GECOS (operating system)

Gecos (General Electric Comprehensive Operating System) refer to an operating system that was developed by General Electric between 1962 and 1964 for the 36 -bit GE -635 mainframe. Contrary to rumor this was not a clone of IBM's System/360. The architecture of the GE -635 is different than in gecos and was far more demanding than IBM's OS/360 operating system. The second-generation 1968 features were support for time-sharing and batch processing. After the sale of the computer division to Honeywell 1970 gecos was renamed GCOS.

Miscellaneous

A data field in the / etc / passwd file on Unix operating systems, in which no system-related information is stored about the user, such as first and last name is also called gecos. The field name refers to the operating system of the General Electric Company, that is not for its own abbreviation. The gecos field was added in 1970 at Bell Labs, to allow the communication of a UNIX system with the other computers, which used the General Electric Comprehensive Operating System. The gecos field is today, as it often only the name is stored, also referred to as the field name.