BOS/360

Last updated
Basic Operating System/360 (BOS/360)
IBM logo.svg
Developer IBM General Products Division (GPD)
Working stateDiscontinued
Initial releaseOctober 1965;57 years ago (1965-10)
Marketing target IBM mainframe computers
Available in English
Platforms System/360
License Proprietary

Basic Operating System/360 (BOS/360) was an early IBM System/360 operating system.

Contents

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 the low end of the System/360 line when it became apparent that OS/360 was not able to run on the smallest systems. BPS (Basic Programming support) was designed to run on systems with a minimum of 8 KB of main storage and no disk. BOS was intended for disk systems with at least 8 KB and one 2311 disk drive. [1] DOS and TOS were developed from BOS for systems with at least 16 KB and either disks (DOS) or tape drives only (TOS).

BOS was released in October 1965, nearly two years before OS/360, [2] thus BOS was the only disk based operating system available at launch for a machine that was marketed as disk based.

Components

BOS consisted of the following components:

IBM 1070 Process Communication Supervisor

The IBM 1070 Process Communication Supervisor was a dedicated process control system that ran as an extension under BOS "Relying on the BOS supervisor to handle ordinary physical and logical I/O operations (i. e., for cards, disk, etc.), the PC supervisor is specialized to the process control aspects of the user's program." [3]

Related Research Articles

A disk operating system (DOS) is a computer operating system that resides on and can use a disk storage device, such as a floppy disk, hard disk drive, or optical disc. A disk operating system provides a file system for organizing, reading, and writing files on the storage disk. Strictly, this definition does not include any other functionality, so it does not apply to more complex OSes, such as Microsoft Windows, and is more appropriately used only for older generations of operating systems.

IBM mainframes are large computer systems produced by IBM since 1952. During the 1960s and 1970s, IBM dominated the large computer market. Current mainframe computers in IBM's line of business computers are developments of the basic design of the IBM System/360.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IBM System/360</span> IBM mainframe computer family (1964–1977)

The IBM System/360 (S/360) is a family of mainframe computer systems that was announced by IBM on April 7, 1964, and delivered between 1965 and 1978. It was the first family of computers designed to cover both commercial and scientific applications and to cover a complete range of applications from small to large. The design distinguished between architecture and implementation, allowing IBM to release a suite of compatible designs at different prices. All but the only partially compatible Model 44 and the most expensive systems use microcode to implement the instruction set, which features 8-bit byte addressing and binary, decimal, and hexadecimal floating-point calculations.

A direct-access storage device (DASD) is a secondary storage device in which "each physical record has a discrete location and a unique address". The term was coined by IBM to describe devices that allowed random access to data, the main examples being drum memory and hard disk drives. Later, optical disc drives and flash memory units are also classified as DASD.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of operating systems</span> Aspect of computing history

Computer operating systems (OSes) provide a set of functions needed and used by most application programs on a computer, and the links needed to control and synchronize computer hardware. On the first computers, with no operating system, every program needed the full hardware specification to run correctly and perform standard tasks, and its own drivers for peripheral devices like printers and punched paper card readers. The growing complexity of hardware and application programs eventually made operating systems a necessity for everyday use.

Job Control Language (JCL) is a name for scripting languages used on IBM mainframe operating systems to instruct the system on how to run a batch job or start a subsystem.

Disk Operating System/360, also DOS/360, or simply DOS, is the discontinued first member of a sequence of operating systems for IBM System/360, System/370 and later mainframes. It was announced by IBM on the last day of 1964, and it was first delivered in June 1966. In its time, DOS/360 was the most widely used operating system in the world.

Queued Telecommunications Access Method (QTAM) is an IBM System/360 communications access method incorporating built-in queuing. QTAM was an alternative to the lower level Basic Telecommunications Access Method (BTAM).

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 under control of IBM Basic Programming Support (BPS/360) on systems with only 8 KB of main memory, and only a card reader, a card punch, and a printer for input/output — thus the word "Basic". However, the full name and the initialism "BAL" almost immediately attached themselves in popular use to all assembly-language dialects on the System/360 and its descendants. BAL for BPS/360 was introduced with the System/360 in 1964.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IBM System/360 Model 30</span> IBM computer model from 1960s

The IBM System/360 Model 30 was a low-end member of the IBM System/360 family. It was announced on April 7, 1964, shipped in 1965, and withdrawn on October 7, 1977. The Model 30 was designed by IBM's General Systems Division in Endicott, New York, and manufactured in Endicott and other IBM manufacturing sites outside of U.S.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IBM CP-40</span>

CP-40 was a research precursor to CP-67, which in turn was part of IBM's then-revolutionary CP[-67]/CMS – a virtual machine/virtual memory time-sharing operating system for the IBM System/360 Model 67, and the parent of IBM's VM family. CP-40 ran multiple instances of client operating systems – particularly CMS, the Cambridge Monitor System, built as part of the same effort. Like CP-67, CP-40 and the first version of CMS were developed by IBM's Cambridge Scientific Center (CSC) staff, working closely with MIT researchers at Project MAC and Lincoln Laboratory. CP-40/CMS production use began in January 1967. CP-40 ran on a unique, specially modified IBM System/360 Model 40.

In IBM mainframe operating systems, basic partitioned access method (BPAM) is an access method for libraries, called partitioned datasets (PDSes) in IBM terminology. BPAM is used in OS/360, OS/VS2, MVS, z/OS, and others.

The history of IBM mainframe operating systems is significant within the history of mainframe operating systems, because of IBM's long-standing position as the world's largest hardware supplier of mainframe computers. IBM mainframes run operating systems supplied by IBM and by third parties.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OS/360 and successors</span> Operating system for IBM S/360 and later mainframes

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 and Input/Output Control System (IOCS) packages for the IBM 7090/7094 and even more so by the PR155 Operating System for the IBM 1410/7010 processors. It was one of the earliest operating systems to require the computer hardware to include at least one direct access storage device.

Input/Output Control System (IOCS) is any of several packages on early IBM entry-level and mainframe computers that provided low level access to records on peripheral equipment. IOCS provides functionality similar to 1960s packages from other vendors, e.g., File Control Processor (FCP) in RCA 3301 Realcom Operating System, GEFRC in GECOS, and to the later Record Management Services (RMS) in DEC VAX/VMS

The IBM 2361 Large Capacity Storage (LCS) is an optional component of the IBM System/360 models 50, 65 (when not being used as a multiprocessor), and 75 computers. Storage is implemented using magnetic cores; the cycle time is 8 microseconds and the access time is 3.6 microseconds. This component is also called IBM 2361 Core Storage or IBM 2361 Large Core Storage. It provides additional main storage with a slower access time than the standard storage of the machine—for example its 8μsec compares to 750nsec for main storage on the Model 65.

IBM Basic Programming Support/360 (BPS), originally called Special Support, was a set of standalone programs for System/360 mainframes with a minimum of 8 KiB of memory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IBM System/360 Model 20</span> Low-end IBM computer model from 1960s

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.

Attached Support Processor (ASP) was an implementation of loosely coupled multiprocessing for IBM's OS/360 operating system. IBM later changed the name to Asymmetrical multiProcessor but retained the acronym ASP.

References

  1. IBM Corporation (Sep 1967). IBM System/360 Basic Operating System Programmer's Guide (PDF). Retrieved Jan 24, 2022.
  2. Pugh, Emerson, et al. "IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems". MIT Press, 1991,p.331
  3. IBM Corporation (1965). IBM System/360 Basic Programming Support and Basic Operating System/360 Programming Systems Summary (C24-3420-0) (PDF).

Further reading