Cobra - the computer the country built, and the operating system it was told to stop

Its most remarkable product was software. SOX was a UNIX-compatible operating system written from scratch in Brazil in the late 1980s, under the leadership of Ivan da Costa Marques, and it obtained formal conformance recognition from X/Open - which made it, briefly, a Brazilian answer to a question the whole industry was asking.

What happened next is recorded in a first-person testimony by Jorge Monteiro Fernandes, who worked at Cobra from 1987 to 1990, given as a paper at the SHIALC history-of-computing symposium in 2012. The Russian Academy of Sciences approached Cobra to port SOX to a RISC machine they had built, because United States technology-flow controls denied them access to UNIX. An agreement was signed and three Russian developers came to work at Cobra. A joint venture was then proposed - Cobra, the Russian Academy and a Chinese company - to sell SOX internationally, and it was approved by Brazil’s own foreign-ministry agency and its national intelligence service.

By Fernandes’s account, the United States consul told Cobra’s president over lunch that his government opposed the venture and that it should be abandoned, or it would act by other means. The matter reached the president of the republic, and the decision was not to confront the United States. Fernandes records his own reply to the general who delivered it - that this was a retreat and a surrender of sovereignty - and the general’s answer: that he was aware of it, but Brazil did not have the Sixth Fleet.

Cobra stopped developing its own technology and became a reseller of foreign products to Banco do Brasil. The same testimony notes that the Cobra 1.000 was itself a United States product sold in Brazil under licence, each sale requiring State Department authorisation - which is the sharpest available description of what technological autonomy meant in practice.