Siris 8 is a discontinued

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

developed by the French company

CII CII or Cii may refer to: * 102 (number) in Roman numerals * Calculated Ignition Index, an index of the ignition quality of fuel oil * Caldera International, Inc., a software company between 2001 and 2002 * Centro Intelligence Interforze, an Itali ...

for its

Iris 80 The CII Iris 80 computer is the most powerful computer made by the French company CII as part of Plan Calcul. It was released in 1970 and had roughly the same capabilities and performance as its main rivals in Europe: the IBM 360/75 and 360/85 ...

and

Mitra 15 The Mitra 15 is a minicomputer made by the French company Compagnie internationale pour l'informatique, CII under Plan Calcul, along with the CII Iris 50, Iris 50 and CII Iris 80, Iris 80 mainframe computers. It was marketed from 1971 to 1985 and ...

computers. It was later replaced by

Honeywell Honeywell International Inc. is an American publicly traded, multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. It primarily operates in four areas of business: aerospace, building automation, industrial automa ...

DPS 7. Jean Ichbiah worked at CII on the rewrite of the Siris 7 operating system of the Iris 80 to create a more successful version, used to operate a three processor Iris 80 in Évry. The first version of Siris 8 offered full compatibility with applications running on its predecessor Siris 7.Siris 8
sur Feb Patrimoine, site de la Fédération des équipes de Bull Among its strong points were its excellent

memory management Memory management (also dynamic memory management, dynamic storage allocation, or dynamic memory allocation) is a form of Resource management (computing), resource management applied to computer memory. The essential requirement of memory manag ...

, which took advantage of the extended virtual addresses and spaces of the Iris 80. Siris 8 was suitable for both

scientific Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...

and business computing, as well as real-time applications.Iris 80
sur Feb Patrimoine, site de la Fédération des équipes de Bull The first delivery of the

uniprocessor A uniprocessor system is defined as a computer system that has a single central processing unit that is used to execute computer tasks. As more and more modern software is able to make use of multiprocessing architectures, such as SMP and MPP, t ...

version occurred in February 1972, and the dual-processor version in September 1972 for the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) . Siris 8 also included , networking software for transporting data to other computers. After the CII merger with Honeywell-Bull, the functionality of Siris was adapted for the GCOS system through an emulation processes, which made it possible to retain all of the Siris 8 customers. The final version of Siris 8, C10, was shipped in 1976.

Characteristics

Before demand paged

virtual memory In computing, virtual memory, or virtual storage, is a memory management technique that provides an "idealized abstraction of the storage resources that are actually available on a given machine" which "creates the illusion to users of a ver ...

was added in 1975, Siris 8 was described as having "two core partitions... one for resident 'batch' tasks, one for swapped time-shared tasks." It operated in four separate modes: * Batch processing comprising, local and remote * Transaction processing * Time sharing * Real-time processing. The Siris 8 monitor consisted of a permanently resident portion and pageable segments. Batch jobs could be entered through the local or a remote

card reader A card reader is a data input device that reads data from a card-shaped storage medium and provides the data to a computer. Card readers can acquire data from a card via a number of methods, including: optical scanning of printed text or barcod ...

, or by the console operator.

Timesharing In computing, time-sharing is the concurrent sharing of a computing resource among many tasks or users by giving each task or user a small slice of processing time. This quick switch between tasks or users gives the illusion of simultaneous ...

could be started and stopped by the operator. A timesharing job was started by the DEMON task, which performed all terminal I/O. The system maintained three types of queues of work. The multiprogramming queue could run multiple jobs at a time, with jobs scheduled by priority. One to five Operational queues () could run one job in each at a time, queued strictly by arrival time. A cataloged job queue was used for jobs submitted by the console operator; multiple jobs from this queue could be active at one time. Real-time jobs had access to special system services such as " itching from slave mode to master mode and vice versa, time delays, abort recoveries." Transaction processing was performed by a subsystem called ''STRATEGE''. The virtual address space available to the user could be up to 32 segments of 128 K (32-bit) words, or 16 MB.

References

Mainframe computers Discontinued operating systems History of computing in France

External links

Siris 8 description from the original commercial brochure, Fédération des Equipes Bull
(translated to English) {{Operating-system-stub