Whitesmiths

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Whitesmiths Ltd. was a software company based in Westford, Massachusetts. It sold a Unix-like operating system called Idris, as well as the first commercial C compiler. The Whitesmiths compiler, written for the PDP-11, was released in 1977 or 1978 and compiled a version of C similar to that accepted by Version 6 Unix (Dennis Ritchie's original C compiler). It was an entirely new implementation, borrowing no code from Unix. Today, it is mainly remembered for lending its name to a peculiar indentation style, originally used in the code examples which accompanied it.

In 1983 Whitesmiths formed a technical and business alliance with France-based COSMIC Software. At that time, Whitesmiths published 16-bit compilers for machines like PDP-11 while COSMIC published 8-bit compilers for Intel and Motorola CPUs. This technology alliance improved compilers for both market places. Whitesmiths was actively involved in developing the original ANSI C standard supplying several members to the standards committee and hosting some technical sessions. They were one of the first suppliers of an ANSI C compliant compiler.

The company's president from 1978 to 1988 was P. J. Plauger. Whitesmiths merged with Intermetrics in December 1988, leading to further M&A.