Michael Lehman's Independent Innovation

Joe Wilcox over at Microsoft Watch today wrote a piece entitled "Operating Systems Don't Matter". As I wrote in the comments to that post, I was a partcipant in a concrete example of his thesis: Digital Research, Inc. DRI wrote and distributed operating systems starting in 1977, beginning with CP/M and then MP/M, CP/M-86, MP/M-86, ...

It was 30 years ago today that I started, in earnest, to build Pascal/MT [wikipedia link], the first source-code-to-binary Pascal compiler.  In those days one could either use UCSD Pascal (a P-code compiler/interpreter) or Pascal/Z which compiled to Z80 assembler code with then had to be run through the Zilog Z80 assembler. Pascal/MT, ...

Nearly twenty years ago I started a small company which was, at first, called MetaTech and then, after the threat of a lawsuit, changed to MT MicroSYSTEMS to build Pascal compilers.  The company was what we now would call a MicroISV and, if the Internet had been available, certainly would have been an Independent Innovation company.  In ...