Today, virtually all of the world’s french fries (95% to be exact) pass through the Automated Defect Removal System (ADR), created by Key Technology, Inc. (Key) of Walla Walla, Washington. In fact, Key has changed the way food is inspected, sorted, handled and prepared for processing, from its first equipment designed solely to separate foreign material from raw peas, to its most recent release of Tegra, the first automated optical sorter of its kind. Tegra, whose user operating system is written primarily using VisualWorks, is able to sort by color, shape, and size criteria, and eject defective product using jets of air with pinpoint accuracy at rates of up to a million objects a minute. To enable Key to apply the Tegra sorter to many different products, the software had to be portable and very flexible, both from an “add new features” perspective and from a runtime scalability point of view. But these weren’t the only reasons Key chose VisualWorks as its application development environment.
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