What is "arx"

ARX was an unreleased Mach-like operating system written in Modula-2+ developed by Acorn Computers Ltd in the Acorn Research Centre (ARC) UK and later Olivetti Research Center and later on Software Technology Laboratory (when Olivetti bought out Acorn) at Palo Alto for their new ARM RISC processors based Archimedes computers range. According to the project Application Manager during the project, while Acorn was developing the kernel, it used C and Acorn Modula Execution Library (CAMEL) in Acorn Extended Modula-2 (AEM2) compiler (ported from Modula-2 ETH using Econet hardware), though never released externally, CAMEL was ported to use it in SUN Unix machines, in an effort to port Sun's workstations Sun NeWS to the Archimedes, and after Olivetti bought out Acorn, developed a compiler based on AEM2 for the Modula-3 programming Language.

ARX was a pre-emptive multitasking, multithreading, multi-user operating system. Much of the OS ran in user mode and as a result suffered performance problems due to switches into kernel mode to perform mutexes, which led to the introduction of the SWP instruction to the instruction set of the ARM3 version of the ARM processor. It had support of optical ( WORM) disks file system and featured a window system, a window toolkit (and a direct manipulation User Interface editor) and an InterScript-based text editor, for enriched documents written in InterPress (a HTML precursor). The OS had to be fitted in a 512 KB ROM image. This suggests that ARX had a microkernel-type design.

It was not finished in time to be fitted to the Acorn Archimedes range of computers, which shipped in 1987 with the Arthur operating system, derived from the earlier MOS operating system from Acorn's earlier 8-bit BBC Micro range. Arthur was later superseded by RISC OS.

The Acorn Research Centre was bought out by Olivetti.

ArX is a distributed version control system. ArX began as a fork of GNU arch, and is licensed under the GPL. Since the fork, ArX has been extensively rewritten in C++, with many new features. The project maintainer is Walter Landry.

Arx is a Latin word meaning " citadel". In the ancient city of Rome, the arx was located on the northern spur of the Capitoline Hill, and is sometimes specified as the Arx Capitolina.

ARX (Algorithmic Research Ltd.) is a digital security company headquartered in San Francisco, CA, with offices in the UK, the Netherlands, Australia and Israel. It is the creator of CoSign by ARX, a digital signature technology, along with related digital signature security technology products. ARX was acquired by DocuSign in May 2015. The acquisition builds on a three year business partnership between DocuSign and ARX, bringing together ARX’s CoSign digital signature technology with DocuSign's Digital Transaction Management (DTM) platform and broadens The DocuSign Global Trust Network.

The ARX digital signature products are based on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) technology, with the digital signatures resulting from a cryptographic operation that creates a ‘fingerprint’ unique to both the signer and the content, so that they cannot be copied, forged or tampered with. This process provides proof of signer identity, data integrity and the non-repudiation of signed documents, all of which can be verified without the need for proprietary verification software.

The company’s CoSign solution integrates into a large range of document management and workflow automation systems and is intended to streamline workflow processes requiring signatures. ARX partners with document management and workflow solution providers including SharePoint, OpenText, Oracle, Alfresco, Nintex and K2.

Industries of focus include life science (particularly research and clinical trials), engineering, legal and federal/local governments. ARX clients are based in North America, Africa, Europe and Asia-Pacific. In Italy, CoSign is used by the Ministry of Defence, RAI, Senate, Court of Accounts, State Police and Bank of Italy. It is also used by the European Court of Human Rights to digitize and streamline their application process.

ARX solutions have been validated for security standards such as NIST FIPS 140-2 level 3, FIPS 186 and ETSI TS 101 733. In 2013, CoSign was named “the strongest digital signature solution” in the Forrester Wave: E-Signatures, Q2 2013 report. In August 2014, CoSign received Common Criteria EAL4+ certification, thus becoming the first remote / server-side digital signature solution to be fully compliant with the EU’s newly enacted Electronic Identification and Trust Services regulation for Electronic Transactions in the Internal Market (eIDAS). ARX solutions also comply with ESIGN, UETA, FDA 21 CFR Part 11, SOX, HIPAA, USDA, among many other signature-related country- and industry-specific laws and regulations.