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58-532: Chorus Systèmes SA was a French software company that existed from 1986 to 1997, that was created to commercialise research work done at the Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique (INRIA). Its primary product was the Chorus distributed microkernel operating system , created at a time when microkernel technology was thought to have great promise for the future of operating systems . As such Chorus

116-551: A microkernel-based network operating system that would run NetWare's network services alongside UnixWare's application services and accordingly be a product that could successfully compete with Microsoft's Windows NT . SuperNOS, which attracted considerable industry attention, was based on the work that had already started between USL and Chorus Systèmes, and a significant number of engineers got assigned to it. The project endured prolonged internal architectural debates, including Gien and Novell's chief scientist Drew Major disagreeing in

174-563: A month later. As part of the founding of the organization, the AIX operating system was provided by IBM and was intended to be passed-through to the member companies of OSF. However, delays and portability concerns caused the OSF staff to cancel the original plan. Instead, a new Unix reference operating system using components from across the industry would be released on a wide range of platforms to demonstrate its portability and vendor neutrality. This new OS

232-514: A new generation of its System X product, a digital switching system . At the time it was the biggest deal Chorus Systèmes had made, and was subsequently mentioned in the general press. Chorus Systèmes also made a deal with Gipsi SA , a maker of X terminals . During 1990, Unisys agreed to use Chorus as the basis for a Unix operating system. The same year, Intel 's Scientific Computers group agreed to use Chorus for its Intel iPSC supercomputer. These successes were followed in 1991 by ports of

290-486: A parallel database server featuring up to 64 SPARC-based processing elements, each running its own database server in a Chorus microkernel-based Unix System V Release 4 environment, and accessing a common, coherent file store. This product employed Chorus/MiX V.4 specifically. The primary alternative to Chorus in the microkernel space was the Mach software at Carnegie Mellon University . Two other microkernel projects going on at

348-578: A popular way to describe network protocols. In large part the French CYCLADES computer networking project was a precursor for the Chorus work, as essential to the idea of Chorus was to take advantage of what was learned in research into networking in order to add communication and distribution within heretofore monolithic operating system kernels . Several iterations of the Chorus technology were produced at INRIA between 1980 and 1986, which were referred to by

406-847: A two-layer architecture with clusters on the lower layer and objects represented through the higher layer. This revision was developed in partnership with the ISA and Commandos projects under the aegis of ESPRIT and materialised in late 1991. The findings from the COOL project were described in an article in Communications of the ACM in 1993. Independent investigations were also made into integrating Chorus with Mac OS , pursuing an approach superficially similar to those already taken with other microkernel technologies such as Mach 3.0 where DOS or Mac OS were run as user-level applications. Following on from earlier work that ported

464-706: The European Strategic Program on Research in Information Technology (ESPRIT), overseen by the European Commission . Microkernels also offer the possibility of multiple operating systems running side-by-side on the same machine. The ability of Chorus to support this soon became of interest to Novell , which had acquired USL and was looking for a way to combined its flagship NetWare product with USL's SVR4-based UnixWare . In 1994 Novell began publicly describing its plans to develop "SuperNOS",

522-678: The Ministry of Economy, Finance and Industry . Inria has nine research centers distributed across France (in Bordeaux , Grenoble - Inovallée , Lille , Lyon , Nancy , Paris - Rocquencourt , Rennes , Saclay , and Sophia Antipolis ) and one center abroad in Santiago de Chile , Chile. It also contributes to academic research teams outside of those centers. Inria Rennes is part of the joint Institut de recherche en informatique et systèmes aléatoires (IRISA) with several other entities. Before December 2007,

580-532: The Unix wars . AT&T founded the Unix International (UI) project management organization later that year as a counter-response to the OSF. UI was led by Peter Cunningham, formerly of International Computers Limited (ICL), as its president. UI had many of the same characteristics of OSF, with the exception of a software development staff. Unix System Laboratories (USL) filled the software development role, and UI

638-632: The X/Open Consortium for certification and branding and Novell passed control and licensing of the UNIX trademark to the X/Open Consortium. In March 1994, OSF announced its new organizational model and introduced the COSE technology model as its Pre-Structured Technology (PST) process, which marked the end of OSF as a significant software development company. It also assumed responsibility for future work on

