[COFF] Other OSes?

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Thursday,  5 July 2018 at 15:56:50 +1000, Warren Toomey wrote:
> OK, I guess I'll be the one to start things going on the COFF list.
>
> What other features, ideas etc. were available in other operating
> systems which Unix should have picked up but didn't?

I came to Unix from Tandem's Guardian OS, which had clearly based on
some exposure to Unix, though in many cases it was much more primitive
(no hierarchical file system, for example).  But it did have one area
where I found it significantly superior: interprocess communication.

The approach is considerably different from Unix.  The system is a
loosely coupled multiprocessor system which communicates by message
passing, and everything, including file operations, goes via the
message system.  That makes IPC really the basis of system
functionality, and at a user process level messages from other process
are read from a special file ($RECEIVE, fd 0 when it's open).

It's really difficult to compare with Unix.  I've tried several times
over the years, and I still haven't come to any conclusion.  One
problem is that Tandem's userland tools (shell and friends) are far
inferior to Unix.  And when we tried to shoehorn Unix onto Guardian,
we ran into all sorts of conceptual issues.

I wrote an overview of Guardian that was published as chapter 8 of
Spinellis and Guisios "Beautiful Architecture" (O'Reilly, 2009).  If
you don't have access, my final draft is at
http://www.lemis.com/grog/Books/t16arch.pdf.

Comments welcome.

Greg
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