GCOS 8 The GCOS story starts with General Electric, who needed an operating system for their 36-bit GE-600 series mainframes, which shipped in 1963. From that base, the GCOS name got used in a whole family of distinct operating systems for distinct hardware, as well as having significant influence on the Multics and UNIX systems. The original GE-600 operating system - at that time called GECOS - rapidly evolved. By the early 1970's, it had a database, a rich set of compilers, and an interactive environment, called TSS. In the late 1970s, the current version, GCOS III was starting to show limitations so Honeywell embarked on an ambitious project to evolve it. This project - called NSA, for New System Architecture - added virtual memory to the GCOS platform, and completed the shift from the 6-bit BCD character set to the 7-bit ASCII that was becoming ubiquitous on other computer platforms at the time. By the 1980's, Honeywell was having a hard time competing with IBM at the high end. Performance wasn't terrible, but was significantly below IBM's highest-end. At the time, NEC, Fujitsu, and Hitachi were engaged in an aggressive mainframe performance race, with all three frequently claiming world-record performance. As a result, Honeywell negotiated an agreement with NEC to rebadge NEC's extremely-high-end ACOS System 1000 mainframe as the Honeywell DPS-90, and marketed it to GCOS 8 customers starting in 1985. This collaboration would last well into the late 90's; until the "Olympus" system in 2000, NEC systems provided on an OEM basis would make up the high end of Bull's GCOS 8 product line. Honeywell and Bull didn't sit idle on their own designs during this time. While the rebadged NEC systems were powerful, they were also extremely large and thirsty. Honeywell-Bull released the internally- developed DPS 8000 (RPM) system in 1987, providing a low-end and midrange platform for GCOS 8. This was followed up by the CMOS DPS 9000/500 in 1992. Meanwhile, NEC continued development as well; the ACOS System 2000 and 3900 (rebadged as the DPS 9000 and 9000/900 respectively) both had world-leading performance at release. Unfortunately, the ACOS System 3900 was the end of NEC's high-end 36-bit line; future NEC 36-bit hardware would be rebadged from Bull, and NEC exited the 36-bit market entirely by 2000. During the 1990's, Bull pushed forward aggressively on GCOS performance, both for GCOS 8 and the lower-end GCOS 7 systems. In 1997, the DPS 9000/700 was released, with performance significantly higher than the 9000/500 system that it replaced. Jupiter was also rebadged by NEC for the Japanese market as the ACOS PX7900; it was the last 36-bit system NEC sold. It was followed up by the 700-2 in 1999, which pushed performance up to 60 MIPS per processor. Finally, in 2000, a true replacement for the NEC-sourced (and almost ten years old) DPS 9000/900 was available: the DPS 9000/TA, codenamed Olympus. Olympus could run at a fast 108 MIPS per processor, roughly on par with the 9000/900 system, and was vastly smaller and more efficient. It was quickly followed up by the DPS 9000/TA200 (Olympus-2) in 2002; the TA200 pushed monoprocessor performance to 162 MIPS. It was itself followed by DPS 9000/TA300 (Olympus-2B) in 2004, a 90nm of shrink of Olympus-2, which increased monoprocessor performance to 216 MIPS. Unfortunately, the TA300 was the last 36-bit machine Bull ever built; it remained the high end of per-processor performance until 2012, while smaller systems have increasingly been replaced by Itanium machines running the V9000 emulation software developed by Bull. --------------------------- Machine Performance History --------------------------- +---------------+-----------+----------+-------------------+-----+----+ | Bull Name | NEC Name | Codename | Date |1-CPU|Max | | | | | |MIPS |CPUs| +---------------+-----------+----------+-------------------+-----+----+ |DPS 88 |N/A |Orion |1982 | 7.2| 2 | |DPS 90 |ACOS S/1000|Ajax |1980 NEC, 1985 HW-B|10.8*| 4 | |DPS 8000 |N/A |RPM |1987 | 2.8| 4 | |DPS 9000 |ACOS S/2000|Titan |1986 NEC, 1988 Bull| 48 | 4 | |DPS 9000/900 |ACOS S/3900|Zeus |1991 NEC, 1993 Bull|110 | 8 | |DPS 9000/500 |N/A |RPM II |1992 |~22 | 4 | |DPS 9000/700 |ACOS PX7900|Jupiter |1997 | 45 | 8 | |DPS 9000/700-2 |N/A |Jupiter-2 |1999? | 60 | 8 | |DPS 9000/TA |N/A |Olympus |2000 |108 | 8 | |DPS 9000/TA200 |N/A |Olympus-2 |2002 |162 | 8 | |DPS 9000/TA300 |N/A |Olympus-2B|2004 |216 | 8 | +---------------+-----------+----------+-------------------+-----+----+ ( * other sources claim 15 MIPS ) Mirrored, with permission, from: http://tamaran.rvf.su/blog/pages/gcos8 You can read more about GCOS on gopher over at Arcane Sciences: gopher://arcanesciences.com:70/1/GCOS