In 1986, Tim King[5] left his job at MetaComCo, along with a few other employees, to start Perihelion Software in England.
While at MetaComCo, much of the Perihelion Software team had worked with both Atari Corp. and Commodore International, producing the programming language ST BASIC for the former, and AmigaDOS for the latter.
Commodore had expressed some interest in their new system, and showed demos of it on an add-on card running inside an Amiga 2000.
The motherboard includes a separate slot for one of the INMOS crossbar switches to improve inter-chip networking performance.
[9] HeliOS is Unix-like enough that it ran standard Unix utilities, including the X Window System as the machine's graphical user interface (GUI).
Blossom supports several video modes: Blossom also includes a number of high-speed effects (128 megapixel fill rates) and blitter functionality, including the ability to apply up to four masks on a bit blit operation in a fashion similar to a modern graphics processing unit's ability to apply several textures to a 3D object.
The video architecture developed by Perihelion for the ATW formed the basis of a "high resolution video engine" expansion card envisaged for the TT030 workstation, connecting to the machine's VMEbus and supporting direct memory access transfers to and from system RAM.