Project Genie

Project Genie was a computer research project started in 1964 at the University of California, Berkeley. It produced an early Berkeley Timesharing System, which was then commercialized as the SDS 940. The project influenced innovations in memory paging and protected memory. It also led to the development of the BCC-500 computer system which could support 500 users, a large number at the time.

The project also led to the development of the Sigma series computers in 1966. The first internet message was then sent in October 1969 from a Sigma 7 series computer operated by Leonard Kleinrock's group at UCLA.

Project Genie was funded by J. C. R. Licklider, the head of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office at that time. The project was a smaller counterpart to Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Project MAC.

The Scientific Data Systems SDS 940 was created by modifying an SDS 930 24-bit commercial computer so that it could be used for timesharing. The work was funded by ARPA and directed by Melvin W. Pirtle and Wayne Lichtenberger at UC Berkeley. Butler Lampson, Chuck Thacker, and L. Peter Deutsch were among the students involved in the project.^[1] When completed and in service, the first 940 ran reliably in spite of its array of tricky mechanical issues such as a huge disk drive driven by hydraulic arms. It served about forty or fifty users at a time and still managed to drive a graphics subsystem that was quite capable for its time.

When SDS realized the value of the time sharing system, and that the software was in the public domain (funded by the US federal government), they came back to Berkeley and collected enough information to begin manufacturing. Because SDS manufacturing was overloaded with the 9 series production and the startup of the Sigma Series production, it could not incorporate the 940 modifications into the standard production line. Instead, production of the 940s was turned over to the Systems Engineering Department, which manufactured systems customised to user requirements. To produce a 940, the Systems Engineering Department ordered a 930 from SDS manufacturing, installed the modifications developed by the Berkeley engineers, and shipped machine to the SDS customer as a 940.

Las computadoras de la serie Sigma tuvieron un papel importante en la historia de Internet. El primer mensaje enviado a través de Internet (entonces ARAPNET) fue enviado por Charley Kline , un estudiante de Leonard Kleinrock en la UCLA, utilizando una computadora Sigma 7 en octubre de 1969. ^{[ 2 ]}

Project Genie fue pionero en varias técnicas de hardware informático, como el tiempo compartido comercial que permitía la programación del usuario final en lenguaje máquina , modos de usuario protegidos separados, paginación de memoria y memoria protegida . Los conceptos de Project Genie influyeron en el desarrollo del sistema operativo TENEX para el PDP-10 y Unix , que heredó el concepto de bifurcación de procesos de él ^{[ 3 ]} (el cocreador de Unix, Ken Thompson, trabajó en un SDS 940 mientras estaba en Berkeley). Un ordenador central SDS 940 fue utilizado por el Sistema en Línea de Douglas Engelbart en el Instituto de Investigación de Stanford y fue el primer ordenador utilizado por el Proyecto de Memoria Comunitaria en Berkeley, siendo efectivamente el primer sistema de tablón de anuncios basado en ordenador .

En 1968, Lampson también ayudó a diseñar un sistema de tiempo compartido diferente en Berkeley: Cal TSS para el CDC 6400 con almacenamiento de núcleo extendido . Lampson solo participó hasta 1969, ^{[ 4 ]} pero Cal TSS continuó hasta 1971. ^{[ 5 ]}

Varios empleados de BCC se convirtieron en el núcleo del grupo de investigación informática de Xerox PARC (Deutsch, Lampson y Thacker) en 1970. Lichtenberger fue a la Universidad de Hawái y fue uno de los primeros empleados de Cisco Systems . ^{[ 10 ]}

Pirtle became technical director for the ILLIAC IV project at NASA Ames Research Center.^[11]

• DARPA
• Berkeley Timesharing System
• Timeline of operating systems

• Documentación del Proyecto Genie