PRIMOS
| PRIMOS | |
|---|---|
| developer | Computer Vision, Corp. |
| License (s) | proprietary |
| Current version | 24.0.0.R52 (July 3, 1997) |
| Architecture (s) | Prime series 50 |
| http://www.computronics.com | |
PRIMOS is an operating system that was manufactured especially for Prime Computer by Prime Computer Inc. in the 1970s .
history
In the mid-1980s, the operating system quickly gained popularity and was a common operating system in the still common mini-computers . With the advent of personal computers and the extinction of minicomputers , the Prime brand disappeared in the early 1990s . Prime Computer sometimes referred to itself as "Pr1me" and PRIMOS as Pr1mos . Very early versions of PRIMOS ( Revision 6) were originally called DOS and later DOSVM , but PRIMOS remained the established name. There were many approvals from PRIMOS. The last, official edition (24.0.0.R52) took place on July 3, 1997. Until then, the OS was kept up to date by the company Peritus . For this, Peritus used former PRIMOS software engineers.
properties
An interesting characteristic of PRIMOS was that, like Unix, it was largely written in a high-level programming language, with library functions in assembly language . At first this language was Fortran IV, which was an unfavorable choice from the point of view of computer science : no pointers , no if-then-otherwise, no native character string type etc. possible. However, Fortran was the programming language most engineers were familiar with. And engineers were the largest target group for Prime in the first few years with a correspondingly large market. Later, around version 18, PRIMOS was rewritten in the PL / P programming language , a subset of PL / 1 .
The source code for PRIMOS was made available to customers so that customers with knowledge of Fortran and PL / P could adapt the OS to their needs. From issue 19 on, the main parts of PRIMOS were written in the programming languages SPL and Modula-2 , the use of PMA (Prime Macro Assembler) , Fortran IV and PL / P decreased considerably.
It was guaranteed that all programs would run on all current main processors (depending on the resources available) as well as on all future main processors. The PRIMOS character set generally consisted of ASCII , with the special feature that the 8th (parity) bit was always set. PRIMOS systems have become rare, but there are still some running systems in 2006, including a number of Prime computers , which in the UK have adapted PRIMOS to keep a telecommunications network running.
Web links
- Online emulators with guest access
- rev 19.2 Assembler, Fortran, Cobol, Pascal Compiler
- rev 20.2.8
- rev 21.0.6 Kermit
- rev 22.1.4 C compiler
- rev 23.4.Y2K.R1 assembler, Fortran, Cobol, Pascal, C and PL / I compiler
- rev 24.0 C compiler
- rev 18.3.1 assembler
- rev 23.4.Y2K.R1