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MetaComCo
Company type
Limited
Industry
Software
Founded
1981
Defunct
1988
Fate
Bankrupt
Headquarters
Bristol
,
England
Key people
Peter Mackeonis
Products
BASIC interpreters, AmigaDOS
MetaComCo (MCC) was a computer systems software company started in 1981 and based in Bristol, England by Peter Mackeonis and Derek Budge. A division of Tenchstar, Ltd.
MetaComCo's first product was an MBASIC compatible interpreter for IBM PCs, which was licensed by Peter Mackeonis to Digital Research in 1982, and issued as the Digital Research Personal Basic, running under CP/M. Other computer languages followed, also licensed by Digital Research and MetaComCo established an office in Pacific Grove, California, to service their United States customers.
In 1984 Dr. Tim King joined the company, bringing with him a version of the operating system TRIPOS for the Motorola 68000 processor which he had previously worked on whilst a researcher at the University of Cambridge.
This operating system was used as the basis of AmigaDOS (file-related functions of AmigaOS); MetaComCo won the contract from Commodore because the original planned Amiga disk operating system called Commodore Amiga Operating System (CAOS) was behind schedule; timescales were incredibly tight and TRIPOS provided a head start for a replacement system.
MetaComCo also developed ABasiC for the Amiga, the first BASIC interpreter provided with Amigas. MetaComCo also worked with Atari Corporation to produce the BASIC initially provided with the Atari ST in 1985: ST BASIC.
The company also sold the Lattice C compiler for the Sinclair QL and the Atari ST and range of other languages (e.g. Pascal, BCPL) for m68k-based computers. MetaComCo also represented LISP and REDUCE software from the RAND Corporation.
Several of the team at MetaComCo went on to found Perihelion Software. Mackeonis founded Triangle Publishing, the software publishing company responsible for creating the ST Organizer for the Atari ST and PC Organizer and Counterpoint (a GUI system) for Amstrad Computers and GoldStar computers.
MetaComCo BASIC was available on the Singapore Teleview videotext receiver.
MetaComCo was disestablished in 1988
Finkel, Andy. "In the beginning was CAOS". Amiga Transactor. 1988. [1]
Reimer, Jeremy. "A history of the Amiga", Ars Technica [2] Oct 2007.
Peck, Robert. The ABasiC manual[permanent dead link]. 1985.
MetaComCo (MCC) was a computer systems software company started in 1981 and based in Bristol, England by Peter Mackeonis and Derek Budge. A division of...
on a Motorola 68000 version started in 1981 at the University of Bath. MetaComCo acquired the rights to the 68000 version and continued development until...
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BASIC quickly came out to replace it. Atari Corporation commissioned MetaComCo to write a version of BASIC that would take advantage of the GEM environment...
few hundred units had been produced. In 1986, Tim King left his job at MetaComCo, along with a few other employees, to start Perihelion Software in England...
The command is analogous to the Stratus OpenVOS create_dir command. MetaComCo TRIPOS and AmigaDOS provide a similar MakeDir command to create new directories...
King along with a number of colleagues who had all worked together at MetaComCo on AmigaOS and written compilers for both the Amiga and the Atari ST.[citation...
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command is available in MS-DOS, IBM PC DOS, DR FlexOS, IBM/Toshiba 4690 OS, MetaComCo TRIPOS, Processor Technology PTDOS, AmigaDOS, TSL PC-MOS, PTS-DOS, SISNE...
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processors of the same family. The file format was originally defined by MetaComCo. as part of TRIPOS, which formed the basis for AmigaDOS. This kind of...
Assembler, Metacomco Macro Assembler, SEKA Assembler Basic dialects: AmigaBASIC from Microsoft, ABasic from Commodore (developed by Metacomco), AC Basic...
file redirection. In AmigaOS 1.x, AmigaDOS is based on a TRIPOS port by MetaComCo, written in BCPL. BCPL does not use native pointers, so the more advanced...
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1980s, Tim King joined MetaComCo from the University of Bath, bringing with him some rights to the TRIPOS operating system. MetaComCo secured a contract from...
Digital Precision BCPL Compiler, Metacomco Beule Tools, Peter Beule C Compiler (Small C), GST C Compiler (Lattice C), Metacomco c68 Cad Pak, Datalink Cardfile...
Amiga Basic shipped with AmigaOS versions 1.1 to 1.3. It succeeded MetaComCo's ABasiC included in AmigaOS 1.0 and 1.1 and was superseded by ARexx, a...
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version). Furthermore, the main processor operated as a computer running MetaComCo BASIC, with keyboard entry via an infrared coupled standard qwerty keyboard...
and the production version was written in assembly-language using the Metacomco assembler. The documentation was created using the TxEd editor, and was...
CPC, both supporting commands for an ISAM indexed file system. In 1985, MetaComCo released ABasiC for the Amiga and ST BASIC for the Atari ST. In 1978,...
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