BOS/360

Basic Operating System/360 (BOS/360) was an early IBM System/360 operating system.

Origin

BOS was one of four System/360 Operating System versions developed by the IBM General Products Division (GPD) in

BOS was released in October 1965, nearly two years before OS/360,[2] thus BOS was the only disk based operating system available at launch for a machine that was marketed as disk based.

Components

BOS consisted of the following components:

• Control programs:
  • The supervisor.
  • Job control capable of running jobs sequentially from the card reader.
  • The
    IPL
    loader.
• System Service Programs:
  • The
    Linkage Editor
    .
  • The Librarian, supporting a core-image library, and optionally a macro library and a relocatable library.
  • The "Load System Program," a
    sysgen
    program to build a disk-resident BOS system from cards.
• IBM-supplied processing programs which could be installed with BOS:
  • Language translators, an
    FORTRAN IV and COBOL
    were added later.
  • Autotest, a debugging aid.
  • Sort/Merge.
  • Utility programs for file-to-file copy between devices and formats.
  • Remote Job Entry allowing the BOS system to submit jobs to a remote System/360 and receive output.
• Data Management, consisting of supervisor support for Physical
  IOCS
  , and macros for Logical IOCS which could be incorporated into the user's processing programs.

IBM 1070 Process Communication Supervisor

The IBM 1070 Process Communication Supervisor was a dedicated process control system that ran as an extension under BOS "Relying on the BOS supervisor to handle ordinary physical and logical I/O operations (i. e., for cards, disk, etc.), the PC supervisor is specialized to the process control aspects of the user's program."^[3]

References

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)