Digitek was an early system software company located in

Los Angeles, California Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...

, United States. Digitek, co-founded in the early 1960s by three equal partners (James R. Dunlap, President plus Vice Presidents Donald Ryan and Donald Peckham who had worked together at

Hughes Aircraft Company The Hughes Aircraft Company was a major American aerospace and defense contractor founded on February 14, 1934 by Howard Hughes in Glendale, California, as a division of the Hughes Tool Company. The company produced the Hughes H-4 Hercules air ...

, in

Culver City, California Culver City is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States. As of the 2020 census, the population was 40,779. It is mostly surrounded by Los Angeles, but also shares a border with the unincorporated area of Ladera Heights, Californi ...

Lahey, Thomas M.
"Tom Lahey's Fortran experiences"
, from ''comp.lang.fortran'', February 25, 2005.), authored many of the

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Programming languages are described in terms of their Syntax (programming languages), syntax (form) and semantics (computer science), semantics (meaning), usually def ...

systems (

compiler In computing, a compiler is a computer program that Translator (computing), translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primaril ...

+ runtime + intrinsic

library A library is a collection of Book, books, and possibly other Document, materials and Media (communication), media, that is accessible for use by its members and members of allied institutions. Libraries provide physical (hard copies) or electron ...

) on various manufacturers' computer systems, including

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

, SDS, and many others. In the 1960s Digitek advertised frequently in ''

Scientific American ''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it, with more than 150 Nobel Pri ...

'' and ''

Datamation ''Datamation'' is a computer magazine that was published in print form in the United States between 1957 and 1998,

'' magazines. Digitek dissolved when taken to task by GE for failing to deliver a promised PL/I compiler for the

Multics Multics ("MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service") is an influential early time-sharing operating system based on the concept of a single-level memory.Dennis M. Ritchie, "The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System", Communications of t ...

project. Don Peckham was bought out. With Dave McFarland, also from Digitek, Don Ryan founded Ryan−McFarland which continued the compiler writing work.

History

Digitek's first compiler customer was

Scientific Data Systems Scientific Data Systems (SDS), was an American computer company founded in September 1961 by Max Palevsky, Arthur Rock and Robert Beck, veterans of Packard Bell Corporation and Bendix, along with eleven other computer scientists. SDS was the f ...

(SDS), a computer mainframe hardware company founded by Max Palevsky in 1961 and later acquired by

Xerox Xerox Holdings Corporation (, ) is an American corporation that sells print and electronic document, digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox was the pioneer of the photocopier market, beginning with the introduc ...

in 1969. Digitek wrote language systems for almost every popular programming language at the time including FORTRAN,

PL/I PL/I (Programming Language One, pronounced and sometimes written PL/1) is a procedural, imperative computer programming language initially developed by IBM. It is designed for scientific, engineering, business and system programming. It has b ...

SIMSCRIPT SIMSCRIPT is a free-form, English-like general-purpose simulation language conceived by Harry Markowitz and Bernard Hausner at the RAND Corporation in 1962. It was implemented as a Fortran preprocessor on the IBM 7090 and was designed for large ...

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 ...

, and

BASIC Basic or BASIC may refer to: Science and technology * BASIC, a computer programming language * Basic (chemistry), having the properties of a base * Basic access authentication, in HTTP Entertainment * Basic (film), ''Basic'' (film), a 2003 film ...

. Digitek compilers included the IBM

System 360 The IBM System/360 (S/360) is a family of mainframe computer systems announced by IBM on April 7, 1964, and delivered between 1965 and 1978. System/360 was the first family of computers designed to cover both commercial and scientific applicati ...

G Level FORTRAN. Due to their implementation in a

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization or emulator, emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide the functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve ...

technology called POPS (for "Programmed Operators"Bell, Gordon
"Computer Structures: Readings and Examples"
Section 6: Processors with multiprogramming ability, p.275. "The DS940 uses a memory map which is almost a subset of that of Atlas but is more modest than that of the IBM 360/67 rden et al., 1966and GE 645 ennis, 1965; Daley and Dennis, 1968 A number of instructions are apparently built in via the programmed operator calling mechanism, based on Atlas extracodes (Chap. 23). The software-defined instructions emphasize the need for hardware features. For example,

floating-point arithmetic In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic on subsets of real numbers formed by a ''significand'' (a Sign (mathematics), signed sequence of a fixed number of digits in some Radix, base) multiplied by an integer power of that ba ...

is needed when several computer-bound programs are run. The SDS 945 is a successor to the 940, with slightly increased capability but at a lower cost."), the company's compilers could be developed rapidly and had a common "footprint". This later allowed a successor company, Ryan-McFarland Corporation, to capitalize on the rapid expansion of the

microcomputer A microcomputer is a small, relatively inexpensive computer having a central processing unit (CPU) made out of a microprocessor. The computer also includes memory and input/output (I/O) circuitry together mounted on a printed circuit board (P ...

market in the late 1970s and early 1980s by providing POPS-based compilers to virtually all of the emerging computer vendors at the time. Among these products were RM/COBOL and RM/BASIC for Tandy's TRS-80, and IBM Professional FORTRAN (and its twin, RM/FORTRAN) for MS-DOS. Ryan-McFarland was sold to an Australian company (Austec) in 1987, and the POPS-based compiler technology was subsequently sold to Language Processors, Inc. (later renamed Liant Software Corporation). Liant was purchased by

Micro Focus International Micro Focus International plc was a British multinational software and information technology business based in Newbury, Berkshire, England. The firm provided software and consultancy. The company was listed on the London Stock Exchange and t ...

in 2008, where the technology, in the form of the RM/COBOL-85 compiler and runtime system, is being sold. In 2020, applications built using this POPS implementation of COBOL are still in widespread use throughout the world. Lahey Computer Systems F77L was also a POPS-based Fortran 77 compiler, for

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few op ...

. Don Ryan, Thomas M Lahey, Doug Ahl, Noel Vasquez, David McFarland, and Jack Perrine (developer of

Univac UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) was a line of electronic digital stored-program computers starting with the products of the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation. Later the name was applied to a division of the Remington Rand company and ...

1108 Fortran V and Athena Fortran) had all worked at Digitek at the same time.

History

References

Further reading