THEOS, which translates from Greek as "God", is an

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 ...

which started out as OASIS, a

microcomputer A microcomputer is a small, relatively inexpensive computer having a central processing unit (CPU) made out of a microprocessor. The computer also includes memory and input/output (I/O) circuitry together mounted on a printed circuit board (P ...

for small computers that use the

Z80 The Zilog Z80 is an 8-bit microprocessor designed by Zilog that played an important role in the evolution of early personal computing. Launched in 1976, it was designed to be software-compatible with the Intel 8080, offering a compelling altern ...

processor. When the operating system was launched for the

IBM Personal Computer/AT The IBM Personal Computer AT (model 5170, abbreviated as IBM AT or PC/AT) was released in 1984 as the fourth model in the IBM Personal Computer line, following the IBM PC/XT and its IBM Portable PC variant. It was designed around the Intel 8 ...

in 1982, the decision was taken to change the name from OASIS to THEOS, short for ''THE Operating System''.

History

OASIS

The ''OASIS operating system'' was originally developed and distributed in 1977 by Phase One Systems of

Oakland, California Oakland is a city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S. state of California. It is the county seat and most populous city in Alameda County, California, Alameda County, with a population of 440,646 in 2020. A major We ...

(President Howard Sidorsky). OASIS was developed for the

processor and was the first multi-user operating system for 8-bit microprocessor based computers (Z-80 from

Zilog Zilog, Inc. is an American manufacturer of microprocessors, microcontrollers, and application-specific embedded System on a chip, system-on-chip (SoC) products. The company was founded in 1974 by Federico Faggin and Ralph Ungermann, who were soo ...

). "OASIS" was a

backronym A backronym is an acronym formed from an already existing word by expanding its letters into the words of a phrase. Backronyms may be invented with either serious or humorous intent, or they may be a type of false etymology or folk etymology. The ...

for "Online Application System Interactive Software". OASIS consisted of a multi-user operating system, a powerful Business Basic/Interpreter, C

compiler In computing, a compiler is a computer program that Translator (computing), translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primaril ...

and a powerful

text editor A text editor is a type of computer program that edits plain text. An example of such program is "notepad" software (e.g. Windows Notepad). Text editors are provided with operating systems and software development packages, and can be used to c ...

. Timothy Williams developed OASIS and was employed at Phase One. The market asked for 16-bit systems but there was no real 16-bit multi-user OS for 16-bit systems. Every month Phase One announced OASIS-16 but it did not come. One day Timothy Williams claimed that he owned OASIS and started a court case against Phase One and claimed several million

U.S. dollars The United States dollar (symbol: $; currency code: USD) is the official currency of the United States and several other countries. The Coinage Act of 1792 introduced the U.S. dollar at par with the Spanish silver dollar, divided it int ...

. Sidorsky had no choice and claimed

Chapter 11 Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code ( Title 11 of the United States Code) permits reorganization under the bankruptcy laws of the United States. Such reorganization, known as Chapter 11 bankruptcy, is available to every business, w ...

. The court case took two years and finally the ruling was that Timothy Williams was allowed to develop the 16-bit version of OASIS but he was not allowed to use the OASIS name anymore. David Shirley presented an alternative history at the Computer Information Centre, an OASIS distributor for the UK in the early 1980s. He said Timothy Williams developed the OASIS operating system and contracted with Phase One Systems to market and sell the product. Development was underway, but it was prematurely announced by POS. This led to pressure to release OASIS early, when it was still not properly debugged or optimised. OASIS 8-bit was quite well optimised by that point, with many parts hand-coded in Z80 assembler, but that meant then-new 16-bit systems performed nowhere near as well as their 8-bit counterparts. This situation led to Williams becoming dissatisfied with Phase One, and forming his own company to market and support the 16-bit OASIS. This new company was initially called Oasis Technologies, until Phase One took action to protect the name. Rather than fight a long and expensive court battle, Williams renamed the company and product to "THEOS". It was intended to mean "the OS" in the sense of "the one" ("Theos" is

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

for "

God In monotheistic belief systems, God is usually viewed as the supreme being, creator, and principal object of faith. In polytheistic belief systems, a god is "a spirit or being believed to have created, or for controlling some part of the un ...

