Commercial Operating System (COS) is a discontinued family of

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

s from

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president unt ...

. They supported the use of

DIBOL DIBOL or Digital's Business Oriented Language is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language, designed for use in Management Information Systems (MIS) software development. It has a syntax similar to FORTRAN and BASIC, alon ...

, a programming language combining features of

BASIC BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College ...

, FORTRAN and

COBOL COBOL (; an acronym for "common business-oriented language") is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is an imperative, procedural and, since 2002, object-oriented language. COBOL is primarily us ...

. COS also supported

IBM RPG RPG is a high-level programming language for business applications, introduced in 1959 for the IBM 1401. It is most well known as the primary programming language of IBM's midrange computer product line, including the IBM i operating system. RP ...

(Report Program Generator).

Implementations

The Commercial Operating System was implemented to run on hardware from the PDP-8 and PDP-11 family.

COS-310

COS-310 was developed for the PDP-8 to provide an operating environment for

. A COS-310 system was purchased as a package which included a desk,

VT52 The VT50 was a CRT-based computer terminal introduced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in July 1974. It provided a display with 12 rows and 80 columns of upper-case text, and used an expanded set of control characters and forward-only scro ...

VDT (Video Display Tube), and a pair of eight inch floppy drives. It could optionally be purchased with one or more 2.5 MB removable media hard drives. COS-310 was one of the operating systems available on the

DECmate II DECmate was the name of a series of PDP-8-compatible computers produced by the Digital Equipment Corporation in the late 1970s and early 1980s. All of the models used an Intersil 6100 (later known as the Harris 6100) or Harris 6120 (an improved In ...

COS-350

COS-350 was developed to support the PDP-11

port A port is a maritime facility comprising one or more wharves or loading areas, where ships load and discharge cargo and passengers. Although usually situated on a sea coast or estuary, ports can also be found far inland, such as Ham ...

of DIBOL, and was the focus for some vendors of

turnkey A turnkey, a turnkey project, or a turnkey operation (also spelled turn-key) is a type of project that is constructed so that it can be sold to any buyer as a completed product. This is contrasted with build to order, where the constructor builds ...

software packages. Pre-COS-350, a PDP 11/05 single-user batch-oriented implementation was released; the multi-user PDP 11/10-based COS came about 4 years later. The much more powerful PDP-11/34 "added significant configuration flexibility and expansion capability."

Notes

References

{{Time-sharing operating systems DEC operating systems Time-sharing operating systems

Implementations

COS-310

COS-350

See also

Notes

References