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696-548: The "Gang of Seven". Later sponsor members included Philips and Hitachi with the broader general membership growing to more than a hundred companies. It was registered under the U.S. National Cooperative Research Act of 1984, which reduces potential antitrust liabilities of research joint ventures and standards development organizations. The sponsors gave OSF significant funding, a broad mandate (the so-called "Seven Principles"), substantial independence, and support from sponsor senior management. Senior operating executives from

754-490: The Chorus creators as Chorus-v0 through Chorus-v2. Concurrently, there was another INRIA project, called Sol. It had been begun by Michel Gien, who also had a background from CYCLADES; it sought to build a Unix operating system implementation for French minicomputers and microcomputers. Sol used the Pascal programming language rather than C for this, as part of adopting more modern software engineering techniques. In 1984,

812-441: The Chorus microkernel for use in real-time processing environments in telecommunications and other areas. The first result of this, a dual-functionality product called Chorus/Fusion for SCO Open Systems Software, was released in 1994. Further work between the two companies took place during the next few years; by 1995, SCO had set up a business unit for the venture and was spending considerable amounts of engineering resources on what

870-423: The Chorus microkernel to the transputer architecture from Inmos and to Acorn Computers ' ARM3 RISC processor "for use in a multimedia workstation". The year after that, Tolerance Computer agreed to work with the Chorus microkernel towards making the first fault-tolerant Unix for a microcomputer-level system. ICL employed the Chorus microkernel in the software architecture of its GOLDRUSH MegaSERVER product:

928-602: The Chorus simulator software to Apple's A/UX operating system, allowing experience to be gained with Chorus itself, such efforts proceeded to the point of porting Chorus to the Macintosh IIcx hardware, permitting Chorus to be started within the Mac OS environment, and for Chorus to appear as an application within that environment, achieving a form of "cohabitation". Over time, development effort on Chorus shifted towards real-time operating systems for embedded systems . As part of

986-402: The Chorus technology, with no attempts to garner revenue via consulting or similar activities. The Chorus-v3 iteration consequently came out around 1988 from Chorus Systèmes, which improved on its real-time and distributed capabilities. Some of the improvements were inspired by work done in other microkernel projects; as an academic paper put out by two of Chorus's staff members stated, their goal

1044-704: The Distributed Management Environment and ANDF , the Architecturally Neutral Distribution Format. Technologies which were produced primarily by OSF included ODE, the Open Development Environment - a flexible development, build and source control environment; TET, the Test Environment Toolkit - an open framework for building and executing automated test cases; and the operating system OSF/1 MK from

1102-575: The ESPRIT's STREAM project, Chorus was structured into a scaled series of capabilities, with the smallest of these being a 10K-byte "nanokernel" with a simple executive and memory management logic up to a full-featured distributed operating system that could run Unix. Subsequently the company looked to change directions away from Unix, as it said its customers were more interested in the Java software platform and its capabilities on real-time devices. In February 1997,

1160-475: The Java realm. By 1997, Chorus Systèmes numbered among its customers in the telecommunications area Alcatel-Alsthom , Lucent Technologies , Matra , and Motorola . Its revenues were $ 10 million. By this point, Chorus Systèmes was looking to get acquired by another company. A couple of years previously, SCO had inquired about such a possibility, but felt that Chorus Systèmes was valuing itself too highly. But with

1218-407: The Java work going on, and a personal connection that Gien had with Sun co-founder Bill Joy , there was an obvious possibility in this respect. In September 1997, it was announced that Sun Microsystems was acquiring Chorus Systèmes SA. The total amount paid for the company was the equivalent of $ 26.5 million. The deal was part of an overall desire by Sun to enter the embedded systems market, which

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1276-570: The OSF Research Institute based on the Mach3.0 microkernel. ODE and TET were made available as open source. TET was produced as a result of collaboration between OSF, UNIX International and the X/Open Consortium. All the OSF technologies had corresponding manuals and supporting publications produced almost exclusively by the staff at OSF and published by Prentice-Hall. IBM has published its version of ODE on GitHub. By 1993, it had become clear that

1334-497: The Sol project was merged into the Chorus project, and as one result, the Chorus-v2 iteration adopted the interfaces of Unix System V rather than having its own custom set of interfaces. Microkernel technology was seen as having great promise for advancing the state of operating system and distributed computing. Accordingly, Chorus Systèmes SA was founded in 1986, in order to commercialise

