GCOS
:GCOS:: /jee'kohs/ n. A quick-and-dirty
clone
of System/360 DOS that
emerged from GE around 1970; originally called GECOS (the General
Electric Comprehensive Operating System). Later kluged to support
primitive timesharing and transaction processing. After the buyout of
GE's computer division by Honeywell, the name was changed to General
Comprehensive Operating System (GCOS). 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. All this might be of zero interest, except
for two facts: (1) The GCOS people won the political war, and this led
in the orphaning and eventual death of Honeywell Multics
, and (2)
GECOS/GCOS left one permanent mark on Unix. 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. GCOS later
played a major role in keeping Honeywell a dismal also-ran in the
mainframe market, and was itself mostly ditched for Unix in the late
1980s when Honeywell began to retire its aging big iron
designs.
Jargon File Version 4.3.1, 29 JUN 2001 =
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