"). While Williams and Sidorsky fought in court, manufacturers had no 16-bit multi-user OS. This led to an agreement between

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

and

Santa Cruz Operation The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. (usually known as SCO, pronounced either as individual letters or as a word) was an American software company, based in Santa Cruz, California, that was best known for selling three Unix operating system variants ...

to make a new operating system based on

Version 7 Unix Version 7 Unix, also called Seventh Edition Unix, Version 7 or just V7, was an important early release of the Unix operating system. V7, released in 1979, was the last Bell Laboratories release to see widespread distribution before the commerc ...

from

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Murray Hill, New Jersey, the compa ...

. Microsoft purchased a license for Version 7 UNIX from

AT&T AT&T Inc., an abbreviation for its predecessor's former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the w ...

in 1978, and announced on August 25, 1980, that it would make it available for the

16-bit 16-bit microcomputers are microcomputers that use 16-bit microprocessors. A 16-bit register can store 216 different values. The range of integer values that can be stored in 16 bits depends on the integer representation used. With the two ...

microcomputer market. Because Microsoft was not able to license the "UNIX" name itself, it was called

Xenix Xenix is a discontinued Unix operating system for various microcomputer platforms, licensed by Microsoft from AT&T Corporation. The first version was released in 1980, and Xenix was the most common Unix variant during the mid- to late-1980s. T ...

. Microsoft would distribute the product via Larry Michels and his son Doug Michels (

Seiko , commonly known as Seiko ( , ), is a Japanese maker of watches, clocks, electronic devices, and semiconductors. Founded in 1881 by Kintarō Hattori in Tokyo, Seiko introduced the world's first commercial quartz wristwatch in 1969. Seiko is ...

also lost patience with THEOS and Williams, and decided to make their own OASIS 16-bit version and hired Dr. Jeffrey Bahr. When Xenix and THEOS became available Seiko did decide to leave this market. Jeffrey Bahr started CET which went on with the development of the 16-bit OASIS compatible software. CET software was completely compatible with OASIS/THEOS and allowed users entry to the Unix and Microsoft world. CET acquired the Phase one company. Also, Phase One Systems licenses a porting tool called CET Basic. CET Basic is compatible with THEOS BASIC, MultiUser BASIC, OASIS BASIC, and UX-BASIC. This means you can keep most of your existing

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

, and using W/32 BASIC, recompile your THEOS, OASIS, or UX-BASIC programs to work under additional operating systems such as

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

SCO UNIX Xinuos OpenServer, previously SCO UNIX and SCO Open Desktop (SCO ODT), is a closed source computer operating system developed by Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), later acquired by SCO Group, and now owned by Xinuos. Early versions of OpenServer were ...

THEOS

THEOS operating systems have been distributed by THEOS Software Corporation in

Walnut Creek, California Walnut Creek is a city in Contra Costa County, California, United States, located in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, about east of the city of Oakland, California, Oakland. Walnut Creek has a total population of 70,127 per t ...

, since 1983. As of 2003, Phase One Systems publishes software development tools for THEOS(R) systems. As well as porting tools, Phase One Systems distributed the Freedom query package and Control database package for THEOS systems, used to bring

SQL Structured Query Language (SQL) (pronounced ''S-Q-L''; or alternatively as "sequel") is a domain-specific language used to manage data, especially in a relational database management system (RDBMS). It is particularly useful in handling s ...

-like data extraction tools to third-party software packages. THEOS was introduced in Europe by Fujitsu and other hardware manufacturers 30 years ago, and is distributed by a number of distributors in Great Britain, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Italy and more. The 'current' version is THEOS Corona Commercial Release 6, which was released in December 2008, and a number of updates have been released since that time. The current Windows Workstation Client (as of May 2009) is version 3.16 from July 2003.

Features

Originally written in the late 1970s by Timothy S. Williams as a low-cost alternative to the more expensive

mini The Mini is a very small two-door, four-seat car, produced for four decades over a single generation, with many names and variants, by the British Motor Corporation (BMC) and its successors British Leyland and the Rover Group, and finally ...