1392-641: The US network and allowed NASA researchers access to an astronomical database based in Strasbourg. This was the first international connection to NSFNET and the first time that French networks were connected directly to a network using TCP/IP , the Internet protocol. The Internet in France was limited to research and education for some years to come. Open Software Foundation The Open Software Foundation, Inc. ( OSF ),

1450-616: The company announced the Chorus/Jazz product, which was intended to allow Java applications to run in a distributed, real-time embedded system environment. The basis of Chorus/Jazz was Chorus Systèmes having licensed JavaOS from Sun Microsystems and replaced that technology's hardware abstraction layer with the Chorus microkernel. At this point, Chorus Systèmes offered three products for the embedded systems space: Chorus/Micro, for small, hard real-time applications; Chorus/ClassiX for larger, RT-POSIX -compliant applications, and Chorus/Jazz in

1508-414: The company was owned by its founders and employees; 16 percent by Innovacom ; and amounts of less than 10 percent by, in descending order, Soffinova , Credit Lyonnais , Banexi Ventures , and Banque Hervet . In 1991, Unix System Laboratories (USL), an off-shoot of Unix founder AT&T , forged an arrangement with Chorus Systèmes to engage in cooperative work on the Chorus microkernel technology, with

1566-577: The company's executives met with people from both the Open Software Foundation and Unix International (the two sides of the Unix Wars then taking place) to seek their endorsements of the Chorus microkernel and to navigate their requirements. Similarly, Chorus Systèmes engaged with a number of hardware vendors in an effort to convince them to adopt the Chorus technology. In early 1990, GEC Plessey Telecommunications agreed to adopt Chorus for

1624-421: The founding, five Open Process projects were named. The organization was seen as a response to the collaboration between AT&T and Sun on UNIX System V Release 4, and a fear that other vendors would be locked out of the standardization process. This led Scott McNealy of Sun to quip that "OSF" really stood for "Oppose Sun Forever". The competition between the opposing versions of Unix systems became known as

1682-648: The greater threat to UNIX system vendors was not each other as much as the increasing presence of Microsoft in enterprise computing. In May, the Common Open Software Environment (COSE) initiative was announced by the major players in the UNIX world from both the UI and OSF camps: Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun, Unix System Laboratories , and the Santa Cruz Operation . As part of this agreement, Sun and AT&T became OSF sponsor members, OSF submitted Motif to

1740-615: The idea of supporting USL's Unix System V Release 4 on Chorus/MiX and thereby making it more scalable and better suited for parallel and distributed applications. As part of this, USL took a $ 1 million stake in Chorus Systèmes. Much of the USL Chorus work was done at the USL Europe facility in London. This was part of the larger Ouverture project , a $ 14 million effort that was itself part of

1798-486: The increasingly important domain of virtualization . This company was then renamed to VirtualLogix , which was then acquired by Red Bend Software in 2010. Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique Inria is a Public Scientific and Technical Research Establishment (EPST) under the double supervision of the French Ministry of National Education, Advanced Instruction and Research and

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1856-464: The key to the technological direction Unix should take and had large ambitions in this realm. Indeed, almost from the start of the company's history, Zimmerman was proclaiming that the existing Unix technology had reached the end of its useful life and that it needed a new kernel approach going forward. As part of this, Zimmerman wanted to expand usage of Unix into new areas and then, within a few years, capture ten percent of that expanded market. As such,

1914-618: The meeting, the proposal was tabled so that members of the Hamilton Group could broach the idea of a joint development effort with Sun and AT&T. In the meantime, Stettner was asked to write an organization charter. That charter was formally presented to Apollo, HP, IBM and others after Sun and AT&T rejected the overture by the Hamilton Group members. The foundation's original sponsoring members were Apollo Computer , Groupe Bull , Digital Equipment Corporation , Hewlett-Packard , IBM , Nixdorf Computer , and Siemens AG , sometimes called

1972-532: The most widely deployed Unix product ever produced. Other technologies developed by OSF include Motif and Distributed Computing Environment (DCE), respectively a widget toolkit and package of distributed network computing technologies. The Motif toolkit was adopted as a formal standard within the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) as P1295 in 1994. Filling out the initial (and what turned out to be final) five technologies from OSF were DME,

2030-623: The neighborhood of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology along with remote development offices in Munich, Germany and Grenoble, France and field offices in Brussels and Tokyo. To the public, the organization appeared to be nothing more than an advocacy group; in reality it included a distributed software development organization. An independent security software company - Addamax, filed suit in 1990 against OSF and its sponsors charging that OSF

