Tartan Laboratories, Inc., later renamed Tartan, Inc., was an American software company founded in 1981 and based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that specialized in programming language compilers, especially for the language Ada. It was based on work initially done at Carnegie Mellon University and gradually shifted from a focus on research and contract work to being more product-oriented. It was sold to Texas Instruments in 1996. Part of it was later acquired by DDC-I in 1998.
Company founding and initial history 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. He was chair, president, and CEO while she was vice president of engineering. The professors left the university as part of this action, but still kept a reference to it, as "Tartan" is the name associated with Carnegie Mellon's athletic teams and school newspaper. A third CMU professor was also a founder, John Nestor, a visiting professor who had previously worked at Intermetrics on the finalist "Red" candidate for the Ada language design. 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. The Cleveland-based Morgenthaler Ventures was another early investor, with David Morgenthaler serving on Tartan's board of directors. The company's offices were initially located in a former industrial warehouse on Melwood Avenue in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. 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. 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. This involved having optimizing code generators semi-automatically produced from architecture descriptions. Tartan made native Ada compilers for VAX/VMS and Sun-3/SunOS, and embedded system Ada cross-compilers, hosted on those platforms, to the MIL-STD-1750A, Motorola 680x0, and later Intel i960 architectures. 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. Tartan also produced compilers for the languages C and Modula-2. Among the C compiler implementers there were Guy L. Steele Jr. and Samuel P. Harbison, who combined to publish C: A Reference Manual (1984) to provide a precise description of the language, which Tartan was trying to implement on a wide range of systems. Both authors participated in the ANSI C standardization process; several revisions of the book were subsequently issued to reflect the new standard. In addition, Tartan created a microcode compiler for Intel Corporation, the goal of which was to produce microcode that was more efficient than what could be done by hand-coding. After a while Wulf assumed the role of chairman and senior vice president for development. By early 1985, Tartan had some 60 employees, a payroll over $2 million, and had seen over $9 million invested by capital venture outfits. The company was considered one of the Pittsburgh area's foremost high-technology firms and part of, as The Pittsburgh Press put it, "changing [the city's] image as a smokestack wasteland". Tartan hosted an ACM SIGAda conference in Pittsburgh in July 1986. In 1987, Tartan and integrated development environment maker Rational began a collaboration in producing a joint product for the 1750A, using Tartan's code generators. Indeed, the Ada 1750A product generated very efficient code and established a strong reputation in the industry. By 1987, the company had received $11 million in venture capital funding. Both of the key founders would then leave Tartan: Jones in 1987 and Wulf followed in 1988. Both went on to distinguished further careers in government settings and at the University of Virginia.
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