4 ms·
It did, yes. Helios ran on a bunch of different systems, 68000, Transputer, i960, and later ARM, I think. It was a fun system to program: the server protocol
by __d 6y ago
It did, yes.
Helios ran on a bunch of different systems, 68000, Transputer, i960, and later ARM, I think.
It was a fun system to program: the server protocol is a bit like Plan9's 9P. It was pretty cool at the time to have all your CPUs, and all your services, linked into a distributed namespace along with your filesystems.
- butterisgood 6y agoThe 9P-like part I found particularly interesting after reading over the seemingly excellent documentation for Helios. I would love to ask Rob Pike if perhaps there was inspiration from Helios for Plan 9, or if they’d arrived at a similar abstraction totally independently. Actually I’ll shoot him an email and see if he answers!
- butterisgood 6y agoRob did reply. He implied that my mentioning Helios may have been the first time he’s heard of it. So, I guess it was just an independently arrived at idea. That’s probably not too surprising I guess.
- __d 6y agoI think it’s likely that they were either independent or the Helios folks had a brief overview of Plan9. While Helios did a lot of quite cool stuff, I don’t think it was as general as 9P. It felt like it was produced by a small number of smart people under a lot of time pressure, while Plan9 felt more like it had a more leisurely research background. I recommend the blue book (vs the black one) for detailed documentation. That plus the book of papers from Perihelion was enough to get servers running.
- pjmlp 6y agoDid you also used the Modula-2 compiler? Was it any good?