Watcom

A software company originally founded 1981 in Waterloo (Ontario, Canada) under the name Watcom International Corporation. It was bought by Powersoft in 1994.

History
The Waterloo Basic interpreter was developed at the University of Waterloo in Canada in the mid 1970's, that was later used as a basis of a number of development systems for languages as disparate as Pascal, Fortran, APL, GKS and Cobol. A number of employees from the Computer Systems Group of the UoW left in 1981 to form the Watcom company that made development tools based on their earlier work.

The company was taken over by Powersoft in 1994, which in turn was taken over by Sybase a year later. Since neither company was interested in the Watcom C/C++ and FORTRAN tools, they were discontinued and after pressure from graphic driver software developer Scitech, agreed to open source them.

Products

 * Watcom APL
 * Watcom BASIC
 * Watcom C
 * Watcom C/C++ - C & C++ development system
 * Watcom COBOL Interpreter
 * Watcom Editor
 * Watcom Express C
 * Watcom FORTRAN 77
 * Watcom GML
 * Watcom Pascal
 * Watcom SQL
 * Watcom VX-REXX
 * WATFILE Data Management System

Open Watcom
 * See also

Publications

 * F.D. Boswell: WATCOM Pascal User's Guide for the IBM Personal Computer with DOS - Watcom Publications 1983, ISBN 0-919884-10-5
 * Graham; Welch; McPhee: Waterloo BASIC Primer and Reference Manual - Watcom Publications 1983, ISBN 0-919884-22-9
 * Boswell; Grove; Mackie: Waterloo Pascal Primer and Reference - Watcom Publications 1984, ISBN 0-919884-45-8
 * F.D. Boswell: Watcom Pascal: Primer and Reference - Watcom Publications 1986, ISBN 0-919884-94-6

Personnel

 * Dave Boswell - Vice president of marketing and sales
 * Rob Veitch - Chief Architect and Technical Manager (VX-REXX)
 * Brian Vink
 * Eric Giguère - VX-REXX developer and head VX-REXX library dev.

Links

 * http://www.azillionmonkeys.com/qed/watfaq.shtml