• 1984

Software Description

Panos is the operating system for the 32016 2nd processor for the BBC Micro and the Acorn Cambridge Workstation, Cambridge Co-Processor, ABC200 & 210 and the Acorn Cambridge Workstation. These systems had essentially the same architecture, based on a 32-bit NS32016 CPU; the ACW having a BBC Micro-based "I/O processor". Access to the I/O processor was through a NS32016 firmware kernel called Pandora. It was launched with the 32016 2nd processor in 1984 and appeared with the Acorn Cambridge Workstation on Acorn price lists until 1988. The Acorn Scientific division supported and developed Panos.Panos ran on the NS32016 and was a rudimentary single-user operating system, written in Modula-2. It provided a simple command line interpreter, a text editor and access to DFS, ADFS or NFS file systems via the I/O processor. Targeted at the academic and scientific user community, it came bundled with compilers for the FORTRAN 77, C, Pascal and LISP programming languages.