20 Jul
2019
20 Jul
'19
11:32 a.m.
Does anyone have documentation or history for European
efforts in the Unix-like operating systems? For example there was Bull’s Chorus which I
seem to recall was based on Mach or a competing microkernel (it was a very long time ago
and I used it for no mare than about two hours..).
I am rather saddened by the fact that there is so much
about all the Unix (and not only >Unix) history of computing in the USA and so very
little in Europe. I wouldn’t even know >where to start, to be honest, all I have as a
history is the Italian side from my father and his other mad friends and colleagues in
Milan. So little of it is recorded, never mind written down.
In the 80-tisch I worked at Philips Data Systems in Apeldoorn, the
Netherlands. Not in Development, but in System Support. Philips was
working on a System V.3 based UNIX running on Motorola 68000 CPUs in a
P9X00 server. Called MPX as in Multi-Processor UNIX. The Multi part
refers to having an Ethernet, X25 and SDLC board running a tailored
version of the OS to offload the main CPU.
See for example
https://www.cbronline.com/news/better_late_philips_enters_the_uk_unix_marke…
https://www.cbronline.com/news/philips_ready_with_68030_models_for_its_p900…
Later Philips moved to i386 with a 'unknown version' based UNIX.
Division was bought by DEC (some say sold off by Philips) in 1991 and
we moved to DEC's choice of SCO UNIX. The 'intelligent comm boards
were ported and still running the separate OS though.
Unfortunately I never had any of that OS type of source and my paper
archive was left behind. Only have some small higher level test stuff
and my mail archive. For a while I was "rudi blom"
<blom(a)kiwi.idca.tds.philips.nl>, later rudi blom"(a)apd.mts