【Fujitsu】CSP/F1, CSP/F3, CSP/F5, and CSP/FX (Operating Systems for the FACOM K Series)

CSP (which stood for“Customer-oriented System Products”) was an operating system developed jointly by Fujitsu and USAC Electronic Industrial (which later became PFU) for the FACOM K series of office computers. CSP/F1 and CSP/F3 were announced in May 1984 and CSP/F5 was announced in May 1985. CSP/FX, an operating system that merged CSP/F3 and CSP/F5, was announced in October 1988.
CSP was designed to unify CPS80 (the operating system for the FACOM System 80 series) and UNIOS (the operating system family for the FACOM V series) while ensuring the continuity of past user software assets and connectivity with existing office computers.
The FACOM K series covered a wide array of machines, from the K-10 series of ultra-small machines that suited workstation applications to the K-200 series of large office computers. Similarly, the CSP operating systems’ architectures were scaled to meet various applications and sizes: CSP/F1 was intended for smaller machines, CSP/F3 for medium-sized applications, and CSP/F5 for larger machines.

1. CSP/F1, CSP/F3, and CSP/F5

Table 1 lists the software components of the three operating systems. The most distinctive model in the FACOM K series was the FACOM K-10 (and its subsequent successors), which was equipped with standalone functionality and the functionality to act as a workstation for a host computer. CSP/F1 was the operating system that supported this twin functionality. Fujitsu’s idea behind the FACOM K series was to offer businesses the entry-level FACOM K-10 as an easy way into office computer systems. Then, as the business’s processes and applications grew in size, Fujitsu offered the extensibility to expand to an office computer system in which FACOM K-10s were repurposed as workstations in a distributed processing environment. Fujitsu called this concept “enter small and expand rapidly.” The FSERV protocol for communication functions (file server functions) underpinned the FACOM K series’ extensibility.

As Table 1 indicates, CSP/F1, CSP/F3, and CSP/F5 had many common functions, such as the FSERV protocol, to communicate with each other and to support distributed processing and had common programming languages, such as COBOL G. At the same time, they provided functions that guaranteed compatibility with CPS80 and UNIOS. The operating systems also came with CASET (which stood for “Computer-Aided Software Engineering Tool”), a tool for improving the productivity of application programs, that expanded on the previous tools under CPS80 and UNIOS. CASET consisted of the following products.

• CAPE: a process definition tool
• FILE: a file definition tool
• FORM: a screen/report format definition tool

The following section describes the characteristics of each operating system.
CSP/F3 and CSP/F5 enabled the formation of many kinds of systems, as shown in Table 1. CSP/F3 was an operating system for host systems and cluster systems. CSP/F5 was an operating system that enabled the construction of office server systems, as well as host systems and cluster systems. This is why CSP/F5 came with office server communications functions, such as DRMS and CJMS, to link to Fujitsu’s FACOM M series of mainframes.

CSP/F1, on the other hand, provided the functionality of an ultra-small office computer along with the functionality of a workstation for CSP/F3 and CSP/F5 machines. The EPOC family, Fujitsu’s standard office automation package, was the key component of CSP/F1’s workstation functionality. The EPOC family included EPOWORD for processing Japanese-language documents, EPOGRAPH for processing business graphs, and EPOCALC for processing spreadsheets.

2. CSP/FX

　CSP/FX was the operating system for the FACOM K-600 series, announced in October 1988, and it supported the symmetric multiprocessors used on FACOM K-600 series machines. CSP/FX was also installed on the FACOM K-600Si series which followed the FACOM K-600 series. Based on CSP/F5, CSP/FX was an operating system that merged CSP/F3 and CSP/F5, which already had significant functional commonality. Specifically, functions were extended so that application programs originally written in COBOL G or IREP to run under CSP/F3 could also run without modification under CSP/F5 (binary compatibility was guaranteed). CSP/FX, which was developed in the same fashion, included conventional CSP/F3 and CSP/F5 functions (see Table 1), as shown in Table 2.

　CSP/FX not only inherited functions from CSP/F3 and CSP/F5, as mentioned above; it also had the following new enhanced functions to keep up with the changing times.

(1) Support for multivendor and open-system environments

• CSP/FX added support for international standards, such as TCP/IP, RDA, and OSI (MHS and FTAM). It also provided FX-RDB and FX-SQL processors to process SQL, a standard relational database protocol. FX-RDB was the basic engine for managing relational databases, and the FX-SQL processor provided SQL functionality.
• Functions for linking to PC-based ISV software (Lotus 1-2-3, dBASE III, Excel, etc.).

(2) Provision of a graphical user interface environment

• In addition to the graphical user interface functions from the FACOM K-100 series of desktop machines, released in tandem with the FACOM K-600 series, CSP/FX came with the K-Windows function that gave CSP/FX application programs access to multiple windows, pull-down menus, background color controls, and other functions.