Watcom

Watcom International Corporation was a software company, which was founded in 1981 by

The first company started by Graham and McPhee was Structured Computing Systems, incorporated in 1974. Then the software development company, WATCOM Systems Inc, started in 1981 with three full-time employees, but had been incorporated two years earlier as Waterloo Basic Enterprises Limited. In 1984, the various subsidiary companies of The WATCOM Group software organization—marketing and sales, publications, seminars and systems (software development) --  were all renamed as WATCOM companies for consistent branding. These were later all merged into one full-service software company, WATCOM International Inc.

History

Waterloo

In 1988, Watcom released their first C compiler for the IBM PC platform (and compatibles). It was released with a version number of 6 at a time when the latest version numbers of Borland's and Microsoft's C Compilers were version 5. These version numbers signified nothing and were used for marketing purposes. The compiler could create tighter and faster code than its competition.[1]

In 1992, Watcom began a move into the client-server arena with the introduction of

In 1993, the VX-REXX system was released.

Watcom was acquired by

Users and reception