In 1980, Ichbiah founded the
software development company
Alsys, created to support initial work on the
Ada programming language. In July 1995, Alsys merged to become
Thomson Software Products (TSP), which itself would subsequently merge into
Aonix in 1996. He had been chairman of the Simula User's Group and was one of the founding members of
IFIP WG 2.4 on Systems Implementation Languages. Ichbiah then joined
CII Honeywell Bull (CII-HB) in
Louveciennes, France, becoming a member of the Programming Research division. Among other projects, he worked on the rewrite of the Siris 7 operating system into
Siris 8 ,Mainframe computer
CII Iris 80 developed by the French company
CII. Ichbiah's team submitted a language design labelled "Green" to a competition to choose the
United States Department of Defense's embedded programming language. When Green was selected in 1978, he continued as chief designer of the language, now named "
Ada". In 1980, Ichbiah left CII-HB and founded the
Alsys corporation in
La Celle-Saint-Cloud, which continued language definition to standardize Ada 83, and later went into the Ada compiler business, also supplying special validated compiler systems to
NASA, the
US Army, and others. He later moved to the
Waltham, Massachusetts subsidiary of Alsys. In the 1990s, Ichbiah designed the keyboard layout
FITALY, which is specifically optimized for
stylus or
touch-based input. Subsequently, he started the Textware Solutions company, which sells
text entry software for
PDAs and
tablet PCs, as well as text-entry software for
medical transcription on PCs. ==Member==