ANDOS
| Company type | Operating system |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer software |
| Founded | 1990 |
| Founder | Alexey Nadezhin |
Key people | Sergey Kamnev |
| Products | Operating system for Electronika BK series |
ANDOS is a Russian-developed operating system designed for the Electronika BK computer series, including models BK-0010, BK-0011, and BK-0011M, all built on the PDP-11 architecture created by Digital Equipment Corporation. The system was initially developed in 1990 by Alexey Nadezhin, whose name it bears, with Sergey Kamnev joining the project later. Released to the public in 1992, ANDOS stood out as the sole widely adopted OS for BK machines that utilized an MS-DOS-compatible file system, specifically implementing the FAT12 format on 800 Kb floppy disk media. For the BK-0011 and BK-0011M variants, ANDOS was capable of simulating a BK-0010 environment by loading the latter’s ROM image into RAM. The operating system operated efficiently, requiring under 4 Kb of RAM in its most basic setup.
Supporting up to 64 disk drives or hard disk drive partitions, ANDOS also accommodated RAM disks and tape storage devices. It provided read-only compatibility with MicroDOS file system disks, a functionality that was made optional in subsequent releases by relocating it from the core OS to the file manager component.