Another computer system with 1 drive and many terminals

Another computer system with 1 drive and many terminals

[Ethan A. Gardener]

Rather less capable than Plan 9 but an impressive system for its era, the Polycorp Poly 1 was an 8-bit machine designed in 1980. It networked in daisy-chain fashion, with a disk drive at the end of the chain. The disk drive unit (called Proteus) notably ran a multi-tasking form of the Poly's own Flex, with one thread for each of the connected Polys. 

I didn't note much else of interest about the software, but the Poly's graphics hardware supported 5 layers: text, graphics, text 2, graphics 2, and background. In the development lab, they went further. "We integrated a full 10" Laser Disk player under program control, which played onto the "background" layer (5) instead of the background colour. In this way, we could take videos, and annotate them for teaching purposes." It all seems rather overkill for an 8-bit, but there it was. :)

https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/collection/poly1.htm
General info with photos -- it ought to have featured in some sci-fi series, possibly hovering, it looks like it should. :) In the comments is a personal account from the operating system developer, including the graphics info I quoted.

https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2016-10-9-poly-acquisition.htm
A few more links here, a bit more info, and a lot more photos, and of course the site owner's tale of how he got them.

http://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/homepages/andrew/poly/Poly.htm
This is an emulator project which, unlike some, doesn't seem to hide any info at all. Documenting the Poly is part of the goal. There's a lot of resources here, including software.

-- 
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne. -- Chaucer