Trix
Trix may refer to:
Entertainment and the arts
TRIX (operating system)
TRIX is a network-oriented research operating system developed in the late 1970s at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) by Professor Steve Ward and his research group. It ran on the NuMachine and had remote procedure call functionality built into its kernel, but was otherwise a Version 7 Unix workalike.
Design and implementation
On startup, the NuMachine would load the same program on each CPU in the system, passing each instance of the program the numeric ID of the CPU it was running on. TRIX relied on this design to have the first CPU set up global data structures and then set a flag to signal when initialization completed. After that, each instance of the kernel was able to access global data. The system also supported data private to each CPU. Access to the filesystem was provided by a program in user space.
The kernel supported unnamed threads running in domains. A domain was the equivalent of a Unix process without a stack pointer (each thread in a domain had a stack pointer). A thread could change domains, and the system scheduler would migrate threads between CPUs in order to keep all processors busy. Threads had access to a single kind of mutual exclusion primitive, and one of seven priorities. The scheduler was designed to avoid priority inversion. User space programs could create threads through a spawn system call.
Trix (construction sets)
Trix model construction sets were originally produced in 1931 by a Nuremberg company, Andreas Förtner (Anfoe). The German patent for the basic Trix pieces had been granted the previous year, in 1930.
The origin of the name Trix is uncertain; it has been suggested (by Adrie Wind) that it could have referred to the triple-hole configuration of the basic pieces.
A friendship between Stephan Bing, owner of Anfoe, and the English toy manufacturer W J Bassett-Lowke led to the founding of the London company Trix Ltd in 1932. In the United Kingdom, Trix sets challenged the British-invented Meccano model construction sets.
(See Trix (company) for details of the model electric trains that the German company also began producing in 1935).
