On Monday, January 7, 2002 at 2:31:07 PM UTC-8, Bob Schor wrote:

I remember Bob Schor well ... is he still around?

> I know about OMSI. The Oregon Museum of Science and Industry supported a group
> that made an EXCELLENT Pascal (ISO-compliant) Pascal compiler that ran on RT-11,
> RSX, VMS, and (I think) IAS. The group later changed its name to Oregon
> Software, and came out with Pascal-2, an optimizing version of their compiler.
> [I believe they had a few other products, as well].

We started as a group of high schoolers at OMSI, selling a (largely) RSTS/E Basic compatible Basic for the PDP-8 (written by me and Gerd Hoeren), a PDP-8 floating point library written by Wayne Davison that was about twice as fast as the standard DEC one with more accurate transcendental functions, hacked an open source TECO editor to run under PS/8-OS/8 which became the basis of DEC's OS/8 Teco. I also wrote a PDP-8 kernal implementing virtualization of memory allocation and I/O service to timeshare OS/8 for the company (ESI) that later paid for the development of what became OMSI Pascal-1.

Most of the above will be of little/no interest to PDP-11 people but it helps explain why we left the museum and formed Oregon Minicomputer Software, Inc (also OMSI in acronym form), with the name later changed to Oregon Software to get rid of any confusion with the Museum itself.

We essentially brought in too much money and spun off. We were actually the second company to spin off from the museum, the first one produced educational products.

For the PDP-11 our other best-known product (after Pascal) was RT-11 for RSTS/E. RSTS/E was essentially a general purpose operating system but sold configured to run RSTS/E Basic only. We provided RT-11 with the native device drivers replaced with device drivers etc that worked with the RSTS/E. Pascal-2 was developed using this environment (couldn't stand RSX-11) on an 11/45 with a third-party memory cache. We ended up supporting RSX-11, of course. We also played with Unix on that machine starting in 1975? 1976? back when the terminal device driver was half-duplex and compatible with Multics. We got sources (because we were still at the museum, i.e. non-profit) and the first thing I did was to rewrite the terminal device driver to be full duplex and compatible with DEC conventions (i.e. delete/rubout would shew\we\ow error corrections as you did them as opposed to the original errrr##or correction of the original half-duplex driver).

> At some point in the mid-to-late 80's, the company was either acquired (or the
> product was acquired) by a company called TauMetric. A few years after that,
> TauMetric ceased to exist.

TauMetric was started by one of our employees, Michael Ball, who hailed from San Diego and couldn't stand the rain in Portland after having lived here a few years.

They developed our C/C++ front end under contract for Oregon Software. They retained rights to that front end but never bought Oregon Software or its assets. We had a friendly relationship, I ported their C++ front end to MIPS under contract to MIPS though it never saw the light of day because Silicon Graphics bought MIPS and killed the project which was just about to enter beta testing. After TauMetric died, Mike Ball when on to Sun Microsystems as part of the Cafe project which gave rise to Java.

> While TauMetric was still in existance, I helped them read some source tapes of
> the PDP/VMS Pascal software code base. They also had a port to the PC, but as I
> understand it, TauMetric did not have rights to the PC product (or, in any case,
> they didn't send me the tapes).

I had no idea that Bob Schor was involved in this :) Since TauMetric was contracted to Oregon Software to write our C/C++ front end I have no idea why they had to reach out to Bob to read source tapes, but as I said above, I was no longer running the company at this time. TauMetric was just two people so probably didn't have a compatible disk drive, is my guess - disk drives were expensive in those days.

I helped TauMetric figure out how to detect C constructs like "goto" statements into the middle of blocks that required the turning off of various optimizations and the like but wasn't involved otherwise.

> (I still have the Pascal-2 products running on my PDP-11 systems)

That makes me happy though the note is 20 years old! :)