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Not to be confused with Microwave.

Microware Systems Corporation was an American software company based in Clive, Iowa, that produced the OS-9 real-time operating system.

Microware Systems Corporation existed as a separate entity from 1977 until September 2001, when it was bought by RadiSys Corp., and became a division of that company. The rights to Microware OS-9 and related software were purchased by a group of distributors on 1 March 2013. The new owner was Microware LP. Microware initially produced a version of BASIC and a real-time kernel for the Motorola 6800 processor, and was asked by Motorola to develop what turned into BASIC09 for the then-new Motorola 6809 processor. Having written BASIC09, they decided it needed an operating system underlying it, and they created the first version of OS-9.

OS-9 was ported to the 68000 family of processors and, after being rewritten mostly in C, to the Intel 80×86, PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, and some of the Hitachi SuperH (SH) series processors. Initially, in the days of the SS-50 bus and SS-50C bus systems such as SWTPC, Gimix, and Smoke Signal Broadcasting, OS-9 was used more as a general purpose microcomputer operating system and had a large, active hobbyist-user population. OS-9 was also popular with industrial and embedded-system users. This was especially true when OS-9 was available for popular 6809-based computers such as the FM-7, FM-77, and the Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer and its near-clone, the Dragon. Over time, Microware concentrated on industrial customers and neglected the hobbyist base that was porting a great many Unix packages and utilities to OS-9.

Microware products

  • RT68 – the original product for the 6800
  • OS-9 and OS-9000 – real-time operating systems for a wide range of embedded CPU architectures.
  • CD-RTOS – the operating system used in the Philips CD-i players, which was a special version of OS-9/68K v2.4.
  • DAVID – the Digital Audio Video Interactive Decoder platform for digital TV.
  • Ariel – a micro OS based on an OS Microware acquired (MTOS-UX by IPI).
  • Color Computer 3 BASIC ROM extensions to support 80-column text and new graphics modes not in the CoCo 1 and 2’s Extended Color BASIC ROM