Software

It is difficult to say much good about the early ETA software and its underlying strategy, although it was settling down at the end. A major mistake was the early decision to develop a new operating system, as against porting the CYBER 205 VSOS operating system. Since the CYBER 205 remained at CDC, we did not have product responsibility or direction, and the new operating system seemed the best way at the time.

In hindsight there has been severe criticism for not porting UNIX to the ETA-10 at the beginning—that is, start with UNIX, only. But in 1983 it was not that clear. I now hear comments from people saying, "If ETA would have started with UNIX, I would have bought." It was only two years later that they said, "Well, you should have done UNIX." However, we did not get UNIX design help, advice, or early orders for a UNIX system.

After we completed a native UNIX system and debugged the early problems, the UNIX system stabilized and ran well on the air-cooled systems, and as a result, several additional units were ordered. While the ETA UNIX lacked many features needed for supercomputer operation, users knew that these options were coming, but we were late to market. In hindsight, we should have ported VSOS and then worked only on UNIX.