Logitech

The Logitech company was founded in 1981 by people connected with the Swiss ETH university, intent on commercialising the Modula-2 development system Niklaus Wirth had introduced in 1979.

History

The Multiscope division of Logitech was sold to Symantec in 1992.

Products

Logitech Mouse

Being the first PC software that explicitly required a mouse the Logitech company ran into some problems finding a suitable product to mate with their software, mice had been announced for the PC but either not shipped or as a specialised piece of hardware costing prohibitively large amounts of money, also the editor had been developed with a three button mouse from an ETH Lilith system and most available mice only supported one or two. This left the company in something of a quandary, but they decided to have a mouse built for them that was a simplified, productionised version of the Lilith mouse, complete with an PC/XT bus interface card.

Everywhere the company showed their Modula-2 development system people started making inquires about the mouse and its availability as a separate item, Logitech scrambled to put together a developers kit for DOS and started to offer the mouse for sale, first as a bus mouse but a little later with a serial connection that saw the controller moved into the mouse. The mouse became a bona fide hit as it was of a similar quality to existing mice but much cheaper, while a host of companies including Microsoft introduced mice in response to the Logitech mouse the latter remained the best seller for years, and was made unchanged well into the 90's. One factor in its relative success was the the company actually had a half decent and cheap developers kit that has some support for competitiors products while Microsoft et al. focused their development kits and drivers towards their own products only.

Over time the mice became a more important product line for the company than the development software and today the company's history omits any mention of their start as a software company.

MultiScope Debugger

The Logitech company added an optional run-time debugger as an option to their system in late 1984, but previously it had been shipped with an source level debugger, much like the mouse system people were almost more interested in the run-time debugger for use with other development systems than with the Modula-2 system and after a couple of years the company introduced it as a separate product in the form of the Multiscope debugger. At the time the only other run-time debuggers available for the IBM PC were hardware based and thus expensive, the software based Multiscope therefore sold in large quantities.