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.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {GECOS}{Multics}]