VME (Virtual Machine Environment) is a mainframe operating system developed by the UK company International Computers Limited (ICL, now part of the Fujitsu group). Originally developed in the 1970s (as VME/B, later VME 2900) to drive ICL's then new 2900 Series mainframes, the operating system is now known as OpenVME incorporating a Unix subsystem, and runs on ICL Series 39 and Trimetra mainframe computers, as well as industry-standard x64 servers. Origins The development program for the New Range system started on the merger of International Computers and Tabulators (ICT) and English Electric Computers in 1968. One of the fundamental decisions was that it would feature a new operating system. A number of different feasibility and design studies were carried out within ICL, the three most notable being: VME/B (originally System B), targeted at large processors such as the 2970/2980 and developed in Kidsgrove, Staffordshire and West Gorton, Manchester VME/K (originally System T), targeted at the mid-range systems such as the 2960 and developed at Bracknell after the original design for these small processors, System D, was dropped. VME/K was developed and introduced to the market but was eventually replaced by VME/B VME/T, which was never actually launched, but warrants a mention as it was conceived to support "fault tolerance", and predated the efforts of the successful American startup company Tandem Computers in this area. The chief architect of VME/B was Brian Warboys, who subsequently became professor of software engineering at the University of Manchester. A number of influences can be seen in its design, for example Multics and ICL's earlier George 3 operating system; however it was essentially designed from scratch. VME/B was viewed as primarily competing with the System/370 IBM mainframe as a commercial operating system, and adopted the EBCDIC character encoding. History When New Range was first launched in October 1974, its operating system was referred to as "System B". By the time it was first delivered it had become "VME/B". VME/K was developed independently (according to Campbell-Kelly, "on a whim of Ed Mack"), and was delivered later with the smaller mainframes such as the 2960. At the time VME/B was still plagued with performance and reliability problems, and the mainly American management team had misgivings about it. ICL had sold a large system to the European Space Agency to process data from Meteosat at its operation centre in Darmstadt. A bespoke variant of VME/K, known as VME/ESA