BOS/360 (Basic Operating System/360) was an early IBM System/360 operating system.
It came in 2 versions, 4K BOS and 8K BOS. The latter evolved into DOS/360, which some[who?] suggest was really version 6 of BOS. BOS in turn was preceded by BPS, Basic Programming Support.
BOS was the first disk based operating system[citation needed] and was released in early 1965. 4K BOS was for machines with 8 or 16K of core storage and, as its name implies, assembled a Supervisor of about 4K. With very few exceptions, all of the early 360s (but not the model 20) shipped with 2, 3 or more IBM 2311 disk drives.[citation needed] Thus BOS was the only disk based operating system available at launch for a machine that was marketed as disk based. The Supervisor was IPL'd and the date and time were entered by the operator on the console typewriter.
The operating system disk contained a source language library, a macro library and a core image library. The macro library included all the options for the supervisor, which was assembled by the 360 assembly language compiler, the only language available at the time, although RPG came a little later. The other crucial component was the Job Controller, which was fed by punched cards using Job Control Language (JCL).
References
- IBM System/360 Basic Programming Support and Basic Operating System/360 Programming Systems Summary. C24-3420-0. 1965.
- http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/360/bos_bps/C24-3420-0_BPS_BOS_Programming_Systems_Summary_Aug65.pdf
This article is based on material taken from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing prior to 1 November 2008 and incorporated under the "relicensing" terms of the GFDL, version 1.3 or later.
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