Net Modula2

A project started in late 1994/early 1995 by people that met on the comp.lang.modula2 USENET newsgroup to create a Modula-2 compiler for OS/2. The background to the project was that all Modula-2 compilers dropped off the market in the early 90s, FTL was too incompatible with anything else but their own CP/M compiler to sell very well although by no means a bad product, Logitech lost interest in Modula when their mice became the standard on most PC operating systems and although TopSpeed Modula-2 sold well the other development systems from the same company did not and after some financial problems the company was taken over and their development tools integrated into the Clarion database and only sold as such, which meant that they quadrupled in price or more. The two or three open source M2 projects that had been floating around either languished or died altogether.

This left us with the somewhat surreal fact that the first 32 bit commercial operating system for the 386 processor family went from having a number of M2 systems available for it one year, to having none the year thereafter. This at a time when sales of OS/2 were rocketing and interest in Modula-2 was increasing as well since the 32 bit operating systems that were coming onto the market needed much larger development teams and M2 just about the only non-esoteric language out there that has explicit support for "programming in the large". At the same time two or three new Modula systems for the Unix/VMS/Minicomputer OSs appeared every year.

Quite a bit of preliminary work was done but in the end the project was scuttled as in response to the project two companies announced that they were working on native OS/2 compilers, XDS of Russia was converting their Modula-2 to C translator to a native system and Jürgen Neuhoff released an alpha/beta version of his Canterbury Modula-2 compiler early in response to the NetM2 project.

The unusual formatting of Modula-2 in the project name with the hyphen being dropped, is a homage to comp.lang.modula2, in daily use the project was known as NetM2.

Some of the original contributors to the project had a few code snippets available on FTP sites in the 90s, but with the exception of Peter Moylan's site listed below they have all disappeared, and unlike web pages there is no project that has preserved FTP site archives so they have probably gone for good.

Links

 * Archive of the old Net Modula2 homepage
 * NetM2: Peter Moylan's page

Personel

 * Jeff Stoner
 * Rick Sutcliffe - Assoc. Prof. Computing/Math, Trinity Western University
 * Jan Walter - Operations Manager/Owner, Centurion Services & Wholesale
 * Ben Stuyts - Stuyts Engineering Haarlem BV
 * Bill Moyer - Chief of CS, Southpaw Productions - Manager of ZuulOS Development Labs
 * Peter Moylan - Associate Professor, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Newcastle, Australia
 * Taylor Hutt
 * Engelbert
 * Peter Vassoff
 * Graham Stark
 * Pat Terry