Tartan was founded 1981 by Carnegie Mellon University computer science professors and husband and wife William A. Wulf and Anita K. Jones, with the goal of specializing in optimizing compilers.

[2] The professors left the university as part of this action,[3] but still kept a reference to it, as "Tartan" is the name associated with Carnegie Mellon's athletic teams and school newspaper.

[4] Initial funding for the company was provided by a New York-based venture capital firm, but a second round came from the Pittsburgh-based PNC Financial Corporation.

[6] The company's offices were initially located in a former industrial warehouse on Melwood Avenue in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh.

[7] In 1983 the company hosted a visit by Governor of Pennsylvania Dick Thornburgh as part of a meeting of the Pittsburgh High Technology Council, an organization seeking to help change Pittsburgh from its former reliance on an industrial base of steel production to one that included an emphasis on high-technology.

[7] Tartan's initial engineering focus was to commercialize use of the Production Quality Compiler-Compiler Project approach towards building optimizing compilers that Wulf had worked on at Carnegie Mellon.

[8] In addition, in March 1982, the company received a contract to maintain and enhance the DIANA intermediate representation that was intended as the cornerstone to various Ada tools.

[16] Indeed, the Ada 1750A product generated very efficient code and established a strong reputation in the industry.

[26] He reduced engineering headcount and increased those for marketing and sales, and vowed that the company would focus on three major compiler lines, including ones for the C3x and i960 where there were no immediate competitors.

[25] Tartan had staff members who were prominent in the Ada language definition and standardization world, including Erhard Ploedereder and Joyce L.

[21] In March 1998, DDC-I acquired from Texas Instruments the development and sales and marketing rights to the Tartan Ada cross-compilers for the MIL-STD-1750A, Motorola 680x0, and Intel i960 architectures.