MU/FO
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MU/FO stands for Muti-User Friendly Office and is (or was) a computer operating system written for the Intel 8088 processor family in assembly language, in 1986.
[edit] History
The original Operating System and Database designs began in the Parent product called Business Express. Business Express was a Operating System / 4GL and Network Database written in Z80 assembly language around 1980 by a company called ACE (American Computing Enterprises). Business Express was was ahead of it's time, being able to run up to 12 concurrent users on a 4.77Mhz 8 bit Z80 processor, using just 128Kb of total system RAM. The final version of Business Express ran on the IBC based hardware that supported a Z80b processor, running at a thumping 8Mhz, and supported up to 16 concurrent green screen users with excellent performance.
In approximately 1986, the Z80 code was ported to 8088 code by a team at the University of Shen Yang, China. The first prototype system was available for testing shortly after. The performance at this stage was NOT as good as the 8 Bit Business Express systems due to the inferior bus design on the original IBM PC. This problem continued during the release of the 80268 processor, and was finally helped by the advent of the x386 family of processors. The newly available Protected Mode memory addressing, allowed for better paging and therefore better performance. At this time, new specialised hardware was designed and created to allow more users to be addressed. The MCIO 16 port serial card actually had a on board I/O Processor (8088 at 8Mhz) which supported board level management of some of the serial traffic. Again, this was an advanced design for the day. Eventually, by 1995 up to 3 MCIO card could be installed to support up to 48 concurrent users on a single Pentium II 266Mhz server, with only 2Mb of RAM.
The operating system included a network database, word processor application design tools and a scripting language. A number of applications were written in MU/FO in the mid to late 1980 through to the end of the 1990s. Bond Corporation, through its subsidiary Bond Information Technology was involved in marketing the product in Australia. The original version of the "Benchmark" legal accounting program was written in MU/FO by Christopher Cogan in Brisbane, Australia between 1987 and 1989 before being re-written in DataFlex 2.3b. Warwick Prince was heavily involved with development of MU/FO based applications, and worked closely with the ShenYang based development team. Professor Yu Ge headed the MU/FO development team at the university in Shen Yang, and Li Ming was a large contributor to the core project.
Warwick Prince went on to take on support of all MU/FO sites in Australia and New Zealand, which continues to this day with the final two sites still running happily. One of the sites has now been running the Business Express / MU/FO based system continuously for over 20 years - surely some sort of I.T record!
[edit] References
MU/FO was ported from Business Express to run on the 8088 processor. (It subsequently was developed to run on the x386 family of processors)
