The Difficulties of 1973

The difficulties of the development lead to a management crisis at the end of 1972. It was seen unlikely that NPL Level2 was able to reach the market at the end of 1973 as originally planned by Upper Management --less than 3 years of design and development. Jean BELLEC was replaced by Claude CARRE as the responsible for development in Paris. The software organization of Hardware engineering was merged into the Software development organization. At the same period (early 1973), Georges LEPICARD who has been one of the key architect of the NPL left the company to head the scientific direction of CII. He will return in 1976 after the merger between Honeywell Bull and CII to lead the "Leo" project which was marketed as DPS-7/80.

The 4A Back-up
A contingency secret plan for a Back-up was established in Boston; it was unveiled only in its support of H200 emulator. This project named as 4A Back-up was managed by William HEFFNER an original GCOS3 designer, who later left to DEC to become VMS manager.

This OS differed from Bull Level 2 design by a more interactive operation: one process per "user" and by a simpler and less effective virtual memory management: let the space per user increase and flush the address space in case of overflow conflicts. This system used the same compilers as Level2 and the "competition" period had a 8 months' duration.

End of P8 Project
Ugo GAGLIARDI, by April 73, had to step down from direct Boston (BCO) responsibilities which were taken by Walker DIX who then cumulated the engineering responsibility of Phoenix --then being reborn of its ashes, and of Billerica.

The P8 Project was cancelled, at the best pleasure of Paris hardware designers. In fact, P8 did not show enough performance advantages from P7 from which it differs not by technology, nor by the word length, but only by a cache memory and better scientific performances. That machine did not implement multi-processor, although this was initially contemplated.

The NPL Technical Office was dispossessed from program management responsibilities and assigned to the technical cooperation between the HISI project (level62), the Bull Level64 project and the Phoenix Level66 development.

John WEILL head of the Research Center was given the responsibility of the overall project coordination and he appointed William FRINK to insure Level64 software coordination. Ernie DIETERICH , with Michel ROCHER as an assistant, was later assigned to Paris to manage the GCOS-64 plans.

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