Watcom

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

~ the eulogy ~

Wes Graham left IBM for the University of Waterloo in 1959 and was running its computing center by 1962. In 1965 an undergraduate there wrote a paper on how to build a teaching compiler for Fortran, Graham put a team together to do it, and the result was WATFOR, which ended up in use at four hundred and twenty postsecondary institutions. The company arrived by stages after that. Structured Computing Systems was incorporated in 1974 and Waterloo Basic Enterprises in 1979, and the software business proper started in 1981 with three full-time employees, most of them out of Graham's Computer Systems Group.

The early catalog was compilers for whatever a university had in the building: APL, COBOL, Fortran, Pascal, an assembler for the 6809, and a BASIC that IBM agreed to market after it was ported to VM/CMS in 1979. In the mid 1980s Watcom built compilers for the Unisys ICON machines running QNX, which is where its embedded business came from. The first C compiler for the IBM PC shipped in 1988. Watcom SQL followed in 1992. Powersoft acquired the company in February 1994 for $100 million, and on 13 February 1995 Powersoft merged into Sybase, which is where the compiler spent the rest of its commercial life.

~ the dossier ~

~ why the games used it ~

The pitch was narrow and it was true. Watcom's compiler emitted tighter and faster code than Borland's or Microsoft's, and on a 386 in 1993 that difference was the frame rate. The version number was a marketing decision: shipping the first PC release as version 6 against two competitors sitting at version 5 meant nothing technically and read as a generation ahead on a shelf.

The other half was the memory problem. A DOS program was stuck under 640 KB of conventional memory, and DOS/4G, a 32-bit extender written by Rational Systems, let one address up to 64 MB of extended memory on a 386 or better. A cut-down version called DOS/4GW shipped bundled with the Watcom compiler. That bundling is the whole story of why the company mattered, because it meant the fastest legal route to a large DOS program was to buy one box from one vendor in Ontario.

What came out of that box: Doom, Descent, Duke Nukem 3D, System Shock, Magic Carpet, Fallout, Grand Theft Auto and Command and Conquer Red Alert. Novell's NetWare 386 and Fox Software's FoxPro 2 were built with it as well. For a stretch of the early 1990s the loading banner reading DOS/4GW Protected Mode Run-time was the first thing on screen when a PC game started.

~ eight people and a database ~

Watcom SQL arrived in 1992 and was written by roughly eight developers. It was a small relational database built to be embedded inside an application and to run without anybody administering it, which turned out to be the shape the following thirty years wanted. Sybase kept it through the merger, spun it out with the rest of the mobile and embedded division as iAnywhere Solutions in May 2000, and it is on sale today as SAP SQL Anywhere, thirty four years after eight people wrote it.

~ what is left running ~

Sybase spent the late 1990s trying to re-target the compiler as a visual development tool called Optima++, then discontinued it in 2003 because it competed with PowerBuilder, which Sybase also owned. In the same year the C and C++ compilers were released as open source under the Sybase Open Watcom Public License, with the Fortran one following. That is an unusual ending for a commercial toolchain, a license change rather than a shutdown notice, and it worked: an Open Watcom V2 fork is under active maintenance in 2026 and it still targets DOS.

Waterloo's computing culture put more than one company into the world in those years, and Open Text came off the same campus at the end of the decade. Turkey's university computing had its own landmark inside that window, the country's first internet connection, opened at Middle East Technical University in April 1993, but the campus spin-off pipeline was not part of the model here. The toolchain stayed with people who wrote software for a living. What crossed the distance was the games built with it, arriving the way games arrived everywhere, on disks, behind a loading banner nobody read and everybody remembers.

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