Watcom International Corporation was a software company, which was founded in 1981 by

Wes Graham James Wesley Graham, OC was a Canadian professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo. Graham was born on January 17, 1932, in Copper Cliff, Ontario. His interest in computing developed while studying math and physics at the U ...

and

Ian McPhee Ian McPhee (born 31 January 1961 in Perth, Scotland) is a Scottish former professional footballer who spent most of his career with Forfar Athletic. Career McPhee was with Celtic as a youth but failed to make a senior appearance and moved to F ...

. Founding staff (Fred Crigger, Jack Schueler and McPhee) were formerly members of Professor Graham's Computer Systems Group at the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a public research university with a main campus in Waterloo, Ontario Waterloo is a city in the Canadian province of Ontario. It is one of three cities in the Regional Municipality ...

, in Waterloo,

Ontario Ontario ( ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada.Ontario is located in the geographic eastern half of Canada, but it has historically and politically been considered to be part of Central Canada. Located in Central Ca ...

, Canada. Watcom produced a variety of tools, including the well-known

Watcom C/C++ compiler Watcom C/C++ (currently Open Watcom C/C++) is an integrated development environment (IDE) product from Watcom International Corporation for the C, C++, and Fortran programming languages. Watcom C/C++ was a commercial product until it was discon ...

introduced in 1988. The first company started by Graham and McPhee was Structured Computing Systems, incorporated in 1974. Then the software development company, WATCOM Systems Inc, started in 1981 with three full-time employees, but had been incorporated two years earlier as Waterloo Basic Enterprises Limited. In 1984, the various subsidiary companies of The WATCOM Group software organization—marketing and sales, publications, seminars and systems (software development) -- were all renamed as WATCOM companies for consistent branding. These were later all merged into one full-service software company, WATCOM International Inc.

History

Waterloo

BASIC programming language BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of General-purpose programming language, general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. Dartmouth BASIC, The original version was created by John ...

was one of the earliest Watcom products and predates the existence of the company. During 1978 to 1979 Waterloo BASIC was developed targeting the

IBM Series/1 The IBM Series/1 is a 16-bit minicomputer, introduced in 1976, that in many respects competed with other minicomputers of the time, such as the PDP-11 from Digital Equipment Corporation and similar offerings from Data General and HP. The Seri ...

. In 1979 the system was ported to

VM/CMS VM (often: VM/CMS) is a family of IBM virtual machine operating systems used on IBM mainframes System/370, System/390, zSeries, System z and compatible systems, including the Hercules emulator for personal computers. The following versions ...

running on the IBM 370, 3030, and 4300 computers and an agreement was reached with IBM to market the compiler. Between 1980 and 1983 updated versions were released including ports to the MVS/TSO and

. In addition to Waterloo BASIC some of the other early products included WATCOM APL, WATCOM GKS, WATCOM

COBOL COBOL (; an acronym for "common business-oriented language") is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is an imperative, procedural and, since 2002, object-oriented language. COBOL is primarily us ...

, WATCOM FORTRAN (

WATFIV WATFIV, or WATerloo FORTRAN IV, developed at the University of Waterloo, Canada is an implementation of the Fortran computer programming language. It is the successor of WATFOR. WATFIV was used from the late 1960s into the mid-1980s. WATFIV was ...

and WATFOR-77), WATCOM

Pascal Pascal, Pascal's or PASCAL may refer to: People and fictional characters * Pascal (given name), including a list of people with the name * Pascal (surname), including a list of people and fictional characters with the name ** Blaise Pascal, Fren ...

and the Waterloo 6809 Assembler. These were the basis and provided with the Commodore

SuperPET The Commodore PET is a line of personal computers produced starting in 1977 by Commodore International. A single all-in-one case combines a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor, Commodore BASIC in read-only memory, keyboard, monochrome monitor, an ...

. In the mid 1980s Watcom developed compilers for the

Unisys ICON The ICON (also the CEMCorp ICON, Burroughs ICON, and Unisys ICON, and nicknamed the bionic beaver) was a networked personal computer built specifically for use in schools, to fill a standard created by the Ontario Ministry of Education. It was b ...

computers running the

QNX QNX ( or ) is a commercial Unix-like real-time operating system, aimed primarily at the embedded systems market. QNX was one of the first commercially successful microkernel operating systems. The product was originally developed in the early 19 ...

operating system. The Watcom C/C++ compiler with QNX developed a market for embedded applications. In 1988, Watcom released their first C compiler for the IBM PC platform (and compatibles). It was released with a version number of 6 at a time when the latest version numbers of Borland's and Microsoft's C Compilers were version 5. These version numbers signified nothing and were used for marketing purposes. The compiler could create tighter and faster code than its competition. In 1992, Watcom began a move into the client-server arena with the introduction of Watcom SQL, a SQL database server product. Being a very small company (about 8 developers) they managed to produce high quality software, famous among software developers. Watcom SQL is still in production, now under the name ''SAP SQL Anywhere''. In 1993, the

VX-REXX VX-REXX is a highly extensible REXX GUI development system for OS/2 developed by Watcom and initially released in 1993. Much of the new code in eComStation and ArcaOS has been written using VX-REXX. Though REXX is itself a 3GL, the VX-REXX inter ...

system was released. Watcom was acquired by Powersoft in 1994, and Powersoft merged with

Sybase Sybase, Inc. was an enterprise software and services company. The company produced software to manage and analyze information in relational databases, with facilities located in California and Massachusetts. Sybase was acquired by SAP in 2010; ...

in 1995. In May 2000, Sybase spun off their mobile and embedded computing division into its own company,

Sybase iAnywhere Sybase iAnywhere, is a subsidiary of Sybase specializing in mobile computing, management and security and enterprise database software. SQL Anywhere, formerly known as SQL Anywhere Studio or Adaptive Server Anywhere (ASA), is the company's flag ...

