The LINDO Story

The first commercial copy of LINDO was purchased in April of 1979 by a Mexican Brewery. LINDO simple, straightforward equation style of model expression was unique to the linear programming software of that time. This feature helped it to rapidly gain popularity in solving industrial applications.

The IBM PC was still in its infancy in February of 1983 when LINDO/PC was unveiled as the platforms's first linear programming package. It required 128K of RAM and handled linear models of up to 60 constraints and 120 variables. In 1987, LINDO added the support of general integer restrictions.

As in industry, LINDO has long been a favorite of the educational community. Citing a survey of business schools OR/MS Today magazine reported, "The use of operations research and management science software is dominated by LINDO (47 percent)..." LINDO has consistently been cited as the most popular optimization software for both educational instruction (a testament to its ease of use) and research (evidence of its power and speed on large models). Several of today's most popular operations research and management science texts are bundled with student versions of LINDO.

With the recent release 6.0 in 1996 of the Windows version, LINDO has once again raised the standard for easy to use optimization software and continues development to anticipate the customer’s needs.

The spreadsheet has become the modeling tool of choice for today's business problems. However, before the first copies of 1-2-3 or Excel had shipped, LINDO Systems debuted VINO, the predecessor to What'sBest!, as the first spreadsheet solver for the first popular spreadsheet, VisiCalc.

In 1985, LINDO Systems and General Optimization jointly completed development on the first release of What'sBest! for Lotus 1-2-3 Release 1a. What'sBest! soon became the first and only optimization package ever to win a PC Magazine prestigious Technical Excellence Award. What'sBest! received attention from such mainstream and computer publications as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

What'sBest! has always specialized in tackling large scale, real world problems. By 1991, a utility company in England was using a customized version of What'sBest! to solve spreadsheet models in excess of 100,000 variables. In 1994, What'sBest! became the first spreadsheet add-in capable of solving large scale nonlinear models. Now, projects under development keep What’sBest! on the cutting edge of technology.

In 1988, LINGO became LINDO Systems first product to include a full featured modeling language. Users were able to utilize the modeling language to concisely express models using summations and subcripted variables.

In 1993, LINGO added a large scale nonlinear solver. It was unique in that the user did not have to specify which solver to use. LINGO would analyze the model and automatically engage the appropriate linear or nonlinear solver. Also unique to LINGO's nonlinear solver was the support of general and binary integer restrictions. With the addition of the nonlinear solver, LINGO essentially replaced GINO as LINDO Systems premiere product for nonlinear optimization. GINO made its debut in 1984 and was the first ever nonlinear solver available on the PC platform.

In 1994, LINGO became the first modeling language software to be included in a popular management science text. In 1995, the first Windows release of LINGO was shipped. Today, LINDO Systems continues to develop faster, more powerful versions.

In 1995, LINDO Systems released its first bundled suite of applications. The Solver Suite included introductory versions of our three primary products, LINDO, LINGO and What'sBest!, and the bundled price offered a significant value. Users with commercial applications enjoyed the ability to fully investigate the different formulation styles used by each application. Today, many evaluate the Solver Suite before upgrading to a larger version of LINDO, LINGO or What'sBest!

Also in 1995, educational licenses for the Solver Suite were made available at a price students could afford. As more and more students today have their own computers, the Solver Suite has allowed many of them to run the software on their own machine rather than having to visit the universities computer lab.

For 1997, the Solver Suite has been updated to include the newest Windows releases of LINDO, LINGO and What'sBest!.

As you can see, LINDO has been a part of getting you the optimum since before the PC became such a large part of business. We are continuing to develop and test our optimization software every day to maintain our position as innovators in optimization modeling tools and give you the BEST!!!