Digitek was an early system software company located in Los Angeles, California, United States.
Digitek, co-founded in the early 1960s by three equal partners (James R. Dunlap, President plus Vice Presidents Donald Ryan and Donald Peckham who had worked together at Hughes Aircraft Company, in Culver City, California[1]), authored many of the programming language systems (compiler + runtime + intrinsic library) on various manufacturers' computer systems, including IBM, SDS, and many others.
[1] Digitek's first compiler customer was Scientific Data Systems (SDS), a computer mainframe hardware company founded by Max Palevsky in 1961 and later acquired by Xerox in 1969.
Due to their implementation in a virtual machine technology called POPS (for "Programmed Operators"[3][4]), 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 1970s and early 1980s by providing POPS-based compilers to virtually all of the emerging computer vendors at the time.