warner encapsulated INFORM in a repository-based development tool and called it Application Factory. INFORM's PROCESS procedural language became known as BUILDER within Application Factory. In 1986 the name of Application Factory was dropped in favor of the name CorVision. CorVision's heyday Between 1986 and 1989 CorVision experienced its heyday. It quickly became known as a robust and capable tool for rapidly building significant multi-user applications. The addition of relational database support attracted major accounts. Cortex quickly became an international company. In 1992, CorVision Version 5 was released with Query and support for Unix. Query allowed read-only access by users and developers to a systems database backend. Where this seemed a desirable facility, allowing users to create "use once then throw away" reports without calling on developers this had a nasty habit of causing performance issues. Users often did not understand the database structure and could