Digital Systems Inc., was an American accounting service and technology development company active between 1966 [1] and 1979. [1] It was founded by John Q. Torode in Seattle, Washington. [2] [3] [1] [4] [5] The company was reorganized into the microcomputer design and development company Digital Microsystems, Inc. (DMS), [5] Oakland, USA, founded in 1979. [6] In 1984, it was sold to the new UK operation Digital Microsystems Ltd. (DML) (owned by Extel Group Plc) [7] and finally ended its US operations in 1986. [1] [5] Without Torode, Digital Microsystems Ltd.'s product HiNet (Hierarchical Integration Network) was sold to Apricot Computers Plc in 1987. [8] In 1986, Torode founded a new company, IC Designs, Inc., based partly on Theodore "Ted" H. Kehl's VLSI technology at the University of Washington (UW), [1] [9] which was bought by Cypress Semiconductor Corp. in 1993. [9]
Gary Arlen Kildall was an American computer scientist and microcomputer entrepreneur. During the 1970s, Kildall created the CP/M operating system among other operating systems and programming tools, and subsequently founded Digital Research, Inc. to market and sell his software products. He is considered a pioneer of the personal computer revolution.
CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. CP/M is a disk operating system and its purpose is to organize files on a magnetic storage medium, and to load and run programs stored on a disk. Initially confined to single-tasking on 8-bit processors and no more than 64 kilobytes of memory, later versions of CP/M added multi-user variations and were migrated to 16-bit processors.
Digital Research, Inc. was a privately held American software company created by Gary Kildall to market and develop his CP/M operating system and related 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit systems like MP/M, Concurrent DOS, FlexOS, Multiuser DOS, DOS Plus, DR DOS and GEM. It was the first large software company in the microcomputer world. Digital Research was originally based in Pacific Grove, California, later in Monterey, California.
MP/M is a discontinued multi-user version of the CP/M operating system, created by Digital Research developer Tom Rolander in 1979. It allowed multiple users to connect to a single computer, each using a separate terminal.
86-DOS is a discontinued operating system developed and marketed by Seattle Computer Products (SCP) for its Intel 8086-based computer kit.
Tim Paterson is an American computer programmer, best known for creating 86-DOS, an operating system for the Intel 8086. This system emulated the application programming interface (API) of CP/M, which was created by Gary Kildall. 86-DOS later formed the basis of MS-DOS, the most widely used personal computer operating system in the 1980s.
Dynamic Debugging Technique (DDT) is a series of debugger programs originally developed for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) hardware, initially known as DEC Debugging Tape because it was distributed on paper tape. The name is a pun on the insecticide DDT. The first version of DDT was developed at MIT for the PDP-1 computer in 1961, but newer versions on newer platforms continued to use the same name. After being ported to other vendor's platforms and changing media, the name was changed to the less DEC-centric version. Early versions of Digital Research's CP/M and CP/M-86 kept the DEC name DDT for their debugger, however, now meaning Dynamic Debugging Tool. The CP/M DDT was later superseded by the Symbolic Instruction Debugger in DR DOS and GEM.
PL/M, an acronym for Programming Language for Microcomputers, is a is a high-level language conceived and developed by Gary Kildall in 1973 for Hank Smith at Intel for the Intel 8008. It was later expanded for the newer Intel 8080.
The IMSAI 8080 is an early microcomputer released in late 1975, based on the Intel 8080 and S-100 bus. It is a clone of its main competitor, the earlier MITS Altair 8800. The IMSAI is largely regarded as the first "clone" microcomputer. The IMSAI machine runs a highly modified version of the CP/M operating system called IMDOS. It was developed, manufactured and sold by IMS Associates, Inc.. In total, between 17,000 and 20,000 units were produced from 1975 to 1978.
IBMBIO.COM is a system file in many DOS operating systems. It contains the system initialization code and all built-in device drivers. It also loads the DOS kernel (IBMDOS.COM) and optional pre-loadable system components, displays boot menus, processes configuration files and launches the shell.
