Operating Systems

7 Pages 1764 Words

iable they also became more business orientated, although they were still very large and expensive. Because of the expenditure, the productiveness of the system had to be magnified as to ensure cost effectiveness. Job scheduling and the hiring of computer operators, ensured that the computer was used effectively and crucial time was not wasted.
Loading the compliers was a time consuming process as each complier was kept on a magnetic tape, which had to be manually mounted. This became a problem particularly when there were multiple jobs to execute written in different languages (mainly in Assembly or Fortran). Each card and tape had to individually be installed, executed then removed for each program. To combat this problem, the Batch System was developed. This meant that all the jobs were grouped into batches and read by one computer (usually an IBM 1401) then executed one after the other on the mainframe computer (usually an IBM 7094), eliminating the need to swap tapes or cards between programs.

The first operating system was designed by General Motors for the IBM 701. It was called Input/Output System, and consisted of a small set of code that provided a common set of procedures to be used to access the input and output devices. It also allowed each program to access the code when finished and accepted and loaded the next program. However, there was a need to improve the sharing of programs, which led to the development of the SOS (Share operating system), in 1959. The SOS provided buf...