Commercial Operating Systems

• Apertos (Sony Computer Science Lab)
• BE OS (Be, Inc.)
  Be is a new multithreaded, multiprocessor microkernel OS that has been designed from the ground for multimedia applications. It currently runs on the Intel and some PowerPC platforms. [ Everything I've heard about Be sounds really good. Everyone who uses it seems to be very impressed - Patrick ]
• BSD/OS (Berkeley Software Design, Inc.)
  BSD/OS is a commercial BSD 4.4-based UNIX operating system for the x86 PC. This is where many of the Berkeley CSRG people went after BSD UNIX research ended at Berkeley. A commercial-quality UNIX implementation with all of the bells and whistles one expects from a modern UNIX system. In some sense, a "let's finally make some money out of all of hard our work" project. Seems fair to me.
• C Executive and PSX (JMI Software Systems)
  C EXECUTIVE is a operating system kernel for embedded applications - providing a small, efficient, real-time software environment for programs written in C. C EXECUTIVE, as small as 5 KB in ROM space, is available on 8-, 16- and 32-bit CISC and RISC processors, providing the foundation for a common, corporate-wide, portable software strategy. PSX provides a single-user, single-group, subset of POSIX.1, with up to 32,000 preconfigured processes. PSX adds a substantial subset of the POSIX.1 system calls to the basic C EXECUTIVE kernel. Using these calls allows applications to migrate from POSIX-conformant UNIX platforms to board-level systems, or vice versa.
• Chorus (Sun Microsystems)
  CHORUS is a family of open micro-kernel-based operating system components to meet advanced distributed computing needs in areas such as telecommunications, internetworking, embedded systems, realtime, "mainframe UNIX", supercomputing and high availability. The CHORUS/MiX multiserver implementations of UNIX allow to dynamically integrate part or all of standard UNIX functionalities and services in the\ above application areas.
• Helios (Perihelion Distributed Software)
  Helios is a micro kernel operating system for embedded and multiprocessor systems. The operating system is modular in design and can scale from an embedded runtime executive up to a fully distributed operating system.
• Inferno
  Inferno(tm) is a new network operating system and programming environment to deliver content in a rich environment of heterogenous networks, clients and servers. The Inferno system includes the Inferno kernel, the Limbo(tm) programming language, reference APIs that include interfaces for networking and graphics, network protocols, security and authentication, and various toolkits. Inferno was developed by members of the Computing Sciences Research Center of Bell Laboratories, the research arm of Lucent Technologies.
• KeyKOS
  KeyKOS is an operating environment for S/370 computers which provides a high level of security, reliability, performance, and productivity. It allows emulation of other environnzens such as VM, MVS, and POSIX. Development of KeyKOS ceased in 1990. Many of the ideas of this system have been carried forward into EROS
• Lynx (Lynx Real-time Systems)
  LynxOS is a proprietary UNIX-like real-time operating system. LynxOS looks and feels like UNIX from the user/programmer point of view. It was developed from the ground-up with high performance, deterministic hard real-time response in mind. Although LynxOS is conformant with POSIX 1003.1 it is not derived from any AT&T/USL/Novell source code. The OS is in effect a complete re-implementation of UNIX from a real-time perspective.
• Mach at OSF (OSF Research Institute)
  Related to: Mach
  The OSF Research Institute is using the Mach technology started at CMU and is using it as the basis for several areas of research, including operating systems for parallel machines, trusted object-oriented kernels, and other OS research areas.
• MacOS (Apple Computer Corporation)
  Related to: Rhapsody
• MTOS
• OpenSTEP (Apple Computer Corporation)
  Related to: Mach
  Steve Jobs' brain child after Apple, all that is left of NeXT is the remarkably good NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP Operating System, a mach-based mostly UNIX with a very good user interface and programmer environment. It's now available for the x86 PC, and many people really like it. OpenSTEP may be the basis of the next Mac OS, Rhapsody.
• OS9 (Microware Systems Corporation)
  OS-9 is a real-time, multiuser, multitasking operating system developed by Microware Systems Corporation. It is modular, allowing new devices to be added to the system simply by writing new device drivers, ]or if a similar device already exists, by simply creating a new device descriptor. All I/O devices can be treated as files, which unifies the I/O system. In addition, the kernel and all user programs are ROMable.
• OSE
  OSE is a full-featured family of high quality, reliable and high performance real-time operating systems from Enea OSE Systems, Sweeden. There is an OSE kernel for every need, from OSE Basic (for Z80, i8051 and others) up to OSE Delta (for M68k, PPC and others). OSE Delta is also the first RTOS to be certified according to the software quality standard IEC 1508. OSE Delta supports runtime configuation, runtime program loading, multi-CPU systems and TCP/IP.
• Plan 9 (Bell Labs Computing Science Research Center)
  Plan 9 is a new computer operating system developed at Bell Labs. It is a distributed system. In the most general configuration, it uses three kinds of components: terminals that sit on users' desks, file servers that store permanent data, and CPU servers that provide faster CPUs, user authentication, and network gateways. One of the interesting facets of Plan 9 is that it exports a file-system interface to essentially all system services.
• QNX
  A micro-kernel, distributed, real-time, fault-tolerant, POSIX-certified OS for the x86. QNX adopts the approach of implementing an OS with a 10 Kbyte micro-kernel surrounded by a team of optional processes that provide higher-level OS services. QNX is fully distributed, with all system interfaces network transparent. QNX has successfully been used in tiny ROM-based embedded systems and in several-hundred node distributed systems.
• Rhapsody (Apple Computer Corporation)
  Related to: MacOS
  Rhapsody is the code name for a new operating system from Apple Computer, Inc., designed to complement Mac OS by providing a variety of high-end solutions. The Rhapsody operating system, available on both PowerPC and Pentium-class processors, provides preemptive multitasking, protected memory, and other modern operating system features.
• RTMX O/S
  Group Members: RTMX Incorporated
  RTMX is a commercial, BSD 4.4-derived, real-time system that offers POSIX 1003.4 real-time programming support with user tunability along with the standard UNIX functionality of BSD networking, X windows, and a full C development environment.
• Spring System (Sun)
  Sun's new research kernel. Spring is a highly modular, object-oriented operating system, which is focused around a uniform interface definition language. Spring is intrinsically distributed, with all system interfaces being accessible both locally and remotely.
• Tao Operating System (Tao Systems) Group Members
  Tao is a radical commercial operating system or run time module offering all of the features required for the building of leading edge, cost driven, embedded consumer electronics (single and multi-processor). It is available on a broad range of processors both as a stand alone OS and co-existing with host operating systems.