was developed on-site to meet the customer's requirements. Following a financial crisis in 1980, new management was brought into ICL (Christopher Laidlaw as chairman, and Robb Wilmot as managing director). An early decision of the new management was to drop VME/K. Thus in July 1981 "VME2900" was launched: although presented to the customer base as a merger of VME/B and VME/K, it was in reality the VME/B base with a few selected features from VME/K grafted on. This provided the opportunity to drop some obsolescent features, which remained available to customers who needed them in the form of the "BONVME" option. The "2900" suffix was dropped at System Version 213 (SV213) when ICL launched Series 39 in 1985 as the successor to the original 2900 series; and the "Open" prefix was added after SV294. VME became capable of hosting applications written originally for Unix through a UNIX System V Release 3 based subsystem, called VME/X, adapted to run under VME and using the ASCII character encoding. In 2007 Fujitsu announced a VME version run as a hosted subsystem, called superNova, within Microsoft Windows, or SUSE or Red Hat Enterprise Linux on x86-64 hardware. In 2012 the VME user group, AXiS, announced that after almost 40 years it would be disbanding because of the reduced user base. Fujitsu intended to support VME on customer computers until 2020. In 2020 Fujitsu transferred 13 HM Revenue and Customs applications from their computers onto Fujitsu's virtual managed VME hosting platform. As of 2022, the Department for Work and Pensions was still using VME based systems to support state pension payments. Architecture VME is structured as a set of layers, each layer having access to resources at different levels of abstraction. Virtual resources provided by one layer are constructed from the virtual resources offered by the layer below. Access to the resources of each layer is controlled through a set of Access Levels: in order for a process to use a resource at a particular access level, it must have an access key offering access to that level. The concept is similar to the "rings of protection" in Multics. The architecture allows 16 access levels, of which the outer 6 are reserved for user-level code. Orthogonally to the access levels, the operating system makes resources available to applications in the form of a Virtual Machine. A Virtual Machine can run multiple processes. In practice, a