CTOS/BTOS

[vallor]

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.

[gareth evans]

Post by vallor
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.

[Dennis Boone]

Post by vallor
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

[vallor]

Post by Dennis Boone

Post by vallor
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
De

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

[Timothy McCaffrey]

Post by vallor

Post by Dennis Boone

Post by vallor
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
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