User:JasonBrigham/sandbox

QC-CALC

QC-CALC is a data collection and statistical process control (SPC) software program first created by Prolink Software Corporation in 1983. The founders, Bruce Brigham, Ralph Disa, Holly Johnson, and Ed Wall embarked on a mission to build an easy-to-use software product to collect data from coordinate measurement machines (CMMs) and give statistical feedback to the user. In the first few years, they wrote the software to run specifically with data from video CMMs created by View Engineering.

History

QC-CALC started in Microsoft DOS and was originally written by Bruce Brigham and Ralph Disa in the Basic programming language. Holly Johnson contributed the original statistics and Ed Wall was responsible for sales. Over time, the software was re-written/converted into Microsoft QuickBasic and eventually Microsoft Visual Basic were it remained for many years. Most recently, it has been converted to Microsoft C# on the Microsoft.Net Platform.

In the early 1990's, the software was split into two distinct products; QC-CALC Real-Time and QC-CALC SPC. QC-CALC Real-Time is primarily responsible for data collection on the shop floor and QC-CALC SPC handles offline historical reporting. In the mid-1990's, it became clear that data collection from hand-held digital gages (calipers, micrometers, etc) was becoming equally important as with CMMs. To respond, Prolink developed QC-Gage; a manual data entry and gage collection product which submits its data to QC-CALC Real-Time.

Prolink's fourth major product, SPC Office Buddy, was developed in 2008 to address a growing number of customers using Minitab. SPC Office Buddy automates the running of reports in Minitab and MS Excel.

In 2008, Prolink also began development on a new reporting platform called Enterprise Report Scheduler that would eventually replace QC-CALC SPC along with QC-Mobile which delivers reports via a web browser.