The Web Site to Remember National Semiconductor's Series 32000 Family

PanOS

PanOS was the operating system of the 32016 Second Processor for the BBC Micro (see Systems/Acorn) and the Acorn Cambridge Workstation. PanOS was developed by Acorn Computers in the 1980's. It was written in Modula-2. Modula-2 is a development of Niklaus Wirth at the ETH Zurich and was a successor of Pascal and Modula.

When PanOS is running the BBC Micro became an I/O processor for the NS32016. Access to the I/O processor was done in software through a NS32016 firmware kernel called Pandora (like a BIOS). Pandora was burned in 32 kbytes of ROMs or EPROMs and was part of the NS32016 board. PanOS came bundled with compilers for Fortran 77, C, Pascal and Lisp. But interestingly it did not contain a compiler for Modula-2 ...

One can still find some sources for PanOS in the internet. For example the website mdfs.net/Software/Tube/32016 presents a lot of stuff.

I think it would be quite interesting to see PanOS running because of the rich compiler collection. The BBC Micro computer can be for sure replaced by an NS32000 system running the software by emulating a 6502 processor and the rest of the BBC system.

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