Integrated Systems, Inc.

~ the obit ~

Any embedded project opens with the same question, which is what operating system goes underneath everything else, and the argument behind that question was settled commercially on a Tuesday in February 2000. The winner was VxWorks, which is still sold. The loser was pSOS, and the company that owned pSOS was Integrated Systems, Inc. of Sunnyvale. Engineers who ask the question today, in the Ankara office where I ask it, have mostly never heard of either the system or the company.

Naren Gupta founded it in 1980 or 1981, depending which part of the Wikipedia article you read. He ran it as chief executive until 1994 and stayed on as chairman to the end. The operating systems came later and came from outside. What the company shipped first was MATRIXx, introduced in 1983, control-system design software of the block-diagram kind an engineer uses to build a controller before any of it touches hardware. pSOS arrived from Software Components Group in 1991, reportedly for $20 million, and FlexOS arrived from Novell in July 1994, which is how a continuation of Digital Research's Concurrent DOS ended up inside a Silicon Valley tools company.

pSOS itself was written around 1982 by Alfred Chao. Through the 1980s it became the obvious choice for anything built on the Motorola 68000, and the 68000 was where serious embedded work went when eight bits were no longer enough. Integrated Systems rewrote most of it in C as pSOS+ so it could follow the industry onto other processor families, and through the 1990s it stayed the name an embedded engineer weighed against VxWorks whenever the kernel decision came up.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what naren gupta built ~

The shape of the company is easy to miss because its pieces ended up so far apart. One half was design tools for control engineers, sold to the aerospace and automotive worlds. The other half was the operating system that the embedded device itself ran. Owning both was a coherent idea in 1995 and a confusing one by 1999, when the question an embedded customer actually wanted settled was simply whose kernel they were going to be stuck with for the next decade.

~ the losing rtos ~

The two sides announced a deal in October 1999 and closed it on 15 February 2000. The structure was a stock-for-stock merger. Each Integrated Systems share became 0.92 of a Wind River share, which came to 22,499,895 shares issued, and the outstanding options converted into options on another 4,133,128.

Both kernels worked, and both had a decade of shipped products behind them. The merger settled the question commercially without settling it technically, and what it settled was not which design was better but which company would still be selling one in 2005. The accounting treatment was a pooling of interests, so no cash moved and Wind River's own historical figures were restated as though the two companies had always been one.

~ the convergence promise ~

There were early assurances that pSOS support would continue. Development was halted instead. Wind River said no further releases of pSOS would happen and promised a converged version of VxWorks that would answer pSOS system calls, which is the standard way of telling customers their code is now a compatibility layer. A pSOS 3.0 did ship that July, and the trade press of the day treated it as a courtesy to the customers who had arrived with the merger rather than a future. NXP later took pSOS for TriMedia off Wind River's hands and kept it alive for that one chip, and in August 2007 RoweBots open sourced a pSOS-compatible kernel of their own called Reliant.

MATRIXx had the longest life of anything in the building. After the merger it was licensed to MathWorks, then sold on to National Instruments when that arrangement drew antitrust attention, and National Instruments finally put it into a five-year end-of-life in 2018 with support ending on 30 June 2023. The company died in 2000. One of its products took another twenty-three years to be switched off.

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