On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 06:43:57PM +0000, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
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.
Well they were doing mice in 1982 along with some gui editor. I think
modula-2 and debuging came in 1983. Selling mice by themselves seem to
have been a couple of years later, whenever the C7 came out, although
they were selling mice to Apollo and HP before that. Not sure if they
also supplied Sun or if that was someone else, although given it was
optical, probably someone else.
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.
Yeah lots of options today.
Borland and Watcom and such all seem to have died out by now.