BOS/360
| Company type | Operating system |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer software |
| Founded | October 1965 |
| Headquarters | Endicott, New York , United States |
| Products | Operating system for IBM System/360 |
Basic Operating System/360 (BOS/360) represented one of the initial IBM System/360 operating system offerings.
Origin
Developed by IBM's General Products Division (GPD) located in Endicott, New York, BOS was among four System/360 operating system variants designed to serve the lower-end models of the System/360 series. Since OS/360 was incompatible with the smallest configurations, IBM created alternatives to fill this gap. BPS catered to systems possessing at least 8 KB of memory without disk storage, whereas BOS required a disk-based environment with a minimum of 8 KB memory and at least one 2311 disk drive. Subsequent systems like DOS and TOS evolved from BOS, supporting machines equipped with a minimum of 16 KB memory either using disks (DOS) or exclusively tape drives (TOS).
Introduced in October 1965, nearly two years prior to OS/360’s release, BOS stood as the sole disk-oriented operating system available upon launch for System/360 models marketed with disk capabilities.
Components
The BOS package comprised these elements:
- Control software:
- The supervisor component.
- Job control enabling sequential processing of jobs submitted via the card reader.
- The IPL loader mechanism.
- System Service Utilities:
- The Linkage Editor tool.
- The Librarian module, which managed a core-image library and optionally supported macro and relocatable libraries.
- The "Load System Program," a system generation utility used to construct a disk-based BOS installation from punched cards.
- IBM-provided application programs installable alongside BOS:
- Language translators including an Assembler and an RPG compiler; later expansions incorporated compilers for FORTRAN IV and COBOL.
- Autotest, a utility for debugging purposes.
- Sort/Merge application.
- File transfer utilities facilitating copying between various devices and data formats.
- Remote Job Entry functionality to submit workloads to remote System/360 installations and retrieve results.
- Data Management: supervisor provisions for Physical IOCS alongside macros enabling Logical IOCS within user-developed programs.
IBM 1070 Process Communication Supervisor
The specialized IBM 1070 Process Communication Supervisor operated as an extension under BOS, functioning as a process control system. It utilized the BOS supervisor’s capabilities for standard physical and logical I/O operations involving cards, disks, and similar devices, while concentrating on managing process control functions within user applications.
Further reading
- Pugh, Emerson W.; Johnson, Lyle R.; Palmer, John H. (1991). IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems, Cambridge: MIT Press. (pp. 321–345)