X-Nico

4 unusual facts about Edinburgh Multiple Access System


Edinburgh Multiple Access System

The University of Kent system went live in December 1979, and ran on the least powerful machine in the ICL 2900 range - an ICL 2960, with 2MB of memory, executing about 290k instructions per second.

Such features lead EMAS supporters to claim that their system was superior to Unix for the first 20 years of the latter's existence.

Near the end of its life, the refactored version was back-ported (as EMAS-3) to the Amdahl 470 mainframe clone, and thence to the IBM System/370-XA architecture (the latter with help from the University of Kent, although they never actually ran EMAS-3).

EMAS was a powerful and efficient general purpose multi-user system which supplied all the computing needs of Edinburgh University and the University of Kent (the only other site outside Edinburgh to adopt the operating system).



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