The Scope story: the Dawn of a New Era
Explore the origins of Scope. Our multi-part blog series reveals the development of the digital Standard for logistics. All chapters at glance:
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An Idea Takes Flight
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Times Are Changing
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Everything Stays Different
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Not Yet Perfect, But Promising
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One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
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And Yet It Moves
The Dawn of a New Era
While one might say that the story of Scope began in 2006, when Christian Riege and a team of collaborators from Riege Software turned their focus toward developing Scope, that would only tell part of the story. The true origins of the journey trace back to 1978. At that time, Johannes Riege – affectionately and respectfully known as JR, after the well-known lead character of a television series – was working in the data center at the University of Bochum/Germany while also pursuing freelance programming to support his growing family.
One day, an IT service provider representative approached JR with an intriguing proposal: Could he develop a program for a client that would allow an Air Waybill (AWB) to be completed by a computer rather than a typewriter? JR immediately saw the potential of the opportunity, recognizing it as a rare and possibly once-in-a-lifetime chance. Without hesitation, he agreed. By early September 1978, the program was live at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, where it was met with resounding success. JR and JFK – the partnership fit perfectly. The air cargo export software he developed was so effective that in 1979, JR received a follow-up request to build an air cargo import system.
Together, these two applications can rightly be considered among the earliest professional Transport Management Systems for the logistics industry. JR dubbed it the Professional Cargo System, or ProCarS for short. ProCarS was groundbreaking, innovative, and always ahead of its time. By the mid-1990s, it was already capable of generating electronic documents after the completion of an air cargo export shipment – a precursor to what would later become the e-AWB.
Initially, ProCarS could only operate on the hardware platform of the service provider that had commissioned JR. However, a few years later, former employees of that company succeeded in adapting the compiler (the software that translates source code into executable machine code) so that ProCarS could run on the now widely adopted IBM PCs and their clones.
ProCarS was written in the DATABUS programming language, which is now known as the Programming Language for Business, or PL/B. The key advantage of PL/B was that, since the early 1970s, it had an integrated database system, and with the advent of commercial local area networks, multiple computers could access this database simultaneously. Moreover, PL/B included operations that allowed for direct, text-based control of the screen and the ability to read data from the keyboard – an innovative feature at the time and one that remains unique to this day.