IBM Basic Programming Support/360 (BPS), originally called Special Support, was a set of

standalone program A stand-alone program, also known as a freestanding program, is a computer program that does not load any external module, library function or program and that is designed to boot with the bootstrap procedure of the target processor – it runs on ...

s for System/360 mainframes with a minimum of 8 KiB of memory. BPS was developed by IBM's General Products Division in

Endicott, New York Endicott is a village in Broome County, New York, United States. The population was 13,392 at the 2010 census. It is part of the Binghamton Metropolitan Statistical Area. The village is named after Henry B. Endicott, a founding member of the End ...

. The package included "assemblers, IOCS, compilers, sorts, and utilities but no governing control program." BPS components were introduced in a series of product announcements between 1964 and 1965. BPS came in two versions — a strictly

punched card A punched card (also punch card or punched-card) is a piece of stiff paper that holds digital data represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. Punched cards were once common in data processing applications or to di ...

system and a magnetic tape based system which, contrary to the stated goals, kept a small supervisor permanently resident. Programming languages available were

IBM Basic Assembly Language Basic Assembly Language (BAL) is the commonly used term for a low-level programming language used on IBM System/360 and successor mainframes. Originally, "Basic Assembly Language" applied only to an extremely restricted dialect designed to run und ...

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 ...

, and FORTRAN IV (subset). Tape FORTRAN required 16 KiB of memory. There were also two versions of the BPS assembler, with the tape version having enhanced capabilities. BPS also had a "disk" counterpart called

BOS/360 Basic Operating System/360 (BOS/360) was an early IBM System/360 operating system. Origin BOS was one of four System/360 Operating System versions developed by the IBM General Products Division (GPD) in Endicott, New York to fill a gap at th ...

. It also required 8 KiB of memory and supported disks such as the

IBM 2311 IBM manufactured magnetic disk storage devices from 1956 to 2003, when it sold its hard disk drive business to Hitachi. Both the hard disk drive (HDD) and floppy disk drive (FDD) were invented by IBM and as such IBM's employees were responsible fo ...

. The group responsible for BPS/BOS went on to develop DOS/360 and TOS/360 as a supposed "interim" solution when it became evident that

OS/360 OS/360, officially known as IBM System/360 Operating System, is a discontinued batch processing operating system developed by IBM for their then-new System/360 mainframe computer, announced in 1964; it was influenced by the earlier IBSYS/IBJOB ...

would be too large to run on 16 KiB systems. BPS and BOS could be used to run standalone applications on a minimal System/360. One application was the ''System/360 Work Station'' for remote job entry to a larger system.

References

External links

IBM System/360 Basic Programming Support and IBM Basic Operating System/360 Programming Systems Summary C24-3420-0
IBM mainframe operating systems Discontinued operating systems {{mainframe-compu-stub

See also

References

External links