Relocation is the process of assigning load addresses for position-dependent code and data of a program and adjusting the code and data to reflect the assigned addresses. Prior to the advent of multiprocess systems, and still in many embedded systems, the addresses for objects are absolute starting at a known location, often zero. Since multiprocessing systems dynamically link and switch between programs it became necessary to be able to relocate objects using position-independent code. A linker usually performs relocation in conjunction with symbol resolution, the process of searching files and libraries to replace symbolic references or names of libraries with actual usable addresses in memory before running a program.
Gordon Edwin Eubanks, Jr. is an American microcomputer industry pioneer who worked with Gary Kildall in the early days of Digital Research (DRI).
A source-to-source translator, source-to-source compiler, transcompiler, or transpiler is a type of translator that takes the source code of a program written in a programming language as its input and produces an equivalent source code in the same or a different programming language. A source-to-source translator converts between programming languages that operate at approximately the same level of abstraction, while a traditional compiler translates from a higher level programming language to a lower level programming language. For example, a source-to-source translator may perform a translation of a program from Python to JavaScript, while a traditional compiler translates from a language like C to assembly or Java to bytecode. An automatic parallelizing compiler will frequently take in a high level language program as an input and then transform the code and annotate it with parallel code annotations or language constructs.
Vector Graphic, Inc., was an early microcomputer company founded in 1976, the same year as Apple Computer, during the pre-IBM PC era, along with the NorthStar Horizon, IMSAI, and MITS Altair.
Heathkit's H8 is an Intel 8080A-based microcomputer sold in kit form starting in 1977. The H8 is similar to the S-100 bus computers of the era, and like those machines is often used with the CP/M operating system on floppy disk.
A binary recompiler is a compiler that takes executable binary files as input, analyzes their structure, applies transformations and optimizations, and outputs new optimized executable binaries.
ISIS, short for Intel System Implementation Supervisor, was an operating system for early Intel microprocessors like the 8080. It was originally developed by Ken Burgett and Jim Stein under the management of Steve Hanna and Terry Opdendyk for the Intel Microprocessor Development System with two 8" floppy drives, starting in 1975, and later adopted as ISIS-II as the operating system for the PL/M compiler, assembler, link editor, and In-Circuit Emulator. The ISIS operating system was developed on an early prototype of the MDS 800 computer, the same type of hardware that Gary Kildall used to develop CP/M.
Thomas Alan Rolander is an American entrepreneur, engineer, and developer of the multitasking multiuser operating system MP/M created for microcomputers in 1979 while working as one of the first employees of Digital Research with Gary Kildall, the "father" of CP/M. CP/M and MP/M laid the groundwork to later Digital Research operating system families such as Concurrent CP/M, Concurrent DOS and Multiuser DOS. He also developed CP/NET.
Dorothy McEwen Kildall, often known as Dorothy McEwen, (1943–2005) was an American microcomputer industry pioneer. In 1974, she co-founded Digital Research, the company that developed the first computer language, the first compiler and the first mainstream operating system for microcomputers.
Kathryn Betty Strutynski was a mathematician and computer scientist, and attended University at Brigham Young University and the Naval Postgraduate School. Besides jobs at Pan Am Airways and Bechtel Corporation, she worked at Digital Research, where she contributed to the development of CP/M, the first mainstream operating system for microcomputers.
[…] The first commercial licensing of CP/M took place in 1975 with contracts between Digital Systems and Omron of America for use in their intelligent terminal, and with Lawrence Livermore Laboratories where CP/M was used to monitor programs in the Octopus network. Little attention was paid to CP/M for about a year. In my spare time, I worked to improve overall facilities […] By this time, CP/M had been adapted for four different controllers. […]
[…] Digital Microsystems, Inc. […] Embarcadero, Oakland, CA […] Digital Microsystems (DMS), originally Digital Systems, was founded in 1975 by Dr. John Torode who designed the first floppy disk subsystem for use on a micro. In 1974, DMS collaborated with Gary Kildall (Digital Research's founder) to design and implement the first microcomputer disk operating system, CP/M. […]