Time Sharing Operating System, or TSOS, is a discontinued

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

for

RCA The RCA Corporation was a major American electronics company, which was founded as the Radio Corporation of America in 1919. It was initially a patent pool, patent trust owned by General Electric (GE), Westinghouse Electric Corporation, Westin ...

mainframe computer A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterpris ...

s of the Spectra 70 series. TSOS was originally designed in 1968 for the Spectra 70/46, a modified version of the 70/45. TSOS quickly evolved into the Virtual Memory Operating System (VMOS) by 1970. VMOS continued to be supported on the later RCA 3 and RCA 7 computer systems. RCA was in the computer business until 1971 when it sold its computer business to

Sperry Corporation Sperry Corporation was a major American equipment and electronics company whose existence spanned more than seven decades of the 20th century. Sperry ceased to exist in 1986 following a prolonged hostile takeover bid engineered by Burroug ...

. Sperry renamed TSOS to

VS/9 VS/9 is a computer operating system for the UNIVAC Series 90 mainframes (90/60, 90/70, and 90/80), used during the late 1960s through 1980s. The 90/60 and 90/70 were repackaged Univac 9700 computers. After the RCA acquisition by Sperry, it ...

and continued to market it into the early 1980s. In the mid seventies, an enhanced version of TSOS called BS2000 was offered by the German company Siemens. While Sperry – now

Unisys Unisys Corporation is an American multinational information technology (IT) services and consulting company headquartered in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. It provides digital workplace solutions, cloud, applications, and infrastructure solutions ...

– discontinued

, the BS2000 variant, now called BS2000/OSD, is still offered by

Fujitsu is a Japanese multinational information and communications technology equipment and services corporation, established in 1935 and headquartered in Tokyo. Fujitsu is the world's sixth-largest IT services provider by annual revenue, and the la ...

and used by their mainframe customers primarily in Germany and other European countries. As the name suggests, TSOS provided

time sharing In computing, time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users at the same time by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking.DEC Timesharing (1965), by Peter Clark, The DEC Professional, Volume 1, Number 1 Its emergence ...

features. Similar to CTSS it provided a common user interface for both time sharing and batch, which was a big advantage over IBM's

OS/360 OS/360, officially known as IBM System/360 Operating System, is a discontinued batch processing operating system developed by IBM for their then-new System/360 mainframe computer, announced in 1964; it was influenced by the earlier IBSYS/IBJOB ...

or its successors MVS, OS/390 and

z/OS z/OS is a 64-bit operating system for IBM z/Architecture mainframes, introduced by IBM in October 2000. It derives from and is the successor to OS/390, which in turn was preceded by a string of MVS versions.Starting with the earliest: ...

References

External links

TSOS manuals at Bitsavers
{{Time-sharing operating systems Time-sharing operating systems Proprietary operating systems Discontinued operating systems UNIVAC software 1968 software

See also

References

External links