Optimized Systems Software - History

History

Optimized Systems Software was formed in early 1981 by Bill Wilkinson and Mike Peters, who had purchased Atari BASIC, Atari DOS and the Atari Assembler/Editor product from Shepardson Microsystems, Inc. (SMI) who had concluded that their BASIC and DOS products were not viable. The new company enhanced the products, renaming them OS/A+ (the Disk Operating System), BASIC A+ (a disk-based language), and EASMD (a powerful assembler / editor).

OSS's first debut was at the West Coast Computer Fair, March 1981.

OSS continued to work with Atari (who had previously contracted with SMI) on enhanced products, most of which never actually reached the market. OSS' independent products fared somewhat better, particularly BASIC XL, Mac/65 and the Action programming language. In January 1988, ICD and OSS merged. Later, Fine Tooned Engineering owned all of ICD 8-bit products.

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