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If the Edinburgh culture had been different, EMAS could easily have been a world-class operating system well before the rise of Unix (which was an inferior system for almost 20 years; like the developers of Multics, Edinburgh people frequently commiserate over the advanced features of EMAS such as dynamic linking, multi-level storage, an efficient scheduler, a separate user-space kernel ('director'), a user-level shell ('basic command interpreter'), and a memory mapped file architecture - which Unix never had or did not acquire until late in the day); however it is not in the Scottish nature to brag on one's accomplishments and Edinburgh did not subscribe to the American "publish or perish" ethos; consequently EMAS perished in obscurity.
The Edinburgh Computer History Project is attempting to salvage some of the lessons learned from the EMAS project and has the complete source code of EMAS online for public browsing.
EMAS was written entirely in the Edinburgh IMP programming language, with only a small number of critical functions using embedded assembler within Imp sources.