PRIMOS
PRIMOS was an operating system, which was made in the 1970s, especially for Prime Computer by Prime Computer, Inc..
History
Mid-1980s, won the operating system quickly gaining popularity and was a commonly used operating system in the more usual mini computers. With the advent of personal computers and the extinction of the minicomputer, the Prime brand disappeared in the early 1990s. Prime Computer identified himself sometimes referred to as " PR1ME " as well as PRIMOS Pr1mos. Very early versions of PRIMOS ( revision 6) were originally DOS and later called DOSVM but PRIMOS was the introduction of the name. There have been many releases of PRIMOS. The last official release ( 24.0.0.R52 ) took place on 3 July 1997. Until then, the OS has been kept up to date by the company Peritus. Peritus put to a former PRIMOS software engineers.
Properties
An interesting feature of PRIMOS was that it was mostly written as Unix in a high level language, with library functions in assembly language. No if - then - else, no native Zeichenkettenart no pointers, etc. are possible: First, this language was Fortran IV, which represented an unfavorable choice from the standpoint of computer science. However, FORTRAN was the language that was familiar to most engineers. And engineers were the largest target group with a correspondingly large market for prime in the early years. Later, the version 18, PRIMOS been rewritten in the programming language PL / P, a subset of PL / 1
The source code for PRIMOS, customers were disclosed, so that customers could customize with knowledge of Fortran and PL / P the OS on your needs. From Issue 19 of 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 significantly.
It was guaranteed that all programs run on all current CPUs (depending on available resources ), and on all upcoming CPUs. The PRIMOS character set generally consisted ASCII, with the particularity that the 8th ( parity) bit was always set. PRIMOS systems have become rare, but there are still some 2006 running systems, including a number of Prime computers, which hold in the UK with customized PRIMOS a telecommunications network run.