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neilv 3 days ago

I knew Rational did Ada (and later acquired awesome products from Atria and Pure), but didn't know they had their own workstation hardware in the '80s.

And it had a nice portrait orientation monitor like some early Xerox workstations (the PARC ones like Alto, and the fancy word processors like 850 and 860 IPS).

Later, starting as a teen, I was working for Cadre, a competitor of Rational on workstation software engineering tools. The company started with Apollo Domain workstations (not rolled their own), and, by the time I joined, had added Sun, HP, IBM, DEC, and MS Windows.

The Cadre site I started at (a spinoff of Tektronix, which did high-end hardware in-circuit emulators with CASE workstation frontends) was practically across the street in the OGI science park from Verdix, which, a bit like Rational, did Ada development tools and related neat systems work like (IIRC) secure compartmentalized workstation technology.

It was an exciting time in computers, and in hindsight, as a kid I saw engineers picking up and applying broader mixes of skills than we usually do in today's fairly rigid skills silos.