This month marks the 25th year of ATEasy’s commercial deployment. “Featuring multi-generational compatibility and designed specifically for functional ATE applications, ATEasy is the only test executive/test-development product with comprehensive simulation capabilities for both the test system resources and UUT,” said Mike Dewey, director of marketing at Marvin Test Solutions. The simulation capability comes with today’s version 9, which also incorporates source/version control. Like previous versions of ATEasy, version 9 maintains backwards compatibility.
What’s now Marvin Test Solutions was Geotest at its founding in 1988. According to Loofie Gutterman, cofounder and now president of MTS, ATEasy was on the company’s roadmap from the beginning. “Our goal was to come up with a product that hardware engineers and software engineers alike can use,” he said in a recent phone interview. “So it’s going to be easy enough that hardware engineers can use it, but it’s going to be robust enough that software engineers can use it.”
According to a timeline provided by MTS, Geotest began development of ATEasy, with contributions from John Fluke Mfg. Co., in 1989. Geotest selected Microsoft Windows 2.0 as the operating system—an uncommon choice at the time that proved to be prescient.
ATEasy 1.0, based by then on Windows 3.0, debuted in July 1991, with minor improvements following in December with ATEasy 1.1.
In 1992 Geotest began development of ATEasy 2.0 with the goal of adding features such as DialogEasy for creating and programming user interfaces and forms as well as fault-analysis databases.
Version 2.0 was released in 1994. 1995 saw the addition of Windows NT support.
Development of ATEasy 3.0 as a 32-bit application—necessitating a complete redesign from the ground up—began in 1996. Geotest released a beta version in 1999. The full release occurred in 2000.
That brings us up to the current century, with subsequent versions adding web-based support, touch-screen support, ATML compatibility, USB support, enhanced multiple-project run-time support, 64-bit operation, and multiple UUT test support.
And finally, ATEasy 9.0 appeared in 2014 with support for UUT and system simulation, support for multiple configuration management tools, and support for Windows 8 and 10.
Look for our September print edition and related online content for more on ATEasy and its history.
