NOS (software)
Encyclopedia
NOS was an operating system
with time-sharing
capabilities, written by Control Data Corporation
in the 1970s.
NOS ran on the 60-bit
CDC 6000 series
of mainframe computer
s and their successors. NOS replaced the earlier CDC Kronos operating system of the 1970s. NOS was intended to be the sole operating system for all CDC machines, a fact CDC promoted heavily. NOS was replaced with NOS/VE on the 64-bit
Cyber-180
systems in the mid 1980s.
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
with time-sharing
Time-sharing
Time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking. Its introduction in the 1960s, and emergence as the prominent model of computing in the 1970s, represents a major technological shift in the history of computing.By allowing a large...
capabilities, written by Control Data Corporation
Control Data Corporation
Control Data Corporation was a supercomputer firm. For most of the 1960s, it built the fastest computers in the world by far, only losing that crown in the 1970s after Seymour Cray left the company to found Cray Research, Inc....
in the 1970s.
NOS ran on the 60-bit
60-bit
Computers with 60-bit words include the CDC 6000 series and some of the CDC Cyber series....
CDC 6000 series
CDC 6000 series
The CDC 6000 series was a family of mainframe computers manufactured by Control Data Corporation in the 1960s. It consisted of CDC 6400, CDC 6500, CDC 6600 and CDC 6700 computers, which all were extremely rapid and efficient for their time...
of mainframe computer
Mainframe computer
Mainframes are powerful computers used primarily by corporate and governmental organizations for critical applications, bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing.The term originally referred to the...
s and their successors. NOS replaced the earlier CDC Kronos operating system of the 1970s. NOS was intended to be the sole operating system for all CDC machines, a fact CDC promoted heavily. NOS was replaced with NOS/VE on the 64-bit
64-bit
64-bit is a word size that defines certain classes of computer architecture, buses, memory and CPUs, and by extension the software that runs on them. 64-bit CPUs have existed in supercomputers since the 1970s and in RISC-based workstations and servers since the early 1990s...
Cyber-180
CDC Cyber
The CDC Cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers were the primary products of Control Data Corporation during the 1970s and 1980s. In their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing...
systems in the mid 1980s.