[TUHS] UNIX on Tandem

[John Cowan via TUHS]

FWIW, I ported the Software Tools tape (in Ratfor) to Guardian, Tandem's
original OS, in the late 70s using their Fortran compiler. I also wrote an
implementation of pipes on top of Tandem's proprietary IPC, a shell called
Quadpoint (because the prompt was "::"), and a Lisp interpreter. All three
were written in Tandem Application Language, a derivative of HP SPL/3000
with C-ish senantics but a syntax closer to Pascal. Unfortunately, none of
this escaped $EMPLOYER, so it is lost.

On Fri, Jan 9, 2026, 8:58 AM Arrigo Triulzi Lampugnani via TUHS <
tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> 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
>
>