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In 2001, the company changed its name from Protel Systems to Altium and continued to expand throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. In 2000, Altium acquired ACCEL with whom they previously partnered with in 1986. The company continued to develop and release new versions of this design tool, including Protel 98 in 1998, Protel 99 in 1999 and Protel 99 SE in 2000. In August 1999, Altium went public on the Australian Securities Exchange under symbol (ASX:ALU). It also began acquisition of various companies with the technologies needed to create a unified electronics design solution, including Accolade Design Automation in 1998. In 1991, Protel released Advanced Schematic/ PCB 1.0 for Windows, the world's first Windows-based PCB design system. A variety of editing tools could then be used to access and manipulate the design, covering areas such as board layout and design, schematic capture, routing (EDA), testing, analysis and FPGA design. FPGA, PCB and embedded software development processes were unified with a common project view and data model. In the 1990s, the company began developing a unified electronics design system, which uses a single data model to hold all of the design data required to create a product. This was followed by Autotrax and Easytrax in 1988. In 1987, Protel launched the circuit diagram editor Protel Schematic for DOS. acquired marketing and support responsibilities of the PCB program for the US, Canada and Mexico under the name Tango PCB. In October 1986 the San Diego-based ACCEL Technologies, Inc.
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Protel PCB was marketed internationally by HST Technology Pty Ltd. The company launched its first product in 1985, a DOS-based printed circuit board (PCB) layout and design tool. He saw an opportunity to make the design of electronics product affordable, by marrying the techniques of electronics design to the PC platform. He was working at the University of Tasmania in the 1980s. The history of Altium dates to 1985 with the founding of Protel Systems Pty Ltd by electronics designer Nicholas Martin.
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