Chorus Systèmes SA
[1] It had been begun by Michel Gien,[6] who also had a background from CYCLADES;[4] it sought to build a Unix operating system implementation for French minicomputers and microcomputers.
[4] Having spent a decade or more enmeshed in the politics of publicly-funded research work, both felt that it was time to try a startup company, especially since they had seen others they knew doing so (such as the American networking pioneer Robert Metcalfe founding 3Com).
At the time, technology startups in France were rare, a point emphasized by the French trade publication 01 Informatique in a profile of the company and by co-founder Gien in retrospect.
[5] The offices of Chorus Systèmes were located at 6 avenue Gustave Eiffel in the town of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines in the Île-de-France region outside of Paris.
[12] Some of the improvements were inspired by work done in other microkernel projects; as an academic paper put out by two of Chorus's staff members stated, their goal was to "[build] on the experience of state-of-the-art research systems ... while taking into account constraints of the industrial environment.
[5][14] Indeed, almost from the start of the company's history, Zimmerman was proclaiming that the existing Unix technology had reached the end of its useful life and that it needed a new kernel approach going forward.
[16] These successes were followed in 1991 by ports of the Chorus microkernel to the transputer architecture from Inmos and to Acorn Computers' ARM3 RISC processor "for use in a multimedia workstation".
[17] ICL employed the Chorus microkernel in the software architecture of its GOLDRUSH MegaSERVER product: a parallel database server featuring up to 64 SPARC-based processing elements, each running its own database server in a Chorus microkernel-based Unix System V Release 4 environment, and accessing a common, coherent file store.
[6] Chorus and Mach shared many similar features of their outward design, but had differences in areas such as naming and addressing and protection schemes.
[22][6] In 1990, the company created a United States subsidiary, Chorus Systems Inc., located in Beaverton, Oregon, that initially had seven employees but plans to double that.
[28][29] SuperNOS, which attracted considerable industry attention, was based on the work that had already started between USL and Chorus Systèmes, and a significant number of engineers got assigned to it.
[30][28] The project endured prolonged internal architectural debates, including Gien and Novell's chief scientist Drew Major disagreeing in the trade press about whether the existent Chorus technology was up to the task.
One was GUIDE, a project of the Universities of Grenoble, which implemented their object-oriented OS on Chorus, Mach, and regular Unix, and drew comparisons between the three.
[20] Standing for the Chorus Object-Oriented Layer, the first version of COOL was done in conjunction with INRIA and the SEPT, a research laboratory of France Telecom, and came into being in late 1988.
[37] As part of the ESPRIT's STREAM project, Chorus was structured into a scaled series of capabilities, with the smallest of these being a 10K-byte "nanokernel" with a simple executive and memory management logic up to a full-featured distributed operating system that could run Unix.
[42] Subsequently the company looked to change directions away from Unix, as it said its customers were more interested in the Java software platform and its capabilities on real-time devices.
[37] In February 1997, the company announced the Chorus/Jazz product, which was intended to allow Java applications to run in a distributed, real-time embedded system environment.
[45] The deal was part of an overall desire by Sun to enter the embedded systems market, which was a growing industry that was attracting the attention of analysts and investors.
[46] Given the declining interest in microkernels, the industry publication Computergram International considered Chorus Systèmes fortunate to have found a buyer for itself.
[6] Some three dozen Sun employees working on Chorus formed their own company, Jaluna, which used microkernel-analogous approaches to the increasingly important domain of virtualization.
