CHAOS
The CHAOS system (Communications Handler And
Operations Scheduler) was intended as the successor of
the TS system. We wanted a network operating system that could run on
all our machines, not just the ORDINATOR with its special hardware.
CHAOS would have been a base-level virtual machine implementation
supporting several file systems; it would not have used the CP/M
BDOS. Instead, one of several upper-layer systems would have been
a BDOS interface implementation; another one would have been a
UNIX-like interface which we tentatively called DJOENIX.
For the implementation of CHAOS we considered a message-passing system
somewhat like the THOTH system, its main attraction being the
network-transparency of its primitive operations Send,
Receive and Transfer.
The initial CHAOS implementation would have been for the
DISKLESS machines, gradually spreading
to all other machines. Unfortunately, CHAOS never left the design stage.
The early CHAOS ideas are also mentioned on page 60 of the book "THE ORDINATOR PROJECT".