I first ran a project building a support system for formal methods in IBM in the early 70's. The resulting FDSS was sufficiently difficult to use that I'm not sorry it is no longer visible!
Between 1981 and 1987 my research focused mainly on the design and construction of support systems for formal methods, a topic that is still of interest to me.
The Manchester group was involved starting, in 1982, support system projects the largest of which was the Alvey-funded Software Engineering project (IPSE 2.5) which created a Theorem Proving Assistant, mural. See the book:
`mural': A Formal Development Support System
C B Jones, K D Jones, P A Lindsay and R Moore, Springer Verlag, 1991
- now available
on-line as pdf (thanks to Roberta Velykiene, this now has all of the figures visible).
The IPSE 2.5 project ran from 1984-88 and was the largest software engineering project funded by the ALVEY directorate. It was collaborative with a number of industrial organisations, most significantly ICL. Manchester University in collaboration with Rutherford Appleton Laboratory had a large team (10 Research Assistants at its peak) which constructed the mural theorem proving system. This system was designed as a major experiment in the construction of user interfaces which permitted the person using mural to construct the proof in exactly the steps that they chose.
If you want to know more about mural have a look at the selected references or at the mural pages at the Rutherford Laboratory.
Building a support system was a key part of the EU-funded RODIN project and the methods/tools from that project are now being used by industrial companies in the DEPLOY project.