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

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