[TUHS] UNIX on Tandem

[Arrigo Triulzi Lampugnani via TUHS]

On 9 Jan 2026, at 12:56, Brad Spencer via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
> 
> Tom Lyon via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> writes:
> 
>> Ran across this citation today.  Anyone ever seen this paper?  Known of the
>> system?   I'm pretty sure they're talking about Tandem(TM), not just
>> generic tandem.
>> 
>> A Distributed UNIX System-The Tandem Experiment. A. M. Usas, Proc Natl
>> Electron Conf, 34 (October 1980), pp 16-8.
> Some version of the Tandem was white boxed at AT&T as the Starserver (or
> Star Server or some such) in the late 1990s time frame.  I believe that

As a lapsed Tandem hand: in the late 90s it would have been an S-series which would indeed have been a MIPS processor.

Before then Tandem had its own processor, the Cyclone, which survived into the K series of the mid-90s.

It was a processor designed to work in lockstep, which is why they had modified MIPS w/o speculative execution for the S-series.

In the ‘90s the “Unix” on NonStop Kernel (aka NSK) was USS, i.e. “Unix System Services”, which ran as a process over NSK and was used to run Java… 

I ported BIND to work under USS for my startup back then…  I also destroyed the first iteration of the Parallel TCP/IP stack in their labs in Cupertino causing a huge testing Tandem to dump core to tape for a rather long time… oops.


Arrigo