On 10/01/17 17:30, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 08:17:59AM +0000, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:On 09/01/17 22:00, Gene Heskett wrote:On Monday 09 January 2017 10:52:46 Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:Logitech should have stuck to selling compilers.Thats a different company I believe.Same company, I was their de-facto UK tech support for a while. Long predated Linux of course (in a nod to the fact that we're wandering way OT).Logitech made software and mice right from the start, and only got into compilers (module-2 I believe) a bit later (although not very much later it seems)
I've just managed to rescue a bunch of Logitech compiler manuals (I've recently had to sacrifice a lot of old stuff) with the hope of at least getting a photo of their early products into Wp to keep the knowledge alive. The v3 copyright notices start off at 1984 (v2 might have earlier dates but I can't see where I've put it), and I am pretty sure that that predates their mice; my recollection is that Mouse Systems and "PC Mouse" which might or might not have been distinct had the market to themselves in the earliest days.
Logitech started to walk away from compilers and concentrate on peripherals when they bought a small company (AMS?) in Warrington ("where the wodka comes from") that made mice etc. for the likes of Amstrad computers, AIUI they also had... errm... personnel problems which effectively resulted in their shutting down the UK office (a nicely-appointed tithe barn somewhere in the Home Counties, possibly Berkshire but I forget the exact location).
Of course, Logitech's M2 was challenged by JPI/Topspeed which was bought out of Borland. legend had it that Borland effectively sabotaged the 8-bit variant by retaining the manual copyright and refusing to reprint, but the 16-bit variants did fairly well for a while until they had... errm... personnel problems in their USA office which effectively forced them to sell out to Clarion.
I supported the Logitech compiler being used for embedded '186 work at Lowbrow Uni in the mid-80s, and later did a fair amount of embedded work using TopSpeed (bare-metal '286 code). These days of course one would use ARM for comparable jobs, with or without a standard OS.
-- Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]