FOCUS

RAMIS was the direct ancestor of FOCUS.

Gerald D. Cohen and Peter Mittelman were the principal developers of RAMIS while working at Mathematica Products Group in 1970. RAMIS was licensed by Mathematica to a number of in-house clients (including Nabisco and AT&T Corporation), and was also offered by the National CSS timesharing company. In[6] October 1975[7] Cohen left Mathematica and formed Information Builders, after which he recreated the product he had built at Mathematica in the form of FOCUS, which was very similar to RAMIS: "the same bugs and the same misspelled error messages."[4] [8]

The syntax of FOCUS in its simplest elements is almost a direct clone of the syntax of RAMIS bearing a resemblance similar to the differences between various early dialects of SQL. At the same time, NCSS decided to work on its own product, later called NOMAD. All three products flourished during the 1970s and early 1980s, with FOCUS also being offered on a time-sharing basis via Tymeshare.[4]

Mathematica's time ran out in the mid-80s, and NCSS also failed, a victim of the personal computing revolution which obviated commercial timesharing.

RAMIS was sold to a series of companies, ultimately landing with Computer Associates. NOMAD suffered a similar fate. FOCUS, under Cohen's direction, continued to flourish by expanding their product line.

Loosely competitive with SAS,[9] FOCUS never quite reached the same degree of mainstream adoption, perhaps because it had only basic analytical and statistical functions and lacked the wide array of specialized analytic tools which made SAS the standard in fields such as pharmaceutical clinical trials. Instead, FOCUS concentrated on extreme flexibility in data import and export as well as ad hoc end-user reporting.

Software packages with which FOCUS has linked and integrated include:

• Excel[10]
• AJAX[11]

Business intelligence software competitors include:[12]

A feature that was unique at the time is that FOCUS features the ability for the user to construct a data description file (called a "master file description")[13][14] referring to the actual data file, or even several different data description files addressing the same data file in different ways, rather than the usual practice of having the file structure hard-coded into the program.

In this way, files of any structure from any source can be accessed or produced in many different ways, eliminating much of the data manipulation (for example concatenation, or parsing) at times required with other earlier programming languages. For instance, the same actual data file can be accessed (read or write) as each record being an 80 byte text string, or as 40 2 character numerical fields, other as 10 8-byte floating point numbers, etc., by the user simply re-writing the appropriate master file description as needed.

• (batch)
  • PRINT LASTNAME FIRSTNAME AREACODE PHONUM NOTES
  • PRINT PROJNAME AND PROJCOST BY CUSTNAME SUBTOTAL PROJCOST BY CUSTID

The second command would produce a report with headings CUSTNAME CUSTID PROJNAME PROJCOST

followed by one or more lines of detail, followed by

_TOTAL_ CUSTNAME xxxxx (and $z,zzz.zz for that CUSTNAME)

The bottom of the report would have the total for ALL projects.

• (interactive)

MODIFY FILE PHONEIDX

PROMPT AREACODE PHONUM LASTNAME FIRSTNAME NOTES

MATCH AREACODE PHONUM

ON MATCH REJECT

ON NOMATCH INCLUDE

DATA

There are keywords to facilitate modification (or deletion) of existing data, and the prompting and error messages from the interactive session can be customized.