Digitek

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Disambiguation: Digitek is also a trade name for the drug Digoxin.

Digitek was an early system software company located in Los Angeles, CA.

Digitek, co-founded in the early 1960's by three equal partners (James R. Dunlap, President plus Vice Presidents Donald Ryan and Donald Peckham), authored many of the programming language systems (compiler + runtime + intrinsic library) on various manufacturers' computer systems, including IBM, SDS, GE, Bell Labs, and many others. Anyone interested in computers during the 60's might recall frequent Digitek advertisements in Scientific American and Datamation magazines.

Digitek wrote language systems for almost every popular programming language at the time including FORTRAN, PL/I, SIMSCRIPT, COBOL, and BASIC. Some Digitek compilers are the IBM System 360 G Level FORTRAN and Bell Labs PL/I. Due to their implementation in a virtual machine technology called POPS (for "Programmed Operators"), the company's compilers could be developed rapidly and had a common "footprint". This later allowed a successor company, Ryan-McFarland Corporation, to capitalize on the rapid expansion of the microcomputer market in the late 1970's and early 1980's by providing POPS-based compilers to virtually all of the emerging computer vendors at the time. Lahey Computer Systems F77L was also a POPS-based Fortran 77 compiler, for MS/DOS. Don Ryan, Thomas M Lahey, Doug Ahl, Noel Vasquez, David McFarland, and Jack Perrine (developer of Univac 1108 Fortran V and Athena Fortran) had all worked at Digitek at the same time.

Digitek went down when taken into regress by GE for failing to deliver a promised PL/I compiler for the Multics project^[1].

Dunlap was quoted in the 1970's as saying that the richest man in the world in the year 2000 would be an ex-programmer.^{[citation needed]} He was, of course, correct, but, alas, it was not he.