Capex Corporation

The company was begun as a start-up in August 1969. In all there were eight original employees, with funding coming from venture capital. Some of the founders had been working for General Electric's computer division in Phoenix, on systems such as the GE-600 series. There, as a 1990 profile in the Phoenix Business Journal of one of them stated, they "encountered the types of limitations that would encourage him and countless other engineers and technical people to venture off and start their own businesses". Among these founders were A. LeRoy Ellison (1936–2017), who became president of the new company, and Harry N. Cantrell (1924–2004). Other original employees had been working on Univac systems.

In putting out mainframe computer systems, General Electric, like other hardware vendors of the time, was providing software without cost to its customers. The Capex founders thought that hardware companies failed to have a sufficient understanding of the software world and that, as a consequence, there was a viable market to be found for an independent software company. This was especially the case following

IBM's decision to unbundle software from its mainframes in 1969, which happened but two months after the founding of Capex. Capex became one of the first companies to capitalize on that change in the marketplace. Initially, they intended to offer products for multiple vendors' platforms but soon found that economically it made sense to focus only on the dominant IBM mainframe.

Early executives of Capex Corporation included

Russell E. Edwards and John J. Anderson. The office for the company was located on 3rd Street, in the Midtown Phoenix neighborhood near the Central Avenue Corridor. The company said that it became profitable during 1971.

By 1976, Capex Corporation employed forty people, had sales offices in various cities in the United States and Canada, and had resellers overseas. Capex's products were focused on IBM's OS/MVS/VS1/SVS operating system and they benefited from having a sales force dedicated to selling on and for that platform. The company began to grow rapidly. By 1978, they had around 100 employees and began building a new $2 million, 36,000-square-foot (3,300 m2) dedicated building for the company, with room to at least double its size. The new office, further north and east in Midtown at 14th Street and Indian School Road, replaced the 3rd Street office and a second facility on Thomas Road.

The company offered both system software products and application software products.

Optimizer

The COBOL (English-like programming language) Optimizer was first released in late 1970 and soon achieved visibility within the computing industry. The Optimizer was a special kind of optimizing compiler, that being a post-code generation-phase object code optimizer for the IBM COBOL compiler. The product acted in part as a peephole optimizer, replacing code sequences generated by the IBM compiler with shorter or faster sequences that had the same semantic effect. These transformations also included avoiding loads from main memory into registers and improving how COBOL PERFORM statements were implemented.

The Optimizer ran during a batch compilation job, after the IBM compiler had generated object code, and was packaged so that it was essentially transparent to the programmer. In the best case, its transformations could bring about a significant savings in machine instruction time at runtime. One early customer, Ford Motor Company, verified assertions that execution-time savings could be on the order of 10–15 percent, while savings in the memory size of compiled programs could be up to 20–30 percent.