PC-KIMMO is a new implementation for microcomputers of a program dubbed KIMMO after its inventor Kimmo Koskenniemi. Koskenniemi's two-level model was designed to generate words (see Koskenniemi 1983). Work on PC-KIMMO was begun in 1985, following the specifications of the LISP implementation of Koskenniemi's model described in Karttunen 1983. The aim was to develop a version of the two-level processor that would run on an IBM PC compatible computer and that would include an environment for testing and debugging a linguistic description. The PC-KIMMO program is actually a shell program that serves as an interactive user interface to the primitive PC-KIMMO functions. These functions are available as a source code library that can be included in a program written by the user.
The coding has been done in the C language by David Smith, Stephen McConnel, and Femke Hemels under the direction of Gary Simons and under the auspices of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Every effort has been made to maintain portability. PC-KIMMO presently runs under four computing platforms:
The release diskettes for the PC and Macintosh versions contain the executable PC-KIMMO program, examples of language descriptions, and the source code library for the primitive PC-KIMMO functions. The UNIX diskettes contain the complete source code which the user must compile.
The PC-KIMMO executable program and source code are copyrighted but are made freely available to the general public under the condition that they not be resold or used for commercial purposes.
The English description referred to in this chapter described in chapter 3.