Datalight

Datalight was a privately held software company specializing in power failsafe and high performance software for preserving data integrity in embedded systems. The company was founded in 1983 by Roy Sherrill, and is headquartered in Bothell, Washington. As of 2019 the company is a subsidiary of Tuxera under the name of Tuxera US Inc. Datalight was founded in 1983 by Roy Sherrill, a former Boeing engineer. Datalight's initial products were two DOS applications: the Datalight Small-C compiler and the Datalight C-Bug debugger. A full C compiler named Datalight C was available from Datalight between 1987 and 1993; Datalight C, developed by Walter Bright, evolved into Zortech C and is now Digital Mars C. Datalight C was also developed into an optimizing compiler called Datalight Optimum-C, which later became Zortech C++, the first native C++ compiler. In 1988, Datalight released C_thru_ROM, which provided embeddedable C functions and C start-up code, allowing programs developed on DOS to run as standalone applications without DOS dependence. In 1989, ROM-DOS 1.0 was released. CardTrick was announced in 1993 to support the flash memory being built into PCMCIA cards. Card Trick later evolved into the embedded flash memory manager FlashFX in 1995, moving Datalight into the raw flash memory market. The company grew rapidly in the late 1990s, receiving the WA Fast 50 award for the fastest growing companies in Washington state in 1997 and 1998. The first of four patents to eventually be assigned to Datalight, "Method and apparatus for allocating storage in a flash memory", was awarded in 1999, followed up with an additional FlashFX-related patent, "Method and system for managing bad areas in flash memory", in 2001. In 2003, Reliance, a reliable transactional embedded file system, was released; a related patent, "Reliable file system and method of providing the same", was awarded in 2007. In 2009, Datalight released FlashFX Tera to support the growing size and complexity of NAND flash arrays.