2088-582: The new venture. Zimmermann became head of the new company, in a position described at different times as president, chairman, or CEO. Gien was variously described as chief of technology, or general manager and director of research, for Chorus Systèmes. At the time, technology startups in France were rare, a point emphasized by the French trade publication 01 Informatique in a profile of the company and by co-founder Gien in retrospect. Thus Chorus Systèmes and system software company ILOG , founded soon after, were in

2146-443: The only major Unix system vendor using the complete OSF/1 package was Digital (DEC), which rebranded it Digital UNIX (later renamed Tru64 UNIX after Digital's acquisition by Compaq ). However, other Unix vendors licensed the operating system to include various components of OSF/1 in their products. Other software vendors also licensed OSF/1 including Apple. Parts of OSF/1 were contained in so many versions of Unix that it may have been

2204-593: The process, it has produced many widely used programs, such as Inria furthermore leads French AI Research, ranking 12th worldwide in 2019, based on accepted publications at the prestigious Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems . During the summer of 1988, the INRIA connected its Sophia-Antipolis unit to the NSFNet via Princeton using a satellite link leased to France Telecom and MCI. The link became operational on 8 August 1988, and allowed INRIA researchers to access

2262-465: The project ended up being scrapped before it achieved fruition. Object-oriented operating systems were another area of active research at the time and there were several efforts to provide ones on top of microkernels. One was GUIDE, a project of the Universities of Grenoble , which implemented their object-oriented OS on Chorus, Mach, and regular Unix, and drew comparisons between the three. Another

2320-452: The results of the INRIA research. The co-founders were Zimmerman and Gien. Having spent a decade or more enmeshed in the politics of publicly-funded research work, both felt that it was time to try a startup company , especially since they had seen others they knew doing so (such as the American networking pioneer Robert Metcalfe founding 3Com ). Some Chorus engineers from INRIA joined them in

2378-486: The sponsoring companies served on OSF's initial Board of Directors. One of the Seven Principles was declaration of an "Open Process" whereby OSF staff would create Request for Proposals for source technologies to be selected by OSF, in a vendor neutral process. The selected technology would be licensed by the OSF to the public. Membership in the organization gave member companies a voice in the process for requirements. At

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2436-493: The three centers of Bordeaux, Lille and Saclay formed a single research center called INRIA Futurs. In October 2010, Inria, with Pierre and Marie Curie University (Now Sorbonne University ) and Paris Diderot University started IRILL , a center for innovation and research initiative for free software. Inria employs 3800 people. Among them are 1300 researchers, 1000 Ph.D. students and 500 postdoctorates. Inria does both theoretical and applied research in computer science. In

2494-432: The time were Amoeba from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and V at Stanford University . Chorus and Mach shared many similar features of their outward design, but had differences in areas such as naming and addressing and protection schemes. In some cases this gave Chorus an advantage, because it provided greater flexibility at the kernel mode–user mode boundary. In any case, Chorus was the only one of these projects that

2552-464: The trade press about whether the existent Chorus technology was up to the task. In any case, later in 1995, Novell sold the Unix technology to The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) and SuperNOS was abandoned. SCO itself had had its own dealings with Chorus Systèmes, going back to 1992 with an agreement between the two companies for cooperative work in the context of combining SCO's OpenServer variant of Unix with

2610-404: The vanguard. Venture capitalists did not exist in France, but the new firm was able to get funding from European projects and from government contracts. In particular this included funding from INRIA and France Telecom . The offices of Chorus Systèmes were located at 6 avenue Gustave Eiffel in the town of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines in the Île-de-France region outside of Paris. Chorus Systèmes

2668-523: Was COOL and was undertaken by Chorus Systèmes itself. Standing for the Chorus Object-Oriented Layer, the first version of COOL was done in conjunction with INRIA and the SEPT, a research laboratory of France Telecom , and came into being in late 1988. A primary aim of the COOL work was to support distributed groupware applications; with that goal partly in mind, COOL was substantially revised into

2726-421: Was a growing industry that was attracting the attention of analysts and investors. Given the declining interest in microkernels, the industry publication Computergram International considered Chorus Systèmes fortunate to have found a buyer for itself. The Sun acquisition closed on 21 October 1997. The Chorus technology became part a new Embedded Systems Software business group at Sun. The name of Chorus itself

