Cadmus workstations

The German computer manufacturer PCS Computer Systeme (see Peripheral Computer Systems ) sold UNIX computers under the product name Cadmus , which were very popular in research and teaching.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the German computer manufacturer PCS Computer Systeme developed a number of microcomputer systems, initially based on the LSI11 (see LSI-11 ) board with a real-time operating system from the Digital Equipment Corporation . In 1982 PCS developed a new system based on a Motorola 68000 processor. The system still showed its origin from the digital environment: Q-Bus (see Q-Bus ) as system bus, terminal interface, disk and magnetic tape interface from Digital, etc. It was initially marketed as "QU68000", Can be installed in 19-inch cabinets .

The successor models used the faster processors 68020 and 68030 - also in CISC architecture - and were marketed under the product name Cadmus. PCS founded an American subsidiary under this name, which disappeared from the market after a few years.

When the first RISC processors hit the market in 1985 , the Cadmus workstations were converted to the MIPS architecture , which was used, among other things, in the Silicon Graphics workstations. The operating system was a separate UNIX derivative called MUNIX .

The computing power of such RISC workstations in the price range of more than 20,000 DM was around 16 MIPS (million instructions per second) at 20 MHz clock frequency and a maximum of 64 Mbytes of RAM in the mid-1980s  .

The Cadmus workstations were sold worldwide until the mid-1990s. After several takeovers by large corporations, PCS became independent again in 1996 through a management buy-out . Today, PCS is developing terminals for access, time and production data acquisition.