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Comment by applied_heat | Hacker News Reader

Is the proprietary operating system that HP Nonstop uses just HP-UX? If so it doesn’t seem that different from other operating systems that rust can use?

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NonStop Kernel (NSK) is the OS for the Tandem hardware which had fault tolerant hardware (dual everything) and software (process pair with checkpoints) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandem_Computers. The OS is not posix compliant, very different from HP-UX. It is used now mainly in financial systems, competes with IBM mainframes. I used to work on NonStop SQL databases.

I’m the one who posted the article. This is the first time I’ve ever even heard of NonStop.

From the entitle I assumed it had something to do with discussions that had been going on for a long time or kept coming up and it was just a typo or something.

Interesting to find out there was a an OS I never heard. Unfortunately the Wikipedia page isn’t very comprehensive.

I'd not heard of NonStop but I've definitely heard of Tandem. I think one is the other after going through a few decades of marketing spin.

The original company was called Tandem Computers. They called their systems NonStop. The OS was originally called Guardian, then it was Guardian 90, then NonStop Kernel, which had both Guardian and POSIX "personalities". Tandem got purchased by Compaq, then Compaq got purchased by HP.

I don't know how complete it is, but NonStop has had POSIX support since the mid-1990s. It's called Open System Services. It's got ksh, and various unix/posix apis/utilities, and a hierarchical filesystem.

Even their coffee mugs were fault tolerant.

https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10262869...

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