Phar Lap Software

» see pharlap.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

640 kilobytes is the number. DOS could address a megabyte of memory, the top 384K of it was reserved for hardware, and that left 640K for everything a program actually wanted to do. By the late 1980s it was nowhere near enough. Phar Lap Software existed to get around that limit. It was founded in April 1986 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, took its name from a champion racehorse, and shipped 386|DOS-Extender in November of its first year.

A DOS extender is a peculiar kind of product. It is a program that loads your program, switches the processor into protected mode, and then sits between your code and DOS for the rest of the session, translating every system call back down into something a real-mode operating system can answer. The result is an application that runs on DOS while using all the memory in the machine, and never mentions to the user that any of this is happening.

The product line grew the way these things do. 286|DOS-Extender emulated an OS/2 environment under DOS with the genuine OS/2 API in protected mode, which was a better OS/2 compatibility story than Microsoft's own version of it. Later came TNT, which did the same trick for Win32. Microsoft shipped MASM 6.1 and the 16-bit Visual C++ 1.0 as Win32 applications bound to TNT, because Windows NT was still in beta and the extender was the only way to run them.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what 640k meant ~

The 640K barrier sounds like a footnote now and was in fact the defining constraint on the PC for about a decade. Every memory manager and every argued-over line in config.sys existed because of it. An entire industry of workarounds grew on top of a limit that came out of how the original IBM PC's memory map was laid out in 1981.

My own PC years start after all of this was over. Windows was already on the first machine at home, the modem climbed from 33.6k to 56k, and the extended-memory question had long since been swallowed by the operating system where nobody needed to think about it again. DOS extenders are a thing I know from documentation.

There is a second kind of distance in this one. Phar Lap sold to the people writing the program and never to the people running it, so even during its own decade almost nobody who benefited from the thing knew the name on it. An enormous install base beside close to zero brand recognition is a workable arrangement right up until the technology is no longer needed.

~ the standards nobody remembers ~

Phar Lap wrote the Virtual Control Program Interface jointly with Quarterdeck Office Systems, the DESQview company, so that a DOS extender and an expanded-memory emulator could share one machine instead of fighting over the processor. It was then one of twelve firms on the committee that produced the DOS Protected Mode Interface, the standard that superseded VCPI. Both specifications are dead and both are the reason a 1992 PC could run a protected-mode application under a multitasker without locking solid.

~ the founder's second career ~

Richard M. Smith, one of the three founders and by then running the company, spent the early part of 1999 looking at what Microsoft Office was putting inside documents. He found that Office embedded a globally unique identifier in every file, and that the identifier contained the network card's hardware address. When the Melissa macro virus spread that March, that GUID was the thread investigators pulled, and Smith is the person who matched the one in the infected document against files belonging to the suspect. Microsoft changed the behavior afterward.

That is a better-known story than anything the company ever shipped, and it happened eighteen months before the sale. By then Maria Giatrelis was president. VenturCom announced the acquisition from Cambridge on 21 September 2000, and the asset in question was Embedded ToolSuite rather than the DOS extenders: a real-time operating system carrying a Win32 API and a Visual Studio plug-in. VenturCom became Ardence and Ardence became IntervalZero, which still carries the Phar Lap name on an embedded toolchain more than twenty years after buying the company that made it. pharlap.com itself resolves to a parking address that resets the connection.

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