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.

Read more about this topic:  Optimized Systems Software

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.
    Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

    Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.
    —Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort (1741–1794)