Ésope (operating system)

Ésope, French for Aesop, was a discontinued experimental time-sharing operating system for the Scientific Data Systems Sigma 7 and its French clone, the CII 10070. It was a project of the French institute IRIA, running from 1968 until 1974, that aimed to use virtual memory and resource sharing to let many users reach a computer at the same time, in an era when France was addressing a shortage of computing power through Plan Calcul. Henri Boucher of the French Armaments Department named the project and recruited the Navy engineers Sacha Krakowiak in May 1968 and Claude Kaiser in 1969. The program suffered departures in 1972, when CII and IRIA preferred the competing project SAM, and was discontinued in 1974.