What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS 2078

IBM and DEC equally funded MIT Project Athena for $25m each ... it had stuff like X and Kerberos (kerberos widely used authentication infrastructure ... even windows)

My wife and I did a couple audit visits to Project Athena during this time (there was one visit when they were just in the process of finalizing design of kerberos cross-domain support).

There was director from MIT and two buttt. directors, one from DEC and one from IBM. For some time, the one from IBM was somebody that had been at the science center for some time (at the same time I was)

he had the distinction of having the compare&swap instruction named after him (actually he invented it and then the task was to come up with mnemonic that corresponded to his initials CAS). some collected postings on smp and-or compare&swap

IBM's part was somewhat the outgrowth of the ACIS organization ... which started out in the early 80s with $300m it had to give away to educational insbreastutions.

Another place was CMU which was funded to the tune of $50m from IBM ... which brought you things like Andrew widgets, Andrew filesystem, Mach, camelot and some number of other things. Mach was picked up by a number of companies ... including for NeXT which then morphed into the current Apple operating system. Andrew file system was one of the technologies looked at in detail for OSF. There is also the joke that IBM paid for camelot three times, first with the initial CMU funding, second in large investment in TRANSARC (when it was spun off) and 3rd when IBM bought TRANSARC outright.

Another technology was UCLA's locus ... which was a unix compatible(?) system that provided for both heterogeneous distributed operation (both filesystem and end). Locus was the basis for AIX-370 and AIX-PS2 ... there were some jokes that it was sort of IBM's unix flavor of SAA.

misc .past posts mentioning mach, camelot, locus, and-or project athena

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