2784-592: Was a not-for-profit industry consortium for creating an open standard for an implementation of the operating system Unix . It was formed in 1988 and merged with X/Open in 1996, to become The Open Group . Despite the similarities in name, OSF was unrelated to the Free Software Foundation (FSF, also based in Cambridge, Massachusetts ), or the Open Source Initiative (OSI). The organization

2842-497: Was able to attract engineering talent from around the world, in part because of the connections the founders had in the research world, in part because of the interesting nature of the work, and in part because people were attracted to the idea of working in the Paris area. By mid-1989, Chorus Systèmes had some 30 employees. By arrangement with its financial backers, during its first two years Chorus Systèmes focused solely on improvements to

2900-878: Was based in Parsippany-Troy Hills, New Jersey to be close to USL. The executive staff of the Open Software Foundation included David Tory, President, formerly of Computer Associates ; Norma Clarke, Vice-President Human Resources formerly of Mitre ; Marty Ford, Vice-President Finance, formerly of DEC; Ira Goldstein, Vice-President Research Institute, formerly of Hewlett-Packard; Roger Gourd, Vice-President Engineering, formerly of DEC; Alex Morrow, Vice-President Strategy, formerly of IBM; Donal O'Shea, Vice-President of Operations, formerly of UniSoft . This staff added more than 300 employees in less than two years. The organization's headquarters were at 11 Cambridge Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts , intentionally located in

2958-496: Was changed to ChorusOS. Some of the work done at Sun included providing a combination of ChorusOS and Sun Solaris for high-availability systems in the telecommunications market. Subsequently, Sun went through a restructuring during the early 2000s recession and decided to jettison the ChorusOS technology. Some three dozen Sun employees working on Chorus formed their own company, Jaluna, which used microkernel-analogous approaches to

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3016-535: Was engaged in anticompetitive practices. The court delivered a grant of summary judgment to OSF (152 F.3d 48, 50 (1st Cir.1998). In a related action in 1991, the Federal Trade Commission investigated OSF for allegedly using "unfair trade practices" in its "process for acquiring technology." OSF's Unix reference implementation was named OSF/1 . It was first released in December 1990 and adopted by Digital

3074-540: Was first proposed by Armando Stettner of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) at an invitation-only meeting hosted by DEC for several Unix system vendors in January 1988 (called the "Hamilton Group", since the meeting was held at DEC's offices on Palo Alto 's Hamilton Avenue). It was intended as an organization for joint development, mostly in response to a perceived threat of "merged UNIX system" efforts by AT&T Corporation and Sun Microsystems . After discussion during

3132-536: Was in the middle of many strategic partnerships regarding Unix and related systems. The firm was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1997. The Chorus distributed operating system research project began at the French Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique (INRIA) in 1979. The project was begun by Hubert Zimmerman , a pioneer of networked computing who devised the OSI reference model which became

3190-492: Was now a re-implementation of OpenServer to run on top of the Chorus microkernel, in what was going to be called the SCO Telecommunications OS Platform. In 1996, SCO and Chorus unveiled a technology roadmap for its OpenServer/Chorus product, giving a codename of MK2 for a product aimed at telephone switches, telephony and multimedia servers, and announcing adoption by Siemens Private Communications Systems. But

3248-437: Was produced in a little more than one year. It incorporated technology from Carnegie Mellon University : the Mach 2.5 microkernel ; from IBM, the journaled file system and commands and libraries ; from SecureWare secure core components; from Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) the computer networking stack; and a new virtual memory management system invented at OSF. By the time OSF stopped development of OSF/1 in 1996,

3306-707: Was ready with a commercial product. In 1990, the company created a United States subsidiary, Chorus Systems Inc., located in Beaverton, Oregon , that initially had seven employees but plans to double that. Will Neuhauser was president of the subsidiary. Chorus employees did a lot of evangelizing of the technology, including in the United States. But initially, the large majority of the company's sales came from Europe. By 1990, Chorus Systèmes had some $ 6.5 million in annual revenues. Over time, Chorus Systèmes received various outside investments of funds. By mid-1991, 63 percent of

3364-534: Was to "[build] on the experience of state-of-the-art research systems ... while taking into account constraints of the industrial environment." Chorus-v3 also featured a variant of Unix, called MiX, in such a way that, as one Chorus paper put it, "we will refer to the combination of the Chorus Nucleus and the set of Unix System V subsystem servers as the Chorus/MiX™ operating system." Chorus Systèmes believed it held

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