SCOPE (Supervisory Control of Program Execution) is a series of

Control Data Corporation Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a mainframe and supercomputer firm. CDC was one of the nine major United States computer companies through most of the 1960s; the others were IBM, Burroughs Corporation, DEC, NCR, General Electric, Honeywel ...

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 developed in the 1960s.

Variants

* SCOPE for the

CDC 3000 The CDC 3000 series ("thirty-six hundred" of "thirty-one hundred") computers from Control Data Corporation were mid-1960s follow-ons to the CDC 1604 and CDC 924 systems. Over time, a range of machines were produced - divided into * the 48-bit upp ...

series * SCOPE for the

CDC 6000 The CDC 6000 series is a discontinued family of mainframe computers manufactured by Control Data Corporation in the 1960s. It consisted of the CDC 6200, CDC 6300, #Versions, CDC 6400, #Versions, CDC 6500, CDC 6600 and #Versions, CDC 6700 computers, ...

series * SCOPE and SCOPE-2 for the

CDC 7600 The CDC 7600 was the Seymour Cray-designed successor to the CDC 6600, extending Control Data's dominance of the supercomputer field into the 1970s. The 7600 ran at 36.4 MHz (27.5 ns clock cycle) and had a 65 Kword primary memory (with a ...

/Cyber-76

SCOPE for the CDC 3000 series

SCOPE for the CDC 6000 series

This operating system was based on the original

Chippewa Operating System The Chippewa Operating System (COS) is a discontinued operating system developed by Control Data Corporation for the CDC 6600, generally considered the first supercomputer in the world. The Chippewa was initially developed as an experimental system ...

. In the early 1970s, it was renamed NOS/BE for the

CDC Cyber The CDC Cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers were the primary products of Control Data Corporation (CDC) during the 1970s and 1980s. In their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically inten ...

machines. The SCOPE operating system is a file-oriented system using mass storage, random access devices. It was designed to make use of all capabilities of CDC 6000 computer systems and exploits fully the multiple-operating modes of all segments of the computer. Main tasks of SCOPE are controlling job execution, storage assignment, performing segment and overlay loading. Its features include comprehensive input/output functions and library maintenance routines. The dayfile chronologically records all jobs run and any problems encountered. To aid debugging, dumps and

memory map In computer science, a memory map is a structure of data (which usually resides in memory itself) that indicates how memory is laid out. The term "memory map" can have different meanings in different contexts. *It is the fastest and most flexible ...

s are available. Under control of SCOPE, a variety of assemblers (

COMPASS A compass is a device that shows the cardinal directions used for navigation and geographic orientation. It commonly consists of a magnetized needle or other element, such as a compass card or compass rose, which can pivot to align itself with ...

), compilers (

ALGOL ALGOL (; short for "Algorithmic Language") is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in 1958. ALGOL heavily influenced many other languages and was the standard method for algorithm description used by the ...

, FORTRAN,

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 ...

), and utility programs (SORT/MERGE, PERT/TIME, EXPORT/IMPORT, RESPOND,

SIMSCRIPT SIMSCRIPT is a free-form, English-like general-purpose simulation language conceived by Harry Markowitz and Bernard Hausner at the RAND Corporation in 1962. It was implemented as a Fortran preprocessor on the IBM 7090 and was designed for large di ...

APT Apt. is an abbreviation for apartment. Apt may also refer to: Places * Apt Cathedral, a former cathedral, and national monument of France, in the town of Apt in Provence * Apt, Vaucluse, a commune of the Vaucluse département of France * A ...

, OPTIMA etc.) may be operated. The computer emulation community has made repeated attempts to recover and preserve this software. It is now running under a CDC CYBER and 6000 series emulator.

Competition

SCOPE was written by a programming team in Sunnyvale, California, about 2,000 miles from the CDC hardware division. It was considered by them a buggy and inefficient piece of software, though not much different than many operating systems of the era. At the CDC Arden Hills, Minnesota laboratories (where they referred to SCOPE as ''Sunnyvale's Collection Of Programming Errors'') they had a competing operating system, MACE. This was the Mansfield And Cahlander Executive (from Greg Mansfield and Dave Cahlander, the authors of the system). It had started as an engineering test executive, but eventually developed into a complete operating system — a modularized rewrite and enhancement of the original Chippewa Operating System (COS). While never an official CDC product, a copy was freely given to any customer who asked for one. Many customers did, especially the more advanced ones (like University and research sites). When Control Data decided to write its next operating system ''Kronos'', it considered both the current SCOPE system and the unofficial MACE alternative. They chose to abandon the SCOPE system and base Kronos on the MACE software. Eventually, Kronos was replaced by the new Network Operating System (NOS). Though many smaller CDC customers continued to use the SCOPE system rather than Kronos. When NOS became the primary Control Data operating system, some customers running mainly batch operations were reluctant to switch to the NOS system, as they saw no benefit for their shop. So the SCOPE system was maintained, and renamed as NOS/BE (Batch Environment), primarily so that CDC Marketing could say that all mainframe customers were using the NOS operating system.

Variants

SCOPE for the CDC 3000 series

SCOPE for the CDC 6000 series

Competition

See also