SCOPE (Supervisory Control of Program Execution) is a series of
Control Data Corporation
Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a mainframe and supercomputer company that in the 1960s was one of the nine major U.S. computer companies, which group included IBM, the Burroughs Corporation, and the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), the N ...
batch operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...
s developed in the 1960s.
Variants
* SCOPE for the
CDC 3000
The CDC 3000 series ("thirty-six hundred" or "thirty-one hundred") are a family of mainframe computers from Control Data Corporation (CDC). The first member, the CDC 3600, was a 48-bit system introduced in 1963. The same basic design led to the c ...
series
* SCOPE for the
CDC 6000 series
* SCOPE and SCOPE-2 for the
CDC 7600
The CDC 7600 was designed by Seymour Cray to be the successor to the CDC 6600, extending Control Data Corporation, 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 ...
/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. In the early 1970s, it was renamed NOS/BE for the
CDC Cyber
The CDC Cyber range of mainframe computer, 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 ma ...
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 operating system 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" has different meanings in different contexts.
#It is the fastest and most flexible cach ...
s are available.
Description
SCOPE is a
multiprogramming
In computing, multitasking is the concurrent execution of multiple tasks (also known as processes) over a certain period of time. New tasks can interrupt already started ones before they finish, instead of waiting for them to end. As a result ...
operating system capable of running up to eight jobs, called ''control points'', at one time. One control point is used for system functions.
Later versions increased this limit to 15.
SCOPE runs on the 6x00's ''peripheral processors'' (PPs). "A central processor (CP)... is completely within the power of every PP at all times." One PP, identified as PP0 runs the Monitor Program (MTR) "that oversees or controls all other activities." PP9 is assigned to control the system console typewriter and displays. The other PPs perform input/output functions as directed by MTR.
A portion of the central processor's memory (called ''central memory'', or CM) the ''Central Memory Resident'' (CMR) "is reserved for various system tables accessible by the PPs.”
Part of this CMR is a communications area for each PP. Each communications area contains an "input register" and an "output register", followed by a message buffer.
When the computer is ''
deadstarted'', all PP's are loaded with system code from
magnetic tape
Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic storage made of a thin, magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic film. It was developed in Germany in 1928, based on the earlier magnetic wire recording from Denmark. Devices that use magnetic ...
. PP0 will begin running the monitor code. The remaining PPs will loop reading their input registers waiting for requests from the monitor.
Software
As of SCOPE 3.3 a number of programming language compilers and utilities were supported. Major languages were
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 ...
,
BASIC
Basic or BASIC may refer to:
Science and technology
* BASIC, a computer programming language
* Basic (chemistry), having the properties of a base
* Basic access authentication, in HTTP
Entertainment
* Basic (film), ''Basic'' (film), a 2003 film
...
,
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 ...
, and
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 No ...
(
assembler). Other languages were
APT, CSSL 3 (Continuous System Simulation Language),
JOVIAL,
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 ...
, and
SIMULA
Simula is the name of two simulation programming languages, Simula I and Simula 67, developed in the 1960s at the Norwegian Computing Center in Oslo, by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard. Syntactically, it is an approximate superset of AL ...
. Other software included IGS (Interactive Graphics System),
PERT
Pert or PERT may refer to:
Ships
* - see List of United States Navy ships: P
* , a World War II corvette, originally HMS ''Nepeta''
* Pert (sidewheeler), ''Pert'' (sidewheeler), a 19th-century steamboat that operated in British Columbia, Canada ...
, and SORT/MERGE.
CDC systems were considered
supercomputer
A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...
s, and customers were often large government agencies and research facilities. Most of these had specialized requirements, and often wrote their own software.
Competition
SCOPE was written by a programming team in
Sunnyvale, California
Sunnyvale () is a city located in the Santa Clara Valley in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States.
Sunnyvale lies along the historic El Camino Real (California), El Camino Real and U.S. Route 101 in California, Highway 1 ...
, 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.
Current status
The computer emulation community has made repeated attempts to recover and preserve CDC software. It is now running under a CDC CYBER and 6000 series
emulator
In computing, an emulator is Computer hardware, hardware or software that enables one computer system (called the ''host'') to behave like another computer system (called the ''guest''). An emulator typically enables the host system to run sof ...
.
See also
*
CDC Kronos
Kronos is an operating system with time-sharing capabilities, written by Control Data Corporation in 1971. Kronos ran on the 60-bit CDC 6000 series mainframe computers and their successors. CDC replaced Kronos with the NOS operating system in ...
*
NOS
References
External links
CDC 6000/70/170 Family Tree
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cdc Scope (Software)
SCOPE
Discontinued operating systems
1964 software