Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!mcvax!nikhefh!gert
From: gert@nikhefh.hep.nl (Gert Poletiek)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Abaq OS, what is it ?
Message-ID: <438@nikhefh.hep.nl>
Date: 2 Mar 88 09:09:26 GMT
References: <24297@yale-celray.yale.UUCP>
Reply-To: gert@nikhefh.hep.nl (Gert Poletiek)
Organization: Nikhef-H, Amsterdam (the Netherlands).
Lines: 34

In article <24297@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> wallman-george@CS.Yale.EDU (Natuerlich!) writes:
>Excuse a question, I am not uptodate at all.
>  Will the Abaq run UNIX ? Which one ?
>
>I heard a cruel joke from a friend, that the author of AmigaDOS is
>writing the MS-DOS compatible OS for the Abaq.
>He was kidding of course ? (Wasn't he *PANIC* ?!?)


The OS for the ABAQ (if that's what it will be called: there are rumours that
there is a Belgian company selling a games computer of the same name -) )
will be HELIOS. This OS is being written by a british company called
Perihelion. HELIOS is based on UNIX and on the distributed operating system
Amoeba developed by A.S. Tanenbaum (you know: the one that did MINIX). Amoeba
is a capability based distributed operating system, and HELIOS is too.

HELIOS is being written in C and transputer assembler NOT IN OCCAM. Most of
the system calls of UNIX (V7 and some BSD) are equivalent, though more system
calls are available to take advantage of the transputer architecture. Those
system services include spawning processes on remote processors and inter
process communication (IPC) using a message passing system. UNIX pipes are
also (I think) implemented on top of the IPC, so pipes can be stretched
across different computing nodes.

More info can be had from Perihelion or Atari UK (I don't have the addresses
right now).


Gert Poletiek

NIKHEF-H, Dutch National Institute for Nuclear and High Energy Physics
          Kruislaan 409, P.O.Box 41882, 1009 DB Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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