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Sinclair QDOS
QDOS is the multitasking operating system found on the Sinclair QL personal computer and its clones. It was designed by Tony Tebby whilst working at Sinclair Research, as an in-house alternative to 68K/OS, which was later cancelled by Sinclair, but released by original authors GST Computer Systems. Its name is not regarded as an acronym and sometimes written as Qdos in official literature (see also the identically-pronounced word kudos). QDOS was implemented in Motorola 68000 assembly language, and on the QL, resided in 48 KB of ROM, consisting of either three 16 KB EPROM chips or one 32 KB and one 16 KB ROM chip. These ROMs also held the SuperBASIC interpreter, an advanced variant of BASIC programming language with structured programming additions. This also acted as the QDOS command-line interpreter.1 KB = 1024 bytes Facilities provided by QDOS included management of processes (or "jobs" in QDOS terminology), memory allocation, and an extensibl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tony Tebby
Tony Tebby is a computer programmer and the designer of Qdos, the computer operating system used in the Sinclair QL personal computer, while working as an engineer at Sinclair Research in the early 1980s. He left Sinclair Research in 1984 in protest at the premature launch of the QL, and formed QJUMP Ltd., a software house specializing in system software and utilities for the QL, based in Rampton, Cambridgeshire, England. Prior to this he worked at the Philips Research Laboratories in Redhill, Surrey where he worked on realtime image processing, using electronic hardware rather than software. At that time, software would have been either a batch program on the PRL mainframe computer or, within the departmental laboratory, the Commodore PET. Among the software developed by QJUMP was SuperToolkit II, a collection of extensions to Qdos and SuperBASIC; a Qdos floppy disk driver which became the ''de facto'' standard for the various third-party floppy disk interfaces sold for the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Acronym
An acronym is a word or name formed from the initial components of a longer name or phrase. Acronyms are usually formed from the initial letters of words, as in '' NATO'' (''North Atlantic Treaty Organization''), but sometimes use syllables, as in '' Benelux'' (short for ''Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg''). They can also be a mixture, as in '' radar'' (''Radio Detection And Ranging''). Acronyms can be pronounced as words, like '' NASA'' and '' UNESCO''; as individual letters, like ''FBI'', '' TNT'', and ''ATM''; or as both letters and words, like ''JPEG'' (pronounced ') and ''IUPAC''. Some are not universally pronounced one way or the other and it depends on the speaker's preference or the context in which it is being used, such as '' SQL'' (either "sequel" or "ess-cue-el"). The broader sense of ''acronym''—the meaning of which includes terms pronounced as letters—is sometimes criticized, but it is the term's original meaning and is in common use. Dictionary ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Small Multitasking System 2
{{disambiguation ...
Small may refer to: Science and technology * SMALL, an ALGOL-like programming language * Small (anatomy), the lumbar region of the back * ''Small'' (journal), a nano-science publication * <small>, an HTML element that defines smaller text Arts and entertainment Fictional characters * Small, in the British children's show Big & Small Other uses * Small, of little size * Small (surname) * "Small", a song from the album ''The Cosmos Rocks'' by Queen + Paul Rodgers See also * Smal (other) * List of people known as the Small * Smalls (other) Smalls may refer to: * Smalls (surname) * Camp Robert Smalls, a United States Naval training facility * Fort Robert Smalls, a Civil War redoubt * Smalls Creek, a northern tributary of the Parramatta River * Smalls Falls, a waterfall in Maine, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Minerva (QDOS Reimplementation)
Minerva is a reimplementation of Sinclair QDOS, the built-in operating system of the Sinclair QL line of personal computers. Written by Laurence Reeves in England, Minerva incorporates many bug fixes and enhancements to both QDOS and the SuperBASIC programming language. Later versions also provide the ability to multi-task several instances of the SuperBASIC interpreter, something not supported by QDOS. Minerva was distributed as a ROM chip on a daughterboard which replaces the QL's original ROM chips. A Minerva Mk. II daughterboard also incorporates an I²C interface and non-volatile real-time clock. As of version 1.89, the Minerva source code is licensed under the GNU General Public License. Other reimplementations of QDOS include SMS2 and SMSQ/E SMSQ/E is a computer operating system originally developed in France by Tony Tebby, the designer of the original QDOS operating system for the Sinclair QL personal computer. It began life as SMSQ, a QDOS-compatible version of SM ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Window (computing)
In computing, a window is a Graphical widget, graphical control element. It consists of a visual area containing some of the graphical user interface of the program it belongs to and is framed by a #Window decoration, window decoration. It usually has a rectangular shape that can overlap with the area of other windows. It displays the ''output'' of and may allow ''input'' to one or more Process (computing), processes. Windows are primarily associated with graphical displays, where they can be manipulated with a Pointer (graphical user interfaces), pointer by employing some kind of pointing device. Text-only displays can also support windowing, as a way to maintain multiple independent display areas, such as multiple buffers in Emacs. Text windows are usually controlled by keyboard, though some also respond to the mouse. A graphical user interface (GUI) using windows as one of its main "Interface metaphor, metaphors" is called a windowing system, whose main components are the disp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Device Driver
