Commercial Operating System

Commercial Operating System (COS) is a discontinued family of operating systems from Digital Equipment Corporation.[2]

Commercial Operating System (COS)
DeveloperDigital Equipment Corporation
Initial release1972[1]
Available inEnglish
PlatformsPDP-8, PDP-11, DECmate II
LicenseProprietary
Preceded byMS/8

They supported the use of DIBOL, a programming language combining features of BASIC, FORTRAN and COBOL.[3] COS also supported IBM RPG (Report Program Generator).[1]

Implementations

The Commercial Operating System was implemented to run on hardware from the PDP-8[4] 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 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.[lower-alpha 1][lower-alpha 2]

COS-350

COS-350 was developed to support the PDP-11 port of DIBOL, and was the focus for some vendors of turnkey software packages.[5]

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.[1] The much more powerful PDP-11/34 "added significant configuration flexibility and expansion capability.": p.69 

See also

Notes
  1. the other was WPS-8
  2. There was a product named COS-300, and some DEC manuals are named with both 300 & 310.

References
  1. DIGITAL EQUIPMENT CORPORATION - Nineteen Fifty-Seven To The Present (PDF). Digital Equipment Corporation. 1978.
  2. Binh Nguyen. Linux Dictionary. p. 424., citing "QUECID".
  3. "Time-Sharing Uses Emphasized For DEC Datasystem 350 Series". Computerworld. July 30, 1975. p. 19. Dibol Under COS: The series operates under the Commercial Operating System (COS) 350, which provides timesharing with a high-speed response.
  4. PDP 8/e Small Computer Handbook. Digital Equipment Corporation. 1973. pp. 2-19 thru 2-20.
  5. "Time-Sharing Uses Emphasized For DEC Datasystem 350 Series". Computerworld. July 30, 1975. p. 19.
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