Watcom

The Watcom International Corporation was founded in 1981 by three former employees of the Computer Systems Group ( Fred Crigger, Ian McPhee and Jack Schueler ) of the Canadian University of Waterloo in Waterloo (Ontario). Watcom developed numerous programming tools, including the series introduced in 1988 Watcom C compiler.

History

Even before the founding Series / 1 was from 1978 Waterloo BASIC for the IBM developed and later ported to other IBM platforms.

In the initial phase, additional language products have been offered:

• WATCOM APL
• WATCOM COBOL
• WATCOM FORTRAN
• WATCOM Pascal

A version of the Watcom FORTRAN 77 compiler for the IBM PC appeared in 1985.

In 1988, the first Watcom compiler for 16 was released in 1989 and the 32- bit compiler Watcom C/32. In the following years, these have been further developed for Watcom C / C compiler. Numerous well-known computer games of the DOS era were created with this compiler, but also the network operating system Novell Netware 386 or real-time applications under QNX.

1992 was brought to the market with Watcom SQL is a SQL database server product.

The visual Rexx development environment VX- REXX they offered in 1993 for OS / 2.

Watcom was acquired by Powersoft 1994. Soon after, it came in 1995 to a consortium of Powersoft and Sybase.

Since 2003, the Watcom C / C and Fortran 77 compilers as open source under the name Open Watcom are available.