Thought I'd better introduce myself:

I was in the USCG in the 80's, and we used the Convergent
Technologies Operating System (CTOS), which became _BTOS_
(Burroughs)(that is to say, Unisys) while I was in the service.
I was the ship's "systems manager".

CTOS was a message-passing microkernel OS that had almost
transparent access to some devices over the network. The shell
on it was the "Executive", where the user would fill out
a form with all of a command's options, then hit a special
"go" button on the keyboard. I thought that was a great interface.

And it was a great operating system, ahead of its time in a lot
of ways. They wrote it in assembly: I believe the source files
were entitled "Project Olympia".

Does this even count as computer folklore? The processors
they used in the New Generation (NGEN) CTOS/BTOS workstations
were a bit unusual: 80186's.

--
-Scott Doty
vallor@vallor.earth
(my email address does work)

On 24/03/2023 08:46, vallor wrote:
>
> Does this even count as computer folklore? The processors
> they used in the New Generation (NGEN) CTOS/BTOS workstations
> were a bit unusual: 80186's.

30 years ago I was part of the design team of a PABX that
used the 80186, the Interconnect Ltd I3000.

> CTOS was a message-passing microkernel OS that had almost
> transparent access to some devices over the network. The shell
> on it was the "Executive", where the user would fill out
> a form with all of a command's options, then hit a special
> "go" button on the keyboard. I thought that was a great interface.

There's a fellow, AJ Palmgren, who has attended the VCFmw show several
times who has a number of these and has been working to sort out various
problems and learn about them. He has a youtube channel here:

https://www.youtube.com/@ConvergentMightyFrame/featured

De

On Fri, 24 Mar 2023 22:48:38 +0000, Dennis Boone wrote:

>> CTOS was a message-passing microkernel OS that had almost
> > transparent access to some devices over the network. The shell on it
> > was the "Executive", where the user would fill out a form with all of
> > a command's options, then hit a special "go" button on the keyboard.
> > I thought that was a great interface.
>
> There's a fellow, AJ Palmgren, who has attended the VCFmw show several
> times who has a number of these and has been working to sort out various
> problems and learn about them. He has a youtube channel here:
>
> https://www.youtube.com/@ConvergentMightyFrame/featured
>
> De

Thank you for the pointer, I've subscribed to his
channel. :)

--
-v

On Saturday, March 25, 2023 at 4:20:58 AM UTC-4, vallor wrote:
> On Fri, 24 Mar 2023 22:48:38 +0000, Dennis Boone wrote:
>
> >> CTOS was a message-passing microkernel OS that had almost
> > > transparent access to some devices over the network. The shell on it
> > > was the "Executive", where the user would fill out a form with all of
> > > a command's options, then hit a special "go" button on the keyboard.
> > > I thought that was a great interface.
> >
> > There's a fellow, AJ Palmgren, who has attended the VCFmw show several
> > times who has a number of these and has been working to sort out various
> > problems and learn about them. He has a youtube channel here:
> >
> > https://www.youtube.com/@ConvergentMightyFrame/featured
> >
> > De
> Thank you for the pointer, I've subscribed to his
> channel. :)
>
> --
> -v

That is a the Convergent Unix (nee CTIX) system, not CTOS (and I think it used 68000s, not 8086s).
I think you could hook up CTOS systems to CTIX and have the CTIX systems provide services to
the CTOS systems, but I never had the "pleasure" of working with CTIX (although we did have
several at one point).

I worked with BTOS systems quite a bit, 30+ years ago. When they switched to protected mode
they (Convergent) made some really iffy design decisions that badly affected some aspects of the
performance.

I think the original OS was written in PL/M. It may have been ported to C later on when they moved
up to the 386 & 32 bit.

- Tim