Shepardson Microsystems, Inc. (SMI) was a small company producing operating systems and programming languages for CP/M, the Atari 8-bit computers and Apple II.
The company got its start in the microcomputer arena by producing a series of BASIC programming language interpreters for the burgeoning S-100 bus computer market.
[1] As machines shipped with ever-increasing amounts of RAM, due largely to the replacement of SRAM with the much denser DRAM in the mid-1970s, SMI further expanded their version as the 26 kB Cromemco Structured BASIC, while a cut-down 12 kB version was released as CP/A Business BASIC.
A version of Microsoft BASIC for the MOS 6502 had been licensed for the systems, but the task of retrofitting the code into an 8k cartridge proved too difficult.
In early 1981, SMI concluded that their BASIC and DOS products were not viable and permitted them, along with the Atari Assembler Editor, to be purchased by Bill Wilkinson and Mike Peters, who formed Optimized Systems Software.