- and

mainframe A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterpris ...

- computers that were popular in the day, OASIS provided time-sharing

multiuser Multi-user software is computer software that allows access by multiple users of a computer. Time-sharing systems are multi-user systems. Most batch processing systems for mainframe computers may also be considered "multi-user", to avoid leavin ...

facilities to allow several users to utilise the resources of one computer. Similar in concept to

MP/M MP/M (Multi-Programming Monitor Control Program) is a discontinued multi-user version of the CP/M operating system, created by Digital Research developer Tom Rolander in 1979. It allowed multiple users to connect to a single computer, each u ...

UNIX Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

, THEOS uses external

device driver In the context of an operating system, a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls a particular type of device that is attached to a computer or automaton. A driver provides a software interface to hardware devices, enabli ...

s rather than a kernel, allowing it to be more portable to other environments, though support has been primarily directed towards industry-standard hardware (i.e. PC's). THEOS is specifically aimed at small business users, with a wide range of vertical-market applications packages being developed and supported by individuals and companies. The languages distributed with THEOS include THEOS Multi-User

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 ...

and C. A powerful EXEC shell language can be used for task automation or to produce a

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 ...

system. A number of security features exist, including dynamic passwords (where the password includes part of the date or time, or client

IP address An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as that is assigned to a device connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. IP addresses serve two main functions: network interface i ...

, or other dynamic elements), allow/deny security, a comprehensive inbound and outbound

firewall Firewall may refer to: * Firewall (computing), a technological barrier designed to prevent unauthorized or unwanted communications between computer networks or hosts * Firewall (construction), a barrier inside a building, designed to limit the spre ...

, and an option to require a certain level of encryption in the

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or computational science, scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating syste ...

connection. In addition, the object file format is proprietary, and the operating system uses

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

protected mode In computing, protected mode, also called protected virtual address mode, is an operational mode of x86-compatible central processing units (CPUs). It allows system software to use features such as Memory_segmentation, segmentation, virtual mem ...

" to further increase defence against buffer overrun attacks.

Commands

The following list of commands are supported by the THEOS/OASIS Command String Interpreter (CSI).THEOS/OASIS User′s Handbook
/ref> * ACCOUNT * ARCHIVE * ASSIGN * ATTACH * BACKUP *

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 ...

* BULKERA * CACHE * CADVERF * CHANGE * CLASS * COMPARE * COPYFILE * CREATE * CSI *

DEBUG In engineering, debugging is the process of finding the root cause, workarounds, and possible fixes for bugs. For software, debugging tactics can involve interactive debugging, control flow analysis, log file analysis, monitoring at the ap ...

* EDIT * ERASE * ERRMSG * EXEC * FILELIST * FILT8080 * FORCE * GETFILE *

HELP Help may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Films * Help (2010 film), ''Help'' (2010 film), a Bollywood horror film * Help (2021 theatrical film), ''Help'' (2021 theatrical film), a British psychological thriller film * Help (2021 TV ...

* INITDISK * INITTAPE * KILL * LIST * LOGOFF * LOGON * MAILBOX * MSG * PEEK * RECEIVE * RENAME * REPAIR * RESTORE * SCRIPT * SEND * SET * SHOW * SPOOLER * START * STOP * SYSGEN * TERMINAL

Reception

BYTE The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable un ...

'' in 1985 stated that "the functionality of THEOS is somewhere between

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few op ...

and

". The magazine criticized the documentation's quality, and concluded that the price was too high compared to other multiuser operating systems for the PC such as Pick and

Coherent Coherence is, in general, a state or situation in which all the parts or ideas fit together well so that they form a united whole. More specifically, coherence, coherency, or coherent may refer to the following: Physics * Coherence (physics ...

References

External links

THEOS Software CorporationHistoria de OASIS®/THEOS® CoronaOASIS Users' Group Archive
February 1981 through November 1985 {{Real-time operating systems Proprietary operating systems X86 operating systems 1977 software