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 | |
 Headquarters inAustin, Texas, in 2001 | |
| Industry | Software |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1985 |
| Founder | Greg Galanos |
| Fate | Acquired byMotorola in August 1999 |
| Headquarters | , |
Key people | Greg Galanos (Founder/President/CTO) and Jean Belanger (Chairman/CEO) |
| Products | CodeWarrior |
Metrowerks was a company that developed software development tools for various desktop, handheld, embedded, and gaming platforms. Its flagship product,CodeWarrior, comprised anIDE,compilers,linkers, debuggers,libraries, and related tools. In 1999 it was acquired byMotorola and in 2005 it was spun-off as part ofFreescale, which continues to sell these tools. In 2015, Freescale Semiconductor was absorbed intoNXP.
Founded by Greg Galanos in 1985 as Metropolis Computer Networks inHudson, Quebec, Metrowerks originally developed software development tools for theApple Macintosh andUNIX workstations. Its first product was aModula-2 compiler originally developed byNiklaus Wirth, the creator of theALGOL W,Pascal and Modula-2 programming languages.[1][2] It had limited success with this product. In 1992, it began an effort to develop development tools for Macintosh computers based on the newly announcedPowerPC processor as well as legacy support for68k chipsets. It shipped the first commercial release of CodeWarrior in May 1994 atApple'sWorldwide Developers Conference. The release was a great success. Metrowerks received much credit for helping Apple succeed in its risky transition to a new processor.[3]
In March 1994 Metrowerks had itsinitial public offering, trading under the symbol MTWKF (NASDAQ foreign exchange) and continued to trade on Canadian exchanges.
Also in 1994, Metrowerks opened a small sales andR&D office inAustin, Texas to be closer to the manufacturers of the new PowerPC chips,IBM andMotorola. Metrowerks later moved its corporate headquarters to Austin along with Greg Galanos (Founder/President/CTO) and Jean Belanger (Chairman/CEO).
By 1996 Metrowerks had begun expanding its CodeWarrior product line to target platforms besides Macintosh computers, including:
In 1997, Metrowerks acquired the principal assets of The Latitude Group Inc., a software compatibility layer to port Macintosh applications to UNIX systems, with the intent to use it to port CodeWarrior to run on Solaris, and to extend it to facilitate portingMacOS software toRhapsody.[8] This will result in the creation of CodeWarrior Latitude.
In August 1999, Motorola's semiconductor sector (Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector, or SPS) acquired Metrowerks for roughly $100 million in cash. After the acquisition, Jean Belanger moved to become VP of business development in SPS and after a short stint as Director of Software Strategy for SPS, Greg Galanos left to become a General Partner and Managing Director at SOFTBANK Venture Capital, known as Mobius Venture Capital since December 2001. David Perkins, previously SVP of Business Development at Metrowerks, assumed the title of President and CEO.Metrowerks subsequently acquired a small number of other companies including HIWARE AG,Embedix[9] and Applied Microsystems Corp. in November 2002 for US$40-Million.[10][11] In 2002, David Perkins assumed the role of Corporate Vice President of NCSG at Motorola SPS; Jim Welch (previously the CFO of Metrowerks) assumed the role of CEO. In late 2003, Jim Welch left to become CEO ofWireless Valley Communications and Matthew R. Harris (who was previously CEO ofLineo and Embedix) became the new CEO of Metrowerks.
In 2003, Motorola spun off its semiconductor group as a separate company namedFreescale Semiconductor.
In late 2004,Nokia purchased theSymbianOS development tools, including members of the engineering, for US$30-Million.[6][12]
In early 2005, Matt Harris left Metrowerks to become CEO ofVolantis at which time Freescale management decided to absorb Metrowerks completely and not treat it as a wholly owned subsidiary.
CodeWarrior for Mac OS had successfully made the transition to Apple's newMac OS X operating system, supporting theCarbon development environment. However, Apple invested heavily in their own development tools for OS X (Xcode), distributed free of charge and always up to date. The increasing prominence of theCocoa development environment marginalized CodeWarrior, and finally the surprise announcement of the Mac's switch to Intel processors – mere weeks after Freescale had sold the Metrowerks Intel compiler tools to Nokia[citation needed] – signalled the end of CodeWarrior on the Mac. In July 2005, Freescale discontinued CodeWarrior for Mac OS, as the same time it was also divesting from any tools targeting non-Freescale silicon.[12]
In October 2005, Freescale retired the Metrowerks name but continues to develop CodeWarrior and other developer technologies as part of Freescale's Developer Technology Organization.[13][14]
Metrowerks' logo of the iconic factory worker and other visual branding was created by illustratorBill Russell
Addendum: Freescale's website now says, "CodeWarrior for Mac OS has been discontinued and is no longer sold or supported." It has several downloadable updates, but the most recent modification date is 15 August 2005.
Starting in 1994, CodeWarrior was the main product from Metrowerks. It was anIntegrated Development Environment forClassic MacOS, that offered C/C++ and Pascal, targeting both68k andPowerPC. Java support was added in 1996.[15]
CodeWarrior forPalmPilot was the IDE in the early days of the device, limited to the C compiler with partial C++ support. Constructor for PalmPilot looked familiar toPowerPlant Constructor users.[7]
CodeWarrior was the default toolchain forBeOS. Initially, developers on a BeBox could either use the command line tool provided, or cross-compile using the Macintosh IDE,[16] until Metrowerks developed the BeIDE as part of CodeWarrior for BeOS.
Later[when?] CodeWarrior was ported to run on Windows for Win32 development (with MFC), and compilers started targeting embedded platforms.
