general electric comprehensive operating system

GCOS
GECOS
General Electric Comprehensive Operating System

   <operating system> /jee'kohs/ An {operating system} developed
   by {General Electric} from 1962; originally called GECOS (the
   General Electric Comprehensive Operating System).

   The GECOS-II operating system was developed by {General
   Electric} for the 36-bit {GE-635} in 1962-1964.  Contrary to
   rumour, GECOS was not cloned from {System/360} [{DOS/360}?] -
   the GE-635 architecture was very different from the {IBM 360}
   and GECOS was more ambitious than DOS/360.

   GE Information Service Divsion developed a large special
   multi-computer system that was not publicised because they did
   not wish {time sharing} customers to challenge their bills.
   Although GE ISD was marketing {DTSS} - the first commercial
   time sharing system - GE Computer Division had no license from
   Dartmouth and GE-ISD to market it to external customers, so
   they designed a time-sharing system to sell as a standard part
   of GECOS-III, which replaced GECOS-II in 1967.  GECOS TSS was
   more general purpose than DTSS, it was more a programmer's
   tool (program editing, e-mail on a single system) than a BASIC
   TSS.

   The {GE-645}, a modified 635 built by the same people, was
   selected by {MIT} and {Bell} for the {Multics} project.
   Multics' infancy was as painful as any infancy.  Bell pulled
   out in 1969 and later produced {Unix}.

   After the buy-out of GE's computer division by {Honeywell},
   GECOS-III was renamed GCOS-3 (General Comprehensive Operating
   System).  Other OS groups at Honeywell began referring to it
   as "God's Chosen Operating System", allegedly in reaction to
   the GCOS crowd's uninformed and snotty attitude about the
   superiority of their product.  [Can anyone confirm this?]
   GCOS won and this led in the orphaning and eventual death of
   Honeywell {Multics}.

   Honeywell also decided to launch a new product line called
   Level64, and later DPS-7.  It was decided to mainatin, at
   least temporarily, the 36-bit machine as top of the line,
   because GCOS-3 was so successfull in the 1970s.  The plan in
   1972-1973 was that GCOS-3 and Multics should converge.  This
   plan was killed by Honeywell management in 1973 for lack of
   resources and the inability of Multics, lacking {databases}
   and {transaction processing}, to act as a business operating
   system without a substantial reinvestment.

   The name "GCOS" was extended to all Honeywell-marketed product
   lines and GCOS-64, a completely different 32-bit operating
   system, significanctly inspired by Multics, was designed in
   France and Boston.  GCOS-62, another different 32-bit low-end
   DOS level was designed in Italy.  GCOS-61 represented a new
   version of a small system made in France and the new {DPS-6}
   16-bit {minicomputer} line got GCOS-6.

   When the intended merge between GCOS-3 and Multics failed, the
   Phoenix designers had in mind a big upgrade of the
   architecture to introduce {segmentation} and {capabilities}.
   GCOS-3 was renamed GCOS-8, well before it started to use the
   new features which were introduced in next generation
   hardware.

   The GCOS licenses were sold to the Japanese companies {NEC}
   and {Toshiba} who developed the Honeywell products, including
   GCOS, much further, surpassing the {IBM 3090} and {IBM 390}.

   When Honeywell decided in 1984 to get its top of the range
   machines from NEC, they considered running Multics on them but
   the Multics market was considered too small.  Due to the
   difficulty of porting the ancient Multics code they considered
   modifying the NEC hardware to support the Multics compilers.

   GCOS3 featured a good {Codasyl} {database} called IDS
   (Integrated Data Store) that was the model for the more
   successful {IDMS}.

   Several versions of transaction processing were designed for
   GCOS-3 and GCOS-8.  An early attempt at TP for GCOS-3, not
   taken up in Europe, assumed that, as in {Unix}, a new process
   should be started to handle each transaction.  IBM customers
   required a more efficient model where multiplexed {threads}
   wait for messages and can share resources.  Those features
   were implemented as subsystems.

   GCOS-3 soon acquired a proper {TP monitor} called Transaction
   Driven System (TDS).  TDS was essentially a Honeywell
   development.  It later evolved into TP8 on GCOS-8.  TDS and
   its developments were commercially successful and predated IBM
   {CICS}, which had a very similar architecture.

   GCOS-6 and GCOS-4 (ex-GCOS-62) were superseded by {Motorola
   68000}-based {minicomputers} running {Unix} and the product
   lines were discontinued.

   In the late 1980s Bull took over Honeywell and Bull's
   management choose Unix, probably with the intent to move out
   of hardware into {middleware}.  Bull killed the Boston
   proposal to port Multics to a platform derived from DPS-6.
   Very few customers rushed to convert from GCOS to Unix and new
   machines (of CMOS technology) are still to be introduced in
   1997 with GCOS-8.  GCOS played a major role in keeping
   Honeywell a dismal also-ran in the {mainframe} market.

   Some early Unix systems at {Bell Labs} used GCOS machines for
   print spooling and various other services.  The field added to
   "/etc/passwd" to carry GCOS ID information was called the
   "{GECOS field}" and survives today as the "pw_gecos" member
   used for the user's full name and other human-ID information.

   [{Jargon File}]

   (1998-04-23)