BESYS

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BESYS (Bell Operating System)
Developer Bell Labs
Written in IBM's FORTRAN and North American's Symbolic Assembly Program (SAP)
Working stateDiscontinued
Initial release1957;64 years ago (1957)
Latest release BE90 / 1968;53 years ago (1968)
Platforms IBM 704

BESYS (Bell Operating System) was an early computing environment originally implemented as a batch processing operating system in 1957 at Bell Labs for the IBM 704 computer.

Contents

Overview

The system was developed because Bell recognized a "definite mismatchbetween the 704's internal speed, the sluggishness of its on-line unit-record equipment, and the inherent slowness of manual operations associated with stand-alone use." [1] According to Drummond, [1] the name BESYS, though commonly thought to stand for BEll SYStem, is actually a concatenation of the preexisting SHARE-assigned installation code BE for Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ and the code assigned by SHARE for systems software, SYS.

The goals of the system were:

The initial version of the system BESYS-1 was in use by October 16, 1957. [1] It was created by George H. Mealy and Gwen Hansen with Wanda Lee Mammel and utilized IBM's FORTRAN and United Aircraft's Symbolic Assembly Program (SAP) programming languages. It was designed to efficiently deal with a large number of jobs originating on punched cards and producing results suitable for printing on paper and punched cards. The system also provided processing capabilities for data stored on magnetic tapes and magnetic disk storage units. Typically punched card and print processing was handled off line by peripheral Electronic Accounting Machines, IBM 1401 computers, and eventually direct coupled computers.

The first system actually used at Bell Labs was BESYS-2. The system was resident on magnetic tape, and occupied the lowest 64 (36-bit) words and the highest 4K words of memory. The upper 4K words held the resident portion of the monitor, and could be partially swapped to magnetic drum to free up additional core for the user program if needed. [1]

"BESYS was a complex software package that provided convenient input/output and integrated disk file storage facilities." [2]

Internal use

BESYS was used extensively by many departments of Bell Labs for over a decade. It was made available through the SHARE organization to others without charge or formal technical support.

BESYS versions

Versions of the BESYS environment (BESYS-3 (1960), BESYS-4 (1962), BESYS-5 (1963), BESYS-7 (1964), and BE90 (1968) [1] ) were implemented as the underlying computers transitioned through the IBM 709X family. BESYS development was discontinued when Bell Labs moved to the IBM System/360 in 1969. Throughout this period the head of the BESYS development project was George L. Baldwin.

Related Research Articles

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History of operating systems Aspect of computing history

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IBM 704 Vacuum tube computer system

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IBM 1620 IBM scientific computer released in 1959

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IBM 650 Vacuum tube computer system

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IBM 7090 Second generation (c. 1959) scientific mainframe

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IBM 701 Vacuum tube computer system

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IBM 709 vacuum tube computer system

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ICT 1900 was a family of mainframe computers released by International Computers and Tabulators (ICT) and later International Computers Limited (ICL) during the 1960s and '70s. The 1900 series was notable for being one of the few non-American competitors to the IBM System/360, enjoying significant success in the European and British Commonwealth markets.

IBM System/360 Model 20

The IBM System/360 Model 20 is the smallest member of the IBM System/360 family announced in November 1964. The Model 20 supports only a subset of the System/360 instruction set, with binary numbers limited to 16 bits and no floating point. In later years it would have been classified as a 16-bit minicomputer rather than a mainframe, but the term "minicomputer" was not current, and in any case IBM wanted to emphasize the compatibility of the Model 20 rather than its differences from the rest of the System/360 line. It does, however, have the full System/360 decimal instruction set, that allows for addition, subtraction, product, and dividend of up to 31 decimal digits.

DATAmatic 1000

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References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Drummond, R.E (1987). "BESYS Revisited" (PDF). AFIPS Conference Proceedings. 56: 805–814.
  2. Belzer, Jack; Holzman, Albert G.; Kent, Allen (March 1, 1976). Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology: Volume 3. CRC Press. p. 210. ISBN   9780824722531 . Retrieved May 26, 2017.