was a
Unix -like
Operating System built by some of the team who had worked on
AmigaOS and
TRIPOS . Like these two it was designed around a light-weight message-passing
Kernel , but it actually copied the messages from process to process rather than passing a pointer.
The unique feature of HeliOS at the time was that it was designed for multiple processors, specifically the
INMOS Transputer . Processes were supported by the hardware and could be created on any processor, and HeliOS provided
Inter-process Communication (IPC) that worked no matter what the topography of the parallel array (transputers had four communication links each). The kernel handled message delivery which could include passing through a message intended for a processor a number of steps away.
From the user's perspective the system tried to look much like Unix, but with obvious changes such as
Ps showing not only what processes were running, but where.
