Antares – A brief history

Antares can trace its roots all the way back to 1983. Although the present Windows-based Antares package started life in 1998, Antares in fact evolved from two earlier systems each of which was developed to take advantage of new technologies as they became available. The first and the original programs were known as “Costar and Quotar”. These were re-written to become known as “EstiMate” and then finally “Antares” emerged to become the full Windows based system we have today.

1983-1986 Costar and Quotar
In 1983, a printer in Leeds, West Yorkshire, wrote a program called “Costar and Quotar” originally just for his own use. It was written in BASIC for the Tandy Model 1 computer. Although the hardware was exceedingly primitive by today’s standards, these programs were revolutionary because, even then, the programs could actually quote, print a job bag and maintain lists of jobs in work.

When the Tandy Model III was released two years later, it came fitted with a single floppy disk drive as standard. The capacity compared with (previous) audio cassette storage seemed enormous and floppy disks were quick too. This was obviously the way forward for Costar and Quotar.

But the biggest advance after the Tandy computer was the appearance of the Sirius and then the Apricot computers. These two systems were among the first Personal Computers to use the MS-DOS operating system. The Apricot computer was doubly revolutionary in also having Unix available for it. The advantage of Unix was that computer systems could now be put together with more than one workstation attached. Now it had become possible to create a multi-user system with terminals in more than one office, all sharing a central database of information.

1986-1997 EstiMate
To make Costar and Quotar work on these new Unix systems needed the first major re-write. The whole of Costar and Quotar was re-written from scratch, designed to work using Unix and it was given a new name, “EstiMate”. The new “EstiMate” package could work either on a single user PC or as a multi-user system with upto 16 or even more terminals.

Now MIS systems became practical both for small printing companies needing just single user systems and for larger companies who needed different departments to be able to access a central system through additional workstations.

IBM then entered the market by creating a standard design for the PC. IBM published full details of their design, which allowed many companies to create compatible expansion hardware, which continually improved the PC, but without making older models instantly obsolete.

Because of improving hardware, EstiMate was able to be developed and expanded to provide more and more functions as the computers themselves advanced in speed and in capacity.

By 1996 EstiMate had reached version 21, still using MS-DOS and Unix before moving on to the next stage in its life.

1998– date Antares.
With the launch of Microsoft Windows in the early 1990s it was immediately obvious that EstiMate would need to be re-written to work with Windows. So in 1998, the authors of EstiMate formed a new company, Antares, specifically to create a new package based on the tried and tested design established by EstiMate and using Windows technology. After considerable work, in 2001 Antares was released.

Despite havng been completely re-written to support Windows, Antares remains faithful to its roots. Importantly, Antares builds on design and experience built up over 20 years making it a very well thought-out system. Antares still follows the way that estimating and production control would be done manually, making Antares easy to learn and understand, keeping it simple so you don’t have to change the way you work.

All trademarks are respected and acknowledged