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STORY

OMSI Pascal Classes and the Birth of Oregon Software

Type: story
Title: OMSI Pascal Classes and the Birth of Oregon Software
Date: 1977-09-01
Alias: OMSI Pascal Classes and the Birth of Oregon Software, OMSI Pascal Classes and the Birth of Oregon Software, OMSI Pascal and Oregon Software
Category: Programming, Pascal, OMSI, Oregon Software, Origins
Participants: Randal Schwartz

  • OMSI Pascal Classes and the Birth of Oregon Software

  • During my high school years in the late 1970s, I attended weekend computing classes at OMSI (Oregon Museum of Science and Industry) in Portland, Oregon.
  • At OMSI, instructors were teaching the Pascal programming language using a pioneering Pascal compiler (OMSI Pascal) that had been created by members of the museum's computing team (possibly connected with work at Reed College).

  • The Creation of Oregon Software

    • The creators of the OMSI Pascal compiler subsequently decided to spin off into their own commercial company.
    • To preserve the iconic OMSI acronym that everyone in the Pacific Northwest computing community already knew, they cleverly incorporated under the name:
    • Later officially renamed Oregon Software, the company became famous worldwide in the 1980s for their highly optimized Pascal-2 compilers running on DEC PDP-11, VAX, and 68000 systems.

What links here

🔗OMSI 🔗Oregon Software 🔗Pascal
These facts are as Randal recalls them, but much time has passed for most of this. If you find a factual error, please email realmerlyn@gmail.com.