"There are two levels of operating software in the system: the Monitor (in EPROM) and the Operating System. The monitor is a simple, single user system that is in effect when the system is powered on. The Monitor uses terminal 0 and provides extensive diagnostic and management functions. The Operating System, IX™ (IX is a trademark of NCUBE Corporation), is automatically invoked if the system is in Normal mode and passes the diagnostic tests. IX™ is a fully protected multiuser, multitasking operating system with complete resource management including memory, main array, graphics and file system. The file system has a hierarchical structure and is distributed across all the disk drives in the system. Thus, a user can access his files regardless of which terminal (or Peripheral Controller) he uses.
In may ways the Operating System is similar to UNIX™ (UNIX is a Bell Laboratories trademark), and therefore will not be described in detail herein. The IX™ System does, however, have additional facilities including:
system temperature sensing
distributed file system
array management
uniform file protection"[0]
I must correct myself, after a visit to moar of the Internets.
Looks like the 1st versions of nCube ran Arix (perhaps shortened to IX), a Unix clone) on a 286 which was the front end and controlled the actual processing elements, and IO. Each compute node ran a 4KB kernel called Vertex[0].
The 2nd version had a Sun Workstation as the front-end and the nodes ran an a 200 KB microkernel called nCX[1]
The nCube 3 / mediaCube nodes ran Transit[2] (hurray for archive.org! )
" Transit is the operating system that runs on each node of the MediaCUBE system. Based on AT&T;'s Plan 9 Unix derivative, it's light-weight microkernel architecture provides a small footprint that minimizes memory consumption. Transit's features include:
Streamlined internal code paths
Hypercube communications software
Algorithms optimized for hardware
Flexibility of UNIX-like environment
Optimized for Oracle Video Server
High performance
Reliability
Transit is used to distribute content processing across interconnected CPU and I/O modules, interface to hardware devices, and manage the Oracle Video Server processes on each node. Transit also provides a file service, u9fs, that creates a special file hierarchy on the system console available to processes running on the MediaCUBE processors. This provides access to non-video files."[2]
In may ways the Operating System is similar to UNIX™ (UNIX is a Bell Laboratories trademark), and therefore will not be described in detail herein. The IX™ System does, however, have additional facilities including:
I believe the plan9 based OS was called Transit.[0] https://ncube.systems/software.html