Digitek was an early system software company located in Los Angeles, California. Digitek, co-founded in the early 1960s by three equal partners (James R. Dunlap, President plus Vice Presidents Donald Ryan and Donald Peckham who had worked together at

Hughes Aircraft Company The Hughes Aircraft Company was a major American aerospace and defense contractor founded on February 14, 1934 by Howard Hughes in Glendale, California, as a division of Hughes Tool Company. The company was known for producing, among other produ ...

, in

Culver City, California Culver City is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States. As of the 2020 census, the population was 40,779. Founded in 1917 as a "whites only" sundown town, it is now an ethnically diverse city with what was called the "third-most d ...

Lahey, Thomas M.
"Tom Lahey's Fortran experiences"
, from ''comp.lang.fortran'', February 25, 2005.), authored many of the programming language systems ( compiler + runtime + intrinsic library) on various manufacturers' computer systems, including IBM, SDS, GE, Bell Labs, and many others. In the 1960s Digitek advertised frequently in '' Scientific American'' and ''

Datamation ''Datamation'' is a computer magazine that was published in print form in the United States between 1957 and 1998,

'' magazines. Digitek dissolved when taken to task by GE for failing to deliver a promised PL/I compiler for the Multics project. Don Peckham was bought out. With Dave McFarland, also from Digitek, Don Ryan founded Ryan−McFarland which continued the compiler writing work.

History

Digitek's first compiler customer was Scientific Data Systems (SDS), a computer mainframe hardware company founded by Max Palevsky in 1961 and later acquired by Xerox in 1969. Digitek wrote language systems for almost every popular programming language at the time including FORTRAN, PL/I, SIMSCRIPT,

COBOL COBOL (; an acronym for "common business-oriented language") is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is an imperative, procedural and, since 2002, object-oriented language. COBOL is primarily us ...

, and

BASIC BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College ...

. Some Digitek compilers are the IBM

System 360 The IBM System/360 (S/360) is a family of mainframe computer systems that was announced by IBM on April 7, 1964, and delivered between 1965 and 1978. It was the first family of computers designed to cover both commercial and scientific applic ...

G Level FORTRAN and Bell Labs PL/I. Due to their implementation in a virtual machine technology called POPS (for "Programmed Operators"Bell, Gordon
"Computer Structures: Readings and Examples"
Section 6: Processors with multiprogramming ability, p.275. "The DS940 uses a memory map which is almost a subset of that of Atlas but is more modest than that of the IBM 360/67 rden et al., 1966and GE 645 ennis, 1965; Daley and Dennis, 1968 A number of instructions are apparently built in via the programmed operator calling mechanism, based on Atlas extracodes (Chap. 23). The software-defined instructions emphasize the need for hardware features. For example,

floating-point arithmetic In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic that represents real numbers approximately, using an integer with a fixed precision, called the significand, scaled by an integer exponent of a fixed base. For example, 12.345 can be ...

is needed when several computer-bound programs are run. The SDS 945 is a successor to the 940, with slightly increased capability but at a lower cost."), the company's compilers could be developed rapidly and had a common "footprint". This later allowed a successor company, Ryan-McFarland Corporation, to capitalize on the rapid expansion of the

microcomputer A microcomputer is a small, relatively inexpensive computer having a central processing unit (CPU) made out of a microprocessor. The computer also includes memory and input/output (I/O) circuitry together mounted on a printed circuit board (PC ...

market in the late 1970s and early 1980s by providing POPS-based compilers to virtually all of the emerging computer vendors at the time. Among these products were RM/COBOL and RM/BASIC for Tandy's TRS-80, and IBM Professional FORTRAN (and its twin, RM/FORTRAN) for MS-DOS. Ryan-McFarland was sold to an Australian company (Austec) in 1987, and the POPS-based compiler technology was subsequently sold to Language Processors, Inc. (later renamed Liant Software Corporation). Liant was purchased by Micro Focus International in 2008, where the technology, in the form of the RM/COBOL-85 compiler and runtime system, is being sold. In 2020, applications built using this POPS implementation of COBOL are still in widespread use throughout the world. Lahey Computer Systems F77L was also a POPS-based Fortran 77 compiler, for MS-DOS. Don Ryan, Thomas M Lahey, Doug Ahl, Noel Vasquez, David McFarland, and Jack Perrine (developer of Univac 1108 Fortran V and Athena Fortran) had all worked at Digitek at the same time.

History

References

Further reading