History of Fitzroy
The Company was established in 1972 to write software and produce design aids for the structural engineering profession; with which it has continued until the present day. The Company currently supports over 6000 users in 1000 organisations worldwide.
The Company is an independent company with links to neither consulting nor contracting organisations; its clients are all structural engineers.
Early projects included:
- Stanchion Design Charts' produced for Constrado in 1974,
- 'Reinforced Concrete Design Charts' published by the Company in 1975 in association with Reinforcement Steel Services (a division of BSC), GKN (South Wales) Limited and BRMCA Subframe/1 and Composite Construction/1 - 2 Genesys subsystems.
Much of the 1970's was spent in writing bespoke software for the solution of various engineering problems such as: beam on elastic foundations, guy rope analysis, fender systems for mooring and berthing dolphins with non-linear behaviour, dynamic absorbers, bending moment and shear force plotting, bridge bearing tables, composite construction tables, continuous beams, and a variety of frames.
In 1981/82 the Company (in partnership with the Cement & Concrete Association) wrote SuperSTRESS, a 2D/3D linear elastic analysis program based on the original STRESS language devised at MIT. SuperSTRESS is now marketed by Integer. Because of the SuperSTRESS project the Company was engaged by Euro Computer Systems in 1984 to extend their version of STRESS to produce a new version marketed as STRESS-3.
From 1982-87 much of the Company's revenue was generated by a 'Frame Analysis Postal Service' advertised in 'The Structural Engineer' and 'New Civil Engineer'. In the six years that the service ran, some 120 firms had over a thousand structural frames analysed.
The income from the Frame Analysis Postal Service was used to develop the SAND package which many of the firms who used the postal service now have on their own personal computers.
In 1988 - following requests from firms who already had their own structural analysis package - SCALE (Structural CALculations Ensemble - part of SAND) was developed to sell as a separate product covering the detailed design of steel, concrete, masonry and timber.
In 1993 two new systems - LUCID & SPADE - were launched covering the detailing of Reinforced Concrete, Structural Steelwork, Masonry and Timber component detailing. Both LUCID and SPADE interface with AutoCAD and other CAD systems able to read DXF files.
Our multi-users for SAND and SCALE include: Arup, Faber Maunsell, Halcrow, Hyder, Jacobs, Mott MacDonald, Mouchel, Parsons Brinckerhoff, Pell Frischmann, Scott Wilson, W A Fairhurst, WSP, White Young Green and 123 supported councils.
During the last 10 years the Company has continued to develop the systems and has updated them so that they are Windows based, all programs within the Sand and Scale packages are now 32-bit Windows "win32" executables. The complete system is fully tested and supported for Windows 98, 98SE, ME, NT4 SP6a, 2000 Professional SP4, XP Home SP1/SP2, XP Professional SP1/SP2, XP Professional x64 Edition and all versions of Windows Vista 32-bit and 64-bit.