Brief History
OSE grew out of work undertaken at the Overseas Telecommunications Corporation (OTC) research and development labs in Sydney, Australia between 1987 and 1990. Although components of OSE were developed in that time, the software truly only became known as OSE from about 1990 onwards. The name OSE was shorthand for "OTC Software Environment". That OSE had its genesis at OTC is why all names in the C++ class library are prefixed with OTC.
OTC was a government owned monopoly providing international telecommunications services for the whole of Australia. Although OSE was primarily a research project, it began to be used in developing network management, alarm and fault escalation systems in areas of OTC supporting the infrastructure of OTC's international cable and satellite networks.
As staff inevitably left the company, word of OSE spread and other companies became interested in using it. This was back when the Internet consisted of email, news and little else. Network connections consisted of 1200 baud modems which would only periodically dial into a backbone site, typically the local university. As you can imagine back then, the idea of sharing software with other companies was a totally foreign concept to management.
After some convincing, OSE was allowed out to two other sites. These were Telecom Australia and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). Both companies were totally government owned and it was only for this reason that OSE was allowed out at all. Telecom Australia was the domestic counterpart to OTC, providing domestic telecommunications services to Australia. The CSIRO was a government sponsored research organisation.
Within Telecom Australia, OSE was used in developing intelligent network services and exchange mediation services. The intelligent network services include One3, Telecard and HomeLink. The average Australian probably wouldn't recognise what was meant by the One3 service, but it is the system which handles their phone call every time they ring a phone number starting with "13" to order a pizza, purchase airline tickets or complain to their bank about the poor level of service they get.
Management finally agreed in 1993 to allow OSE to be made more widely available. OTC didn't have a direct presence on the Internet, so the software was made available on ftp servers at the CSIRO and subsequently Telecom Australia. There was no world wide web back then, so the existence of OSE was made known by on-line news groups and word of mouth. OSE subsequently came to be used in a number of start-up companies dealing in object oriented technology here in Australia. The two main companies being Object Oriented Pty Limited and Open Technology (now called Open Telecommunications). Both companies were part founded by people who had exposure to OSE through working at OTC and Telecom Australia.
At about that time, the telecommunications industry in Australia was being deregulated. OTC and Telecom Australia were merged together to form a new company called Telstra, with competitors being allowed into the marketplace for the first time. The merger of the companies saw the inevitable cost cutting and rationalisation of groups within the organisation. A consequence of this was that the group out of which OSE was developed was virtually eliminated.
In order that OSE might survive, Dumpleton Software Consulting was licensed to be able to continue to develop and make available the software. OSE was already being used too widely to seriously consider changing what it was called or the naming conventions it used. However, because OTC no longer existed and due to development being done by Dumpleton Software Consulting, it didn't make sense to use its full name so only the acronym OSE is now used.
Dumpleton Software Consulting continued to enhance OSE and received an award in 1994 for OSE at CODA'94, the ComputerWorld Object Developer Awards held in conjunction with ObjectWorld in Sydney, Australia. The category in which OSE was a winner was "Best implementation of a reusable development environment for company deployment". Despite receiving such recognition, with the subsequent standardisation of the C++ language it was obvious that STL would predominate and that the market for third party libraries would vanish.
Due to the effect of the STL, development work on OSE was subsequently directed towards extending OSE to suit the needs of existing users and OSE was little publicised over the following years. Despite this, OSE developed a loyal band of followers, mainly through word of mouth but also thanks to people stumbling across it as a result of web search technology. OSE is currently being used in numerous companies around the world, as well as organisations such a NASA and the US military.
Since that time OSE has been enhanced to extend its functionality beyond that of providing just generic components. Specialised support for dealing with memory management issues in applications has been developed as well as sophisticated program logging and debugging features. The most significant additions however, have been the inclusion of support for building event driven systems, interprocess messaging and the Internet enabling of applications. To make all these easier to use, Python wrappers have been added which make rapid development of applications relatively easy.
With the introduction of OSE version 7.0, the software has been moved to an Open Source license and the SourceForge web site. A concerted effort is being made to upgrade all the documentation to cover many features which haven't previously been documented.
