Vortex System (original)

Vortex System is the first version of the EKS Vortex operating system released on December 9, 1983. Vortex System is the exact clone of the TS-OS 6, made to run on IBM-compatible PCs.

History
The result of a collaboration of Chris Mandel (programmer), John Montfort (dynamic load engineer), and Gerry Lindgren (hardware engineer) who wanted to build a real-time multi-user environment.

Features
Vortex System had a heavy emphasis on multiuser interactive applications. The implementation of automatic time synchronization, rather than requiring every user to enter the time every time they started a new application session, was revolutionary, and essentially led to the commercial rise of the system.

According to its product description, users were allowed full access to the hardware. This in itself was considered a major feature at the time, for desktop personal computers were extremely closed systems. Thus, it enabled VMS users to share terminal machines, printers, and disk drives over a network.

In the early 1990s, TS-OS 6 was sold in a single-user, and a dual-user edition. The single-user system was a CGA-compatible monochrome display with 8-bit icons and about 10 megabytes of RAM. The dual-user system had a color display, VGA interface, and up to 16 megabytes of RAM.

Users could run multiple VTOLS in a single physical terminal, sharing the frame buffer with the system manager, thus providing "client-server" style multitasking. This allowed a VTOLS program to allocate resources to specific VTOLS, which were called out via text messaging.

The client GUI also supported drag-and-drop and hot-key interfaces.