Re: Operating System in Ada

["Corey Ashford" <corey@remove.these.four.words.rational.com>]

> Robert C. Leif, Ph.D. wrote in message <000301bdf6f6$9a9e5f60$1a404bd1@rleif>...
> From: Bob Leif
>
>To: the Readers of Comp.Lang.Ada
>
> The equivalent of an Ada operating system has already be done twice.
> Firstly, there was the BIIN project, which was in Ada. If any one can find
> the sources, it would be of interest to make them available. I suspect that
> if BIIN were hosted on a modern PC, that it might have reasonable
> performance. If the present POSIX.Ada '95 packages used with Linux were
> employed, it would be very interesting to run BIIN head to head against
> commercial operating systems like Windows NT.


Actually, BiiN was the name of the spin-off company from Intel and
Siemens.  The OS name was Osiris.  It was a monster object-oriented
OS.  It's not really comparable with NT in any sense.  It wasn't GUI
oriented at all.  It was aimed toward security, high-reliability, availability, and
fault-tolerance.  It had a lot of OO theory in it, but was fairly slow
because it was running on parallel 16 MHz i960 chips.

I believe that the code was put under lock-and-key by Siemens never to see
the light of day again because no buyer could be found for BiiN when Siemens
and Intel decided to call it quits on the deal.

It would have been a bear to port anyway as it relied on the "P7 Extended
Architecture" of the i960 that never really received much public description.
There were a lot of object oriented features built right into the processor -
which also required a 33-bit word (1 bit was used for tagging access
descriptors).

- Corey