🚀 go-pugleaf

> Question:
>
> I was talking to a friend that mentioned his
> company was thinking about developing a huge telecom
> package on Sparc stations because of the development,
> debug, and revision control tools but the final
> destination is a Tandem. A Tandem not running Unix but
> running their proprietary system, whatever that is.
> This is so they get all the feature of fault tolerance.

I have extensive experience with UNIX, and a little experience with
GUARDIAN (Tandem's proprietary OS).  I believe that fault tolerant
applications (that are not PATHWAY applications) have to be programmed
as such; ie this does not happen by magic - porting a C program from
a Sparc to a Tandem will not make it fault tolerant.

Although there is certainly an argument for developing generic C programs
on a UNIX platform, and later porting them to GUARDIAN (Tandem's ANSI C
is pretty good), I doubt whether it holds when much of the code needs to
be GUARDIAN specific.

> Apparently the Unix on the Tandem is missing some. He 
> thinks that it's POSIX compliant but I still have
> concerns that they are looking for trouble. This is not
> a small project...approx. 40+ developers. 

I dont thing GUARDIAN is POSIX compliant until release D00, although
I could well be wrong.  

> Can anyone tell me if this is possible or is disaster
> just around the corner?

It may be an idea to look at Tandem's fault tolerant UNIX platforms
(ie the Integrity S3), which I believe now runs SVR4.