Kathleen O'Brien

Kathleen O'Brien was a programmer at Shepardson Microsystems who wrote the Atari Assembler Editor, the cartridge programming environment for the Atari 8-bit computers, which was finished before Atari BASIC. She also worked on portions of Atari BASIC beside her husband Paul Laughton, the primary author of that interpreter. As part of Shepardson's work for Atari she wrote common routines that were built into the computer's operating system, including the floating point math functions, the first floating point code she had worked on. After Shepardson delivered its work, O'Brien, Laughton and Bill Wilkinson formed Optimized Systems Software to continue developing the Atari products, licensing the source code of BASIC, Assembler Editor and Atari DOS. O'Brien and Laughton were later bought out by Mike Peters and Wilkinson. She was interviewed for a podcast by Kevin Savetz in 2015.