CII Iris 80

Iris 80 at The *Institut universitaire de calcul automatique de Lorraine* (IUCAL) in Nancy, 1977

The Iris 80 computer is the most powerful computer made by the French company CII as part of Plan Calcul.

Designed for the civilian market, the Iris 80 is the backward-compatible successor to the CII 10070 (SDS Sigma 7 imported from the United States or built under license).

Because of a policy of national preference that the Plan Calcul imposed on the public sector, this computer was installed at four of the approximately twenty university computing centers in the mid- 1970s, as well as INRIA and other research organizations.

About a hundred Iris 80s were delivered, including 27 dual processors.

The CS 40, used for telephone switching, was derived from it.

Hardware

CPU

The CPU is a modification of the CII 10070 (32-bit words, largely identical instruction set), with addressing revised for multi-processor operation. Paging uses associative memory. Main memory can be expanded to 4 megabytes. Calculation precision is 64 bits, ensuring the convergence of calculations which may be divergent on other machines.

Peripherals

Magnetic disk capacity increased from the MD 25 (25 megabytes) to MD 200 (200 megabytes) by 1974. Mitra 15s were used as controllers.

Software

Operating systems

The Iris 80's operating system was a multitasking operating system known as Siris 8, a rewrite of Siris 7, intended to take advantage of new addressing modes. This rewriting was carried out by Jean Ichbiah,^[1] and notably made it possible to operate an Iris 80 triple-processor system in Evry.^[which?]

Siris 8 handles a varied workload, including batch processing (local and remote processing) and [[time shari. It was the first system to include routing software for the transport of data to other computers, Transiris [fr], and a networking and data sharing system, adapted to the customers at universities, research centers and administrations of Iris 80. The Cyclades network was notably demonstrated at SICOB 1975, with use at La Défense with applications running at INRIA (Rocquencourt), and at various regional sites.

Languages

Symbol assembler,
Metasymbol, a meta-assembler
LP70, a language similar to PL360
COBOL
Fortran IV extended
BASIC
Algol 60
PL/I
Pascal
Simula 67
SNOBOL
Lisp—Several implementations of Lisp, from the universities of Toulouse, Grenoble, etc., were used by the university community
LIS, a systems implementation language, derived from MESA, Modula-2 and Simula, intended for writing portable operating systems

Software packages

Mistral document retrieval system
Socrate database management system
Modulef modular library for calculation using the finite element method

References

^ "Jean Ichbiah est ensuite passé au projet LIS, Langage d'Implémentation de Systèmes, destiné à rendre portables les systèmes d'exploitation par la simple réécriture des modules de bas niveau, puis à la définition du langage de programmation Ada (langage)|Ada."

External links

FEB-patrimoine website of the Bull Teams Federation: the CII Iris 80

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[1] "Jean Ichbiah est ensuite passé au projet LIS, Langage d'Implémentation de Systèmes, destiné à rendre portables les systèmes d'exploitation par la simple réécriture des modules de bas niveau, puis à la définition du langage de programmation Ada (langage)|Ada."

[1]