History

Before 1969, practically all system software was supplied by the hardware manufacturer and was freely available with the computer. Not until system software was given a price, was the market opened for independent competing software companies.

ROSAM ADB ab, probably the oldest system software company, was founded in the spring of 1970, with the aim to create software for managing large and complex databases. At this time, only organizations with extremely powerful computers could make any use of the database management systems on the market.

Our company's first product, Rosam, a database management system, was brought into production in November 1970 at Surahammars Bruk AB, followed by Astra (now AstraZeneca), the next year. This system differentiated itself from other products on the market by being possible to use on all IBM 360 computers, even the smallest, and by displaying a functionality and performance widely superior to any other product at this time.

In 1971, ROSAM ADB ab partnered with ASEA (now ABB) to develop a general terminal transaction manager, called Aros (Asea Rosam On-line System). Aros was developed as an integrated add-on to Rosam, and was first used in production at ASEA in the spring of 1972, after an intense, eight month-long development effort. 

Our products have been constantly updated and a number of other products have been added, always aiming to facilitate our client's developing and maintaining applications based on Rosam-Aros.

Up to 1980, we expanded with one new client each year. The reason for this limitation is that each client, usually a very large organization, requested an intense initial support as well as a continuous training. After 1980, we decided to economize on the number of new clients, in order to become more focused on software development, to function as a support team for our client's software development departments. Our goal in this decision was to concentrate more on software development, in line with the company's original purpose.

From 1990 we also develop general products for the Windows environment. The purpose for these products is to benefit from the mainframe, together with the graphical user interface of the Windows environment. Our first Windows product was Aros Work Station, AWS, a very advanced terminal emulator with built-in ability to translate data in terminal images to relational tables. Via well-defined interfaces, a client can develop his own application in any programming language that speaks COM, such as C++ or Visual Basic. The application can work with the mainframe data, without having to change legacy mainframe applications. In fact, AWS doesn't even require any of our mainframe products.

During the last ten years, we have also developed specific system software on commission from our clients, often to integrate the IBM MVS environment with other environments, such as UNIX.

In 2005 we split into two companies. ROSAM ADB ab continues to own our products, while Rosam IT-Tjänster AB continues with maintenance and customer support.