Wind River Systems

Wind River Systems, Inc. is a publicly-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 operating system.

Among their flagship products are the VxWorks real-time operating system (which began as an add-on to the Virtual Real-Time Executive operating system in the early 1980s), the Eclipse (computing)-based Wind River Workbench integrated development environment (which has superseded the previous Tornado environment) and the Wind River Compiler (formerly the DIAB compiler , bought from the Swedish company Dataindustrier AB).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) and various products based on Linux made by MontaVista, Timesys and others.

=External references=

*[http://www.windriver.com/ Company page] *[http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.09/wind_pr.html Lord of the Toasters] an article from Wired magazine