Magic-Six

The Magic Six operating system was the 32 bit successor to the original Magic 1-5 operating system running on Interdata, later Perkin-Elmer, minicomputers back in the 1970s. Magic originally stood for Mockapetris And Gregory Interactive Computer (or something like that). Google the names to find out more about them. Later etymologies were based on the saying "If it works, it's magic." The Interdata 7/32 had a 1MB address space, and the system was modeled loosely on the GE, MIT, Honeywell Multics operating system in that it supported segmented memory, protected address spaces, dynamic linking, an advanced command line and a number of other features. It also supported a variety of multimedia devices such as tablets, displays, attached graphics processors, laser disk players, quadrophonic sound generation and more. The hardware wasn't really up to the job. The 7/32 supported segmentation, but not paging, so memory management was ugly and slow. It also didn't handle memory faults correctly. It completed the operation as if it had fetched a zero making recovery impossible. A hardware modification pinning the interrupt generation line to the switch register sets line fixed this, but it wasn't always possible to back up the program counter. When the heuristic failed, the user was presented with a "bad_luck" fault. Mike Kazar, the principal designer of the system originally titled his undergraduate thesis on this as "An Operating System for a Piece of Shit". This was removed from the draft version before submission. The Architecture Machines newsletters were a collaboration of Nicholas Negronponte who sought to raise the profile of the Architecture Machine Group by mailing out a newsletter about the group's research and multimedia convergence. The original editor was Lee Nason, a specialist in concrete form construction and libertarian candidate for senator. The Architecture Machine Group formed the nucleus of the MIT Media Lab in the 1980s, but unlike the Architecture Machine which was highly visible on the top floor of Building 9, the MIT Media Lab was relatively isolated in its own building. No one walked in at 2AM and showed off her storyboard for an animated version of the Psycho shower scene. There isn't a lot more to say. The code has been lost, and good riddance. Perkin-Elmer bought Interdata and is still around, though no longer making computers. They are mainly known these days for botching the optics on the Hubble Space Telescope, but they did make some improved versions of the 7/32 and 8/32, including some that could address more memory and restart properly after a page fault. The Hubble Space Telescope was repaired by a shuttle mission some years ago.