2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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GCOS
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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/jeekohs/ , n. A quick-and-dirty clone of System/360 DOS that emerged from
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GE around 1970; originally called GECOS (the General Electric Comprehensive
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Operating System). Later kluged to support primitive timesharing and
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transaction processing. After the buyout of GE's computer division by
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Honeywell, the name was changed to General Comprehensive Operating System
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(GCOS). Other OS groups at Honeywell began referring to it as God's Chosen
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Operating System , allegedly in reaction to the GCOS crowd's uninformed and
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snotty attitude about the superiority of their product. All this might be of
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zero interest, except for two facts: (1) The GCOS people won the political
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war, and this led in the orphaning and eventual death of Honeywell Multics ,
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and (2) GECOS/GCOS left one permanent mark on Unix. Some early Unix systems
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at Bell Labs used GCOS machines for print spooling and various other
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services; the field added to /etc/passwd to carry GCOS ID information was
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called the GECOS field and survives today as the pw_gecos member used for
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the user's full name and other human-ID information. GCOS later played a
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major role in keeping Honeywell a dismal also-ran in the mainframe market,
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and was itself mostly ditched for Unix in the late 1980s when Honeywell
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began to retire its aging big iron designs.
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