Running 4 copies of an operating system at once
Dick explained to me that they were using an operating system from a company called Telesoft. Telesoft, headed by UCSD Pascal author Ken Bowles, was building an Ada compiler on top of its ROS (Renaissance Operating System) product. He told me (and I remember this clearly) that they had the operating system running in single user mode but that they wanted to run it in multi-user mode. At that point I was barely 21 years old. I had written a whole bunch of system-level 6502 assembler code and I had a really good ground-up understanding of the way that contemporary computer hardware worked. After studying the manual for the SUN board, I decided that I could simply break the 2MB of physical memory in to 4 chunks of 512KB each and run 4 copies of the operating system, gaining control via interrupts and device drivers.
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