Amoeba is a distributed operating system developed by Andrew S. Tanenbaum and others at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
The aim of the Amoeba project was to build a timesharing system that makes an entire network of computers appear to the user as a single machine.
Development at the Vrije Universiteit was stopped: the source code of the latest version (5.3) was last modified on 30 July 1996.
Aside from workstations and processors, additional machines operate as servers for files, directory services, TCP/IP communications etc.
Each thread is assigned a 48-bit number called its "port", which serves as its unique, network-wide "address" for communication.