Wind River Systems

Wind River Systems, Inc. is a publicy-owned company, provider of embedded systems, development tools for embedded systems, middleware, and other types of software. The company was founded in Berkeley, California in 1981 by Jerry Fiddler .

Wind River concentrates on middleware: software and operating systems, for information appliances and devices. Their products are used in cellular phones, auto braking systems, routers, digital cameras, projectors, set-top boxes, traffic signals, Mars Rovers MER-A and MER-B and other things. They were the final proprietors of BSD/OS, the commercial BSD operating system.

Among their flagship products are the VxWorks real-time operating system (which began as an add-on to the VRTX operating system in the early 1980s), the Eclipse-based Wind River Workbench integrated development environment (which has superseded the previous Tornado environment) and the Wind River Compiler (formerly the DIAB compiler, bought from the Swedish company Dataindustrier AB ). Wind River's head offices are located at 500 Wind River Way, Alameda, California. As of 2004, their strategic theme is device software optimization.

In 1999 Wind River bought one of their major competitors, Integrated Systems Inc., makers of pSOS. Wind River has since discontinued the pSOS product line and has recommended existing pSOS customers transition to VxWorks.

Today, their competitors include Green Hills Software, QNX Inc. (makers of the QNX neutrino system) and to a lesser extent the real-time and embedded product lines of Microsoft (largely WindowsCE and Windows NT Embedded) and various products based on Linux made by MontaVista, Timesys and others.

External references

• Company page
• Lord of the Toasters an article from Wired magazine