Commercial Operating System (COS) is a discontinued family of
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 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 until ...
.
They supported the use of
DIBOL, a programming language combining features of
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 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 ...
. 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. ...
(Report Program Generator).
Implementations
The Commercial Operating System was implemented to run on hardware from the PDP-8
and PDP-11 families.
COS-310
COS-310 was developed for the PDP-8 to provide an operating environment for
DIBOL. A COS-310 system was purchased as a package which included a desk,
VT52
The VT50 is a CRT-based computer terminal that was 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 forwar ...
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.
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 Hamburg, Manch ...
of DIBOL, and was the focus for some vendors of
turnkey 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."
]
See also
* Comparison of operating systems
* Timeline of operating systems
Notes
References
{{Time-sharing operating systems
DEC operating systems
Time-sharing operating systems