(formerly iAnywhere Solutions Inc.). Sybase tried to re-target the Watcom compiler into a visual

RAD RAD or Rad may refer to: People * Robert Anthony Rad Dougall (born 1951), South African former racing driver * Rad Hourani, Canadian fashion designer and artist * Nickname of Leonardus Rad Kortenhorst (1886–1963), Dutch politician * Radley R ...

tool, ''Optima++'', but in 2003, because the product competed directly with the Sybase offering

PowerBuilder PowerBuilder is an integrated development environment owned by SAP since the acquisition of Sybase in 2010. On July 5, 2016, SAP and Appeon entered into an agreement whereby Appeon, an independent company, would be responsible for developing, sel ...

, the product was discontinued. Its sister product, Optima-J, was continued. In 2003, the Watcom C/C++ and Fortran compilers were released as an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

project under a new name,

Open Watcom Watcom C/C++ (currently Open Watcom C/C++) is an integrated development environment (IDE) product from Watcom International Corporation for the C, C++, and Fortran programming languages. Watcom C/C++ was a commercial product until it was discon ...

Users and reception

Doom Doom is another name for damnation. Doom may also refer to: People * Doom (professional wrestling), the tag team of Ron Simmons and Butch Reed * Daniel Doom (born 1934), Belgian cyclist * Debbie Doom (born 1963), American softball pitcher * L ...

'', ''

Descent Descent may refer to: As a noun Genealogy and inheritance * Common descent, concept in evolutionary biology * Kinship, one of the major concepts of cultural anthropology **Pedigree chart or family tree **Ancestry **Lineal descendant **Heritage (d ...

'', ''

Magic Carpet A magic carpet, also called a flying carpet, is a legendary carpet and common trope in fantasy fiction. It is typically used as a form of transportation and can quickly or instantaneously carry its users to their destination. In literature One o ...

'', ''

Grand Theft Auto ''Grand Theft Auto'' (''GTA'') is a series of action-adventure games created by David Jones (video game developer), David Jones and Mike Dailly (game designer), Mike Dailly. Later titles were developed under the oversight of brothers Dan Hous ...

'', ''

System Shock ''System Shock'' is a 1994 first-person action-adventure video game developed by LookingGlass Technologies and published by Origin Systems. It was directed by Doug Church with Warren Spector serving as producer. The game is set aboard a space s ...

'', ''Fast Attack'', ''

Atomic Bomberman ''Atomic Bomberman'' is a game by Interplay Productions for the PC that was released in 1997. It was the first original ''Bomberman'' game to be developed for Windows, and the second game of the series made for the PC, following '' Dynablaster' ...

'', ''

Duke Nukem 3D ''Duke Nukem 3D'' is a first-person shooter video game developed by 3D Realms. It is a sequel to the platform games ''Duke Nukem'' and ''Duke Nukem II'', published by 3D Realms. ''Duke Nukem 3D'' features the adventures of the titular Duke Nuke ...

'' and ''

Fallout Nuclear fallout is the residual radioactive material propelled into the upper atmosphere following a nuclear blast, so called because it "falls out" of the sky after the explosion and the shock wave has passed. It commonly refers to the radioac ...

'' are among well known games that were compiled with Watcom C and

DOS/4GW DOS/4G is a 32-bit DOS extender developed by Rational Systems (later Tenberry Software). It allows DOS programs to eliminate the 640 KB conventional memory limit by addressing up to 64 MB of extended memory on Intel 80386 and above machines. ...

Novell Novell, Inc. was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi-platform network operating system known as Novell NetWare. Under the lead ...

's Netware386Cave, W. Dale (1 March 1995)
Developing C++ NLMs
Novell.com Support. and

Fox Software Foxes are small to medium-sized, omnivorous mammals belonging to several genera of the family Canidae. They have a flattened skull, upright, triangular ears, a pointed, slightly upturned snout, and a long bushy tail (or ''brush''). Twelve sp ...

FoxPro FoxPro was a text-based procedurally oriented programming language and database management system (DBMS), and it was also an object-oriented programming language, originally published by Fox Software and later by Microsoft, for MS-DOS, Windows ...

2 were compiled with Watcom C/C++.

References

*Graham, J. W., J. W. Welch, K. I. McPhee 1983. Waterloo BASIC Primer and Reference Manual. WATCOM Publications.

Footnotes

External links

* * {{webarchive , url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220526131746/http://www.openwatcom.org/ , title=Open Watcom project website
iAnywhere Solutions website
Companies based in Waterloo, Ontario

History

Users and reception

See also

References

Footnotes

External links