OPEN WATCOM

Open Watcom project is rather long, in terms of Internet years it would probably span millennia. The origins can be traced back to 1965. That summer a team of undergraduate students at the University of Waterloo develped a FORTRAN compiler (called WATFOR) that ran on the University's IBM 7040 systems. The compiler was soon ported to IBM 360 and later to the famous DEC PDP-11. In early 1980s a brand new version of the compiler was created that supported the FORTRAN 77 language. It ran on two p... latforms, the IBM 370 and the emerging IBM PC. The PC version of WATFOR-77 was finished in 1985 and in the same year support for Japanese was added. In 1986, WATFOR-77 was ported to the QNX operating system. The early compilers were written in a portable language called WSL or Watcom Systems Language. In late 1980s the developers rewrote the existing code in C and from then on all new developments were done on C, later with traces of C++ here and there. In parallel to the FORTRAN compilers Watcom developed optimizing C compilers. When the first PC version (Watcom C 6.0) was introduced in 1987, it immediately attracted attention by producing faster code than other compilers available at that time.More