Книга: Distributed operating systems

7.1.1. History of Amoeba

7.1.1. History of Amoeba

Amoeba originated at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands in 1981 as a research project in distributed and parallel computing. It was designed primarily by Andrew S. Tanenbaum and three of his Ph.D. students, Frans Kaashoek, Sape J. Mullender, and Robbert van Renesse, although many other people also contributed to the design and implementation. By 1983, an initial prototype, Amoeba 1.0, was operational.

Starting in 1984, the Amoeba fissioned, and a second group was set up at the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science, also in Amsterdam, under Mullender's leadership. In the succeeding years, this cooperation was extended to sites in England and Norway in a wide-area distributed system project sponsored by the European Community. This work used Amoeba 3.0, which unlike the earlier versions, was based on RPC. Using Amoeba 3.0, it was possible for clients in Tromso to access servers in Amsterdam transparently, and vice versa.

The system evolved for several years, acquiring such features as partial UNIX emulation, group communications and a new low-level protocol. The version described in this chapter is Amoeba 5.2.

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