| Definitions of 'gcos' |
The New Hacker's Dictionary |
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1. gcos
A quick-and-dirty
clone of System/360 DOS that emerged from GE around
1970; originally called GECOS (the General Electric Comprehensive Operating
System). Later kluged to support primitive timesharing and transaction
processing. After the buyout of GE's computer division by Honeywell, the
name was changed to General Comprehensive Operating System (GCOS). Other
OS groups at Honeywell began referring to it as ‘God's Chosen
Operating System’, allegedly in reaction to the GCOS crowd's
uninformed and snotty attitude about the superiority of their product. All
this might be of zero interest, except for two facts: (1) The GCOS people
won the political war, and this led in the orphaning and eventual death of
Honeywell Multics, and (2) GECOS/GCOS left one
permanent mark on Unix. Some early Unix systems at Bell Labs used GCOS
machines for print spooling and various other services; the field added to
/etc/passwd to carry GCOS ID information was called
the GECOS field and survives today as
the pw_gecos member used for the user's
full name and other human-ID information. GCOS later played a major role
in keeping Honeywell a dismal also-ran in the mainframe market, and was
itself mostly ditched for Unix in the late 1980s when Honeywell began to
retire its aging big iron designs.
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Definitions of gcos
