Alpha Micro Operating System

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"Murphy" was an Alpha Micro 100/T system that originated with James McLarty & Son in the late 1970s before finding its way to the University of Western Australia Computing Club. Murphy was retired from the UCC is the late 1980s and found its way in the possession of one James McParlane. It lived in the "Accelerated House", a dilapidated duplex of goths and cyberpunks, inhabited by most of the Accelerated Men and a cat called Velocity.

We drilled through the walls of the two houses for terminal connections. The individual nodes were named "The Sisters of Murphy" (which strangely enough became a Sisters of Mercy cover band in the UK about a decade later), and referred to the system as New Rose Hotel, based on the William Gibson short story (multiple battered copies of Mirrorshades were present at the house). I used the AlphaPascal compiler for Principles of Computer Science course at Murdoch University around 1991. I threatened to hand in the assignments on platter disks - they decided to accept printouts instead.

When James moved to Sydney it was passed on to me, where it lived for a few years in Mt. Lawley. Alas, it was on my watch that the last solonoid on the CDC Hawk drive died and, unable to acquire a working replacement, Murphy was passed on to Hi-Tech Metal Recycling, a sort of old computer system graveyard in Ascot Vale where they were stripped for precious metals.

AMOS still has a special place in my life as it was the first operating system I worked on that was for a multi-user system. MS-DOS was fine and all, but there was something truly visceral about working with AMOS.

Here's is some links to other AMOS sites.