Optimized Systems Software was formed in early 1981 by Bill Wilkinson, Mike Peters, Paul Laughton, and Kathleen O'Brien.
Laughton and O'Brien (married) were not as involved with the company and were bought out by Peters and Wilkinson.
[citation needed] The new company enhanced the programs, renaming them OS/A+ (the Disk Operating System), BASIC A+ (a disk-based language), and EASMD (an update to the Assembler Editor).
OSS continued to work with Atari, Inc. (who had previously contracted with SMI) on enhanced products, most of which never reached the market.
[5] In January 1988, OSS merged with ICD (the makers of SpartaDOS and various Atari computer hardware add-ons).
In 1994, Fine Tooned Engineering obtained limited rights to ICD's 8-bit products before disappearing.
OSS did reissue OS/A+ 4.1 for a brief period when they decided not to modify DOS XL for double-sided disk support.
Featured extensions that took advantage of unused memory space in Atari XL/XE computers and OSS supercartridges.
Because BASIC A+ had to be purchased, programs developed using its extended features could not be shared with people who did not own the interpreter.
A significant change in BASIC XL is the handling of line number lookups in GOTO/GOSUB and FOR...NEXT loops.
In Atari BASIC, any GOTO searches the entire program for the provided line number, and FOR...NEXT loops use the same code.
This gives a huge performance boost, making loops run as fast as Microsoft BASIC, and the program as a whole even faster.
MAC/65 is a 6502 editor and assembler originally released on disk in 1982, then on a bank-switched "supercartridge" in 1983 which includes an integrated debugger (DDT).
A cartridge-based development system for a readable ALGOL-like language that compiles to efficient 6502 code.
combines a full-screen editor with a compiler that generates code directly to memory without involving disk access.
Toolkit (originally called the Programmer's Aid Disk, or PAD) contains additional code and examples for use with the Action!
[2] A one-pass, machine code generating compiler for the Pascal language developed by J. Lohse for the Atari ST and released by OSS in 1987.
[10] According to Bill Wilkinson, OSS was already building a word processor, but stopped when The Writer's Tool was submitted.
[2] According to Bill Wilkinson, OSS sold about 12,000 copies of Basic XL before the ICD merger.