Message-Based OSes / Re: Object-Oriented Interface to UNIX

Clay Phipps phipps at fortune.UUCP
Wed Feb 15 11:55:19 AEST 1984


I know of two operating systems that may be of interest
(I'm not sure what the original poster is really searching for):

o   DEMOS
o   EMBOS

Both systems are probably more appropriately termed "message-based", 
although at least EMBOS (I don't know much about DEMOS)
can reasonably be considered "object-oriented", also.
The two terms are often used interchangeably these days,
especially if you consider a system process that communicates
by sending and receiving messages to be an "object".

DEMOS was developed at Los Alamos for the Cray-1.
See the Proceedings of the 6th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems 
Principles (1977).
Forest Baskett, who occasionally appears on the net from "decwrl" 
("decwrl!baskett" ?), is a coauthor of one of the DEMOS papers.

EMBOS (ELXSI Message Based Operating System) was (and is still being)
developed by ELXSI (a little-known Silicon Valley start-up from 1979)
for its 6400 high-performance multiprocessor
"mini-mainframe" (as they called it at one time).
The EMBOS system was deliberately designed to be distributable,
and its components usually can run on any available "CPU".
The only technical data readily available was a brief paper
by Olson, Kumar, & Shar in the 1983 Spring CompCon
Digest of Papers.

-- Clay Phipps

-- 
   {allegra,amd70,cbosgd,dsd,floyd,harpo,hpda,ihnp4,
    megatest,nsc,oliveb,sri-unix,twg,varian,VisiA,wdl1}
   !fortune!phipps



More information about the Comp.unix.wizards mailing list