Business Operating System
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Template:Update The Business Operating System, or BOS, is an early cross-platform operating system originally produced for Intel 8080 and Motorola 6800 computers, subsequently for Z80-based computers, and then later for most microcomputers of the 1980s. CAP Ltd, a British company and at the time one of the world's largest Information Technology consulting firms, developed BOS. CAP designed BOS and BOS applications for platform-independence. Its command line nature was its demise when graphical user interface operating systems became prevalent.
BOS applications were compiled to a p-code and interpreted as they ran. BOS had a p-code interpreter so efficient that programs, even the BOS/Writer word processor, ran sufficiently fast to satisfy users. Apart from a 2-kilobyte (Kb) host kernel, BOS is written in BOS/MicroCobol, a language based on COBOL but with system level programming constructs added and elements of structured programming, which bore a vague similarity to Pascal. In recent computing, programming languages such as Java have re-introduced the concept of p-code "virtual machines".
BOS required 48Kb of RAM and two 250Kb floppies, though it was more commonly deployed on machines equipped with 64 kilobytes of RAM and a hard drive. A computer with 128Kb RAM and a 10-megabyte (Mb) hard drive could run as many as five concurrent users. When the IBM PC XT came out in 1983, BOS served over eight concurrent dumb terminals on it. At the time, this made BOS very attractive.
Software that ran under BOS included BOS/Finder (database), BOS/Planner (spreadsheet), BOS/Writer (word processor) and BOS/AutoClerk (report generation). Companies sold various BOS accounting software suites in the UK and U.S.. In the U.K., BOS accounting packages were considered to be the industry standard by most accountants.
With user-management tools and application programming interfaces, BOS was considered an alternative even to the platform-specific operating systems on machines such as the PDP-11 and the Vax.
Despite, or because of its command line interface, BOS remains popular with medium to large organisations in the UK.