In computing, a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls a particular type of device that is attached to a computer or automaton. A driver provides a software interface to hardware devices, enabling operating systems and other computer programs to access hardware functions without needing to know precise details about the hardware being used. A driver communicates with the device through the computer bus or communications subsystem to which the hardware connects. When a calling program invokes a routine in the driver, the driver issues commands to the device (drives it). Once the device sends data back to the driver, the driver may invoke routines in the original calling program. Drivers are hardware dependent and operating-system-specific. They usually provide the interrupt handling required for any necessary asynchronous time-dependent hardware interface. Purpose The main purpose of device drivers is to provide abstraction by acting as a translator b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Filesystem
In computing, file system or filesystem (often abbreviated to fs) is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one large body of data with no way to tell where one piece of data stopped and the next began, or where any piece of data was located when it was time to retrieve it. By separating the data into pieces and giving each piece a name, the data are easily isolated and identified. Taking its name from the way a paper-based data management system is named, each group of data is called a " file". The structure and logic rules used to manage the groups of data and their names is called a "file system." There are many kinds of file systems, each with unique structure and logic, properties of speed, flexibility, security, size and more. Some file systems have been designed to be used for specific applications. For example, the ISO 9660 file system is desig ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Process (computing)
In computing, a process is the instance of a computer program that is being executed by one or many threads. There are many different process models, some of which are light weight, but almost all processes (even entire virtual machines) are rooted in an operating system (OS) process which comprises the program code, assigned system resources, physical and logical access permissions, and data structures to initiate, control and coordinate execution activity. Depending on the OS, a process may be made up of multiple threads of execution that execute instructions concurrently. While a computer program is a passive collection of instructions typically stored in a file on disk, a process is the execution of those instructions after being loaded from the disk into memory. Several processes may be associated with the same program; for example, opening up several instances of the same program often results in more than one process being executed. Multitasking is a method to allow mu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Command-line Interpreter
A command-line interpreter or command-line processor uses a command-line interface (CLI) to receive command (computing), commands from a user in the form of lines of text. This provides a means of setting parameters for the environment, invoking executables and providing information to them as to what actions they are to perform. In some cases the invocation is conditional based on conditions established by the user or previous executables. Such access was first provided by computer terminals starting in the mid-1960s. This provided an interactive environment not available with punched cards or other input methods. Today, many users rely upon graphical user interfaces and menu-driven interactions. However, some programming and maintenance tasks may not have a graphical user interface and use a command line. Alternatives to the command-line interface include text-based user interface menu (computing), menus (for example, IBM AIX SMIT), keyboard shortcuts, and various desktop met ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Programming Language
A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming language is usually split into the two components of syntax (form) and semantics (meaning), which are usually defined by a formal language. Some languages are defined by a specification document (for example, the C programming language is specified by an ISO Standard) while other languages (such as Perl) have a dominant implementation that is treated as a reference. Some languages have both, with the basic language defined by a standard and extensions taken from the dominant implementation being common. Programming language theory is the subfield of computer science that studies the design, implementation, analysis, characterization, and classification of programming languages. Definitions There are many considerations when defining ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
BASIC
BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College in 1963. They wanted to enable students in non-scientific fields to use computers. At the time, nearly all computers required writing custom software, which only scientists and mathematicians tended to learn. In addition to the program language, Kemeny and Kurtz developed the Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS), which allowed multiple users to edit and run BASIC programs simultaneously on remote terminals. This general model became very popular on minicomputer systems like the PDP-11 and Data General Nova in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Hewlett-Packard produced an entire computer line for this method of operation, introducing the HP2000 series in the late 1960s and continuing sales into the 1980s. Many early video games trace their ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
SuperBASIC
SuperBASIC is an advanced variant of the BASIC programming language with many structured programming additions. It was developed at Sinclair Research by Jan Jones during the early 1980s. Originally SuperBASIC was intended as the BASIC interpreter for a home computer code-named ''SuperSpectrum'', then under development. This project was later cancelled; however, SuperBASIC was subsequently included in the ROM firmware of the Sinclair QL microcomputer (announced in January 1984), also serving as the command line interpreter for the QL's QDOS operating system. It was one of the first second-generation BASICs to be integrated into a microcomputer's operating system (unlike BBC BASIC which preceded it in 1981), making the OS user-extendable—as done by Linus Torvalds in his formative years. Advanced features * RESPR for resident procedures, e.g. to extend QDOS * choice of parameters passed to procedures * procedures return parameters as chosen * IF - THEN - ELSE - END IF * FOR ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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