🚀 go-pugleaf

Gosh, blast from the past time :-)

I worked on B20's just when Sperry and Burroughs merged about 7 years
ago. They were OEM'd by Burroughs from Convergent Technology who called
them NGen's. They were Intel based, and by the time I left B38 had '386
chips fitted in them.

The really neat thing about them, was that the modules (extras disks,
floppy's, etc) were added by just addding another "slice". The main
processor box was just slightly smaller than a Sun IPC/IPX box on its
side, to add another one just plugged in the another box, via some clip
mechanism, I never ever had to open a box. Power supplies were
separate, and consisted of "power-bricks" which one just plugged in to
the slices as one needed to.

The Operating System CTOS/BTOS version 2 (when I left), was probably
one of the best documented OS's I had seen since Unix Version 7, the
documentation was all based on the Systems Programming Language, which
was a superset of Pascal. It was a pleasure to use. We actually used C
on it, which wasn't quite as well integrated as the Pascal, but still
more than adequate. We ported Sperry's DCA architecture to run on it,
to allow a B20 to appear like a real Sperry host.

When we had the '286 and above versions, CTOS supported memory
management and multitasking long before DOS and its successors managed
to provide it. The main problem, I guess was the price, and lack of
marketting, lack of support of fancy graphics and screens. They were
and still are quite popular in Local Government and Banking markets.

Convergent also used to make minis running CTOS, and at one point sold
Unix Servers to Unisys which had CTOS underlying them. Nowadays I
believe Convergent/CTOS (or whatever it now called) is POSIX
compliant.


	-- Steve

Arpa Email address:	cobrin.sbd-e@RX.Xerox.COM
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