Metier was founded in 1976 by Richard Evans, Robin Lodge, Roy W. Brown and James Miller who programmed the original single-user version of the software in a Suffolk attic in Debach.
The first products were sold as turn-key systems: both hardware (the Hewlett Packard 21 series) and software built into a desk.
Artemis 9000 was originally a mainframe only product working on IBM or compatible hardware running MVS or VM.
The porting to the server environment was made possible by IBM's release of a PL1 compiler originally for their OS/2 operating system.
The company introduced a variety of supporting products: Metier was sold to Lockheed for US$130m at a time when the US$ and the £Sterling were close to parity.
Artemis ran on a variety of Windows and Web based platforms using Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases.
Artemis ProjectView was a robust critical path method (CPM) scheduling system capable of handling extremely large projects (over 20,000 individual activities) with the associated resource requirements and logical dependencies.
Artemis CostView was full earned value management system and was compliant with government and industry EVM standards.
While Artemis has provided project planning and management tools used by Global 500 companies since 1978, during the 1990s it encountered financial problems similar to many other high technology firms in the post dot.com bubble era.
Further on in the Form 10-K filing Artemis made the additional comments: "We have experienced net losses in each of the three years in the period ended December 31, 2005.
A longstanding employee pursued legal action culminating in the case of Harlow V Artemis International Corporation, in which the UK High Court ruled that an enhanced redundancy payment was an express term of an employee's employment terms, and not merely discretionary, as claimed by Artemis.