Kronos is a series of 32-bit processor equipped printed circuit board systems,[1] and the workstations based thereon,[1] of a proprietary hardware architecture developed in the mid-1980s in Akademgorodok, a research city in Siberia, by the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, Siberian branch, Novosibirsk Computing Center, Modular Asynchronous Developable Systems (MARS) project, Kronos Research Group (KRG).
[citation needed] The Kronos instruction set architecture was based on Niklaus Wirth's Modula-2 workstation Lilith, developed at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) of Zürich Switzerland, which in turn was inspired by the Xerox Alto developed at Xerox PARC.
[1] The Modula-2-based Kronos was quite amenable to the basic principles of MARS, as Modula-2 is fundamentally modular, allowing programs to be partitioned into units with relatively well defined interfaces.
Although Kronos was a proprietary processor, it was well suited to applications which were sensitive to high programmability rather than to software compatibility.
[5] In design, it is similar to the OS Medos-2, developed for the Lilith workstation, at ETH Zurich, by Svend Erik Knudsen with advice from Niklaus Wirth.