An object-oriented parallel operating system that is completely portable between all widely used processors, so much so that applications do not even need to be recompiled is the creation of a British company – Tao Systems Ltd of Belsize Park, London NW – which has substantial financial backing from Japan. Taos relies on a Virtual Processor – a 32-bit machine with 16 registers and support for standard data types and addressing modes, for which all applications are written. The run-time code is loaded onto a real processor and translated on the fly into the chip’s native instruction set. It is currently up on the Transputer and the 80386, with 68000 family, ARM RISC and MIPS R3000 processors a few months away. The most significant feature of Taos is that the kernel takes up just 13Kb of memory – and is blindingly fast on complex applications such as graphics ray tracing.
