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This page last updated 1-Apr-13

A-Shell Details

This section of the website has quite a few pages of information on A-Shell.  Please use the navigation bars (above) to find you need.


 A-Shell Overview:

Portability for AlphaBasic Applications


If you have an AlphaBasic application, but are feeling confined by the proprietary AMOS/Alpha Micro environment, A-Shell is your ticket to freedom.  

A-Shell, the portable AlphaBasic environment, liberates your application from its hardware and operating system confinement.  Which means you can run it on just about any popular platform, from laptops and Windows workstations to LANs, WANs, Linux servers, AIX machines, and all manner of UNIX variants.   

How is that possible?  Through precision and patient software engineering.  Over the course of several years, we painstakingly developed a nearly perfect clone of the AlphaBasic compiler and runtime system, including XCALLs, CMD/DO file processing, PPNs, etc.  The main difference between ours and the one you've become used to is that ours is written in portable C, allowing it to run on a wide variety of industry standard platforms.  The other notable difference is that ours is a lot faster.  Admittedly, that is only partly due to software engineering; most is due to the overwhelming processing power of modern commodity computing platforms which figuratively run circles around the 68060.  But the end result is the same: your real-world multi-user applications will run many times faster on an Intel, PowerPC, UltraSparc, or HP RISC CPU than they can on an MC68060.

Why port rather than buying a new application? Chances are that your investment in your existing application is worth more than you think.  This is certainly true if you have customized or developed it.  But conversely, your computing hardware is probably worth less than you think.  For under $5000, you can buy a complete system that will outrun the fastest AM6000.  But it may cost you considerably more than that to develop or purchase a complete new business software package, especially when you consider training, data conversion, customization costs, etc.  With A-Shell, you can keep your most valuable asset--your software--while replacing your least valuable one--your hardware.  The end result is that you get dramatically better performance, reliability (UNIX systems don't crash), flexibility, and access to industry standards, while avoiding the risks, disruptions, and outlays usually associated with switching to a new application.  


For additional and more in-depth information, please see the A-Shell Detailed Description.