Optimized Systems Software

~ the obit ~

This company was gone before I turned four, and no Atari 8-bit machine has ever sat on a desk of mine. What is left of it is documentation, which turns out to be an unusually good way to meet it, because the manuals were written by the same people who had written Atari's own system software.

Atari did not write Atari BASIC or Atari DOS. It contracted both out to Shepardson Microsystems, where Paul Laughton was the primary author of the BASIC and Kathleen O'Brien wrote the Assembler Editor cartridge. In early 1981 Laughton and O'Brien, who were married, joined Bill Wilkinson and Mike Peters to form Optimized Systems Software, and the new company bought all three products back from Shepardson outright. Laughton was still employed by Atari at the time and had his manager's permission to be involved.

So OSS debuted at the West Coast Computer Faire in March 1981 selling improved versions of software its customers already owned. Atari DOS became OS/A+ and Atari BASIC became the disk-loaded BASIC A+. The Assembler Editor became EASMD. Laughton and O'Brien were not as involved as the other two and were eventually bought out by Peters and Wilkinson, and in a 1984 interview Wilkinson put the whole company at fifteen people.

The products that made its reputation came later and were not rewrites of anything. The MAC/65 assembler and BASIC XL, a bank-switched cartridge that replaced BASIC A+, were the two that Atari programmers took seriously. Then there was Action!, an ALGOL-descended compiled language with a full-screen editor built into it. A 6502 in 1983 had no business running a compiler of that shape.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the lawyer at the booth ~

OS/A+ existed because Atari DOS 2.0S had a design problem everybody hated. The menu-driven disk utilities were too big to stay in memory, so after every program you ran you had to reload them off the disk. OSS replaced the menus with a compact command line small enough to stay resident alongside most applications. That was the CP/M approach, and MS-DOS would take it too. The product was named CP/A when it was first shown. A lawyer from Digital Research, which owned CP/M, walked up to the booth, and the name changed on the spot. Wikipedia's dry note on why is that OSS could not have afforded even a court filing fee.

~ long filenames in 1983, and why that failed ~

Version 4.1 of OS/A+ threw out the eight-character name with a three-character extension and supported long filenames, which Microsoft would not do on DOS until VFAT in 1995. It was a genuinely early idea and it was shipped badly. Disks formatted by 4.1 could not be read by Atari DOS or by OS/A+ 2.1, so backward compatibility was simply gone, and the resident portion was large enough that some popular applications no longer had room to run.

Market penetration went to the earlier version instead. DOS XL was meant to replace OS/A+ and did add single and double density support plus Indus GT Synchromesh, but Atari was working on a new DOS of its own and demand was thin, so OSS stopped work on DOS XL 4 and reissued 4.1 rather than add double-sided support. The company's last few years are legible in that one decision.

~ into icd, and then nothing ~

OSS tried to follow its customers up the product line. Personal Pascal went to the Atari ST and Personal Prolog was aimed at the Macintosh, advertised for the ST as well, and may never have shipped at all. Neither market cared. Wilkinson's own figure for BASIC XL was about twelve thousand copies sold over its life, which tells you the size of the business being argued over.

In January 1988 OSS merged with ICD, the company behind SpartaDOS and a line of Atari hardware add-ons, and became a division of it. In 1994 a company called Fine Tooned Engineering obtained limited rights to ICD's 8-bit products and then disappeared, which is where the paper trail for all of this stops. Bill Wilkinson died in November 2015.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »