Watcom International Corporation

Watcom International Corporation was founded in 1981 by three former employees of the Computer Systems Group (Fred Crigger, Ian McPhee, and Jack Schueler) at the University of Waterloo, in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Watcom produced a variety of tools, including the well-known Watcom C/C++ compiler introduced in 1988.

Waterloo BASIC programming language 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. In 1979 the system was ported to VM/CMS 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 VM/CMS. In addition to Waterloo BASIC some of the other early products included WATCOM APL, WATCOM GKS, WATCOM COBOL, WATCOM FORTRAN (WATFIV and WATFOR-77), WATCOM Pascal and the Waterloo 6809 Assembler. These were the basis and provided with the Commodore SuperPET.

In the mid 1980s Watcom developed compilers for the Unisys ICON computers running the QNX operating system. The Watcom C/C++ compiler with QNX developed a market for embedded applications.

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