IBM Basic Programming Support/360 (BPS), originally called Special Support, was a set of
standalone programs for
System/360
The IBM System/360 (S/360) is a family of mainframe computer systems that was announced by IBM on April 7, 1964, and delivered between 1965 and 1978. It was the first family of computers designed to cover both commercial and scientific applica ...
mainframes with a minimum of 8 KiB of memory.
BPS was developed by
IBM's General Products Division in
Endicott, New York. The package included "assemblers,
IOCS, compilers, sorts, and utilities but no governing control program." BPS components were introduced in a series of product announcements between 1964 and 1965.
BPS came in two versions — a strictly
punched card system and a
magnetic tape
Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic storage made of a thin, magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic film. It was developed in Germany in 1928, based on the earlier magnetic wire recording from Denmark. Devices that use magne ...
based system which, contrary to the stated goals, kept a small supervisor permanently resident.
Programming languages available were
IBM Basic Assembly Language,
IBM RPG, and
FORTRAN IV (subset). Tape FORTRAN required 16 KiB of memory.
There were also two versions of the BPS assembler, with the tape version having enhanced capabilities.
BPS also had a "disk" counterpart called
BOS/360. It also required 8 KiB of memory and supported disks such as the
IBM 2311.
The group responsible for BPS/BOS went on to develop
DOS/360 and TOS/360 as a supposed "interim" solution when it became evident that
OS/360 would be too large to run on 16 KiB systems.
BPS and BOS could be used to run standalone applications on a minimal System/360. One application was the ''System/360 Work Station'' for
remote job entry to a larger system.
See also
*
Punched card input/output
References
External links
IBM System/360 Basic Programming Support and IBM Basic Operating System/360 Programming Systems Summary C24-3420-0
IBM mainframe operating systems
Discontinued operating systems
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