As I sit here in the lounge at the Singapore Airport in transit on my way back to Japan, I can't help but feel what a great time we live in. Just 2 years ago, who would have thought I'd be able to monitor my stocks and post messages to SI while waiting to catch a flight in an environment that is completely "transitionary and away from home". Mobility and Internationalism have taken such profound strides! Anyway, enough babbling; on to Greenhills and Chorus...
Greenhills (which merged with Oasys, way back in the early 90's) makes some very good compilers, and their Multi IDE definately was something that companies such as Wind and ISI were trying to shoot for in the 1993 to 1995 timeframe. Another of Greenhills' claim to fame was that they supported many CPU architectures, such as being the firts company to support 68k, PPC, x86, MIPS, Sparc, etc all with the same Toolsuite.
As ISI's relationship with Microtec (the original tools, such as the MCC compilers and the Xray debugger, provided for pSOS) had to change due to Microtec being acquired by Mentor Graphics, ISI opted to partner with Greenhills. Thus Greenhills' Multi was rolled into the ISI toolsuite called pRISM+. Eventually, as time moved on and ISI acquired DiabData and other tools companies, they drifted away from Greenhills.
Greenhills also had a relationship with Wind, again in the pre-1995 timeframe, when Wind's VxWorks tools were only available for Unix hosts. Wind partnered with GHS to provide tools for people who wanted to develop VxWorks applications on PC Hosts.
All this changed when Wind introduced Tornado, as Tornado provided an IDE that was as good as (better than...) the Multi IDE. And Tornado was available for both Unix and PC hosts.
So Greenhills was kind of marooned, having lost it's partnership advantage with both ISI and Wind. Hence, most likely, the decision to provide their own OSs. The strange thing is they opted for two OSs; one was "reliable" and the other was "fast and small". I think they chose the name Velocity for one and I forget what the other one was called, it was something like "Integrity". Greenhills' founder is often credited with being a pioneer figure in the compiler and cross development space.
Now, on to Chorus. Chorus was started more or less as a distributed computing environment in a French University. Pure Academia. SOrt of their attemt to challenge the MachOS coming out of Carnegie-Mellon. The French gov't got involved, urged Alcatel and SGS Thomson to use Chorus. I think Alcatel used Chorus in some large telecom switching systems. Then Chorus did something interesting; they proposed wrapping a UNIX SVR4 API around the Chorus kernel. ATT (who owned Unix System Labs and therefore SVR4 at the time) got involved and started promoting this. But since Chorus was extremely from an academic background, it appeared to have problems getting accepted/implemented/embedded in commercial projects.
Somewhere along the way, around 1996, Sun was getting really busy hyping Java. They needed an embedded OS, and apparently shopped around. I heard they got very close to buying Lynx real Time systems, but at the last minute they opted for Chorus, maybe because it was cheaper to acquire. Around the same time they also acquired Diba, which was a pioneer company designing Internet Appliances (stuff like a Web Pad for the Kitchen). It seems that Sun probably made good use of the engineers that came thru these acquisitions, but not necessarily the technologies.
Perhaps the detail level was a little high, but since my flight is delayed I had time to kill...
Happy New Year folks! Cheers!
chinacat |
