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Further reading □ Overview □ Project □ GEC □ Overview □ 4000 Series □ GEC 4070 Operating System □ Installation □ Communications □ GEC 4000 family □ Nucleus □ Functional spec. □ Babbage assembler □ Instruction set manual □ Nucleus manual □ Prime □ Overview □ The company □ Primos Operating System □ Systems □ Communications □ Software □ Prime and UMIST □ Office Automation □ The Schools Project □ Prime 750 □ FOREST preprocessor □ META II TWS □ META II definition □ FINGS graphics system □ ROOTS extended FORTRAN □ Prime User Manual
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Further reading ⇓

□ Overview □ Project
GEC
□ Overview □ 4000 Series □ GEC 4070 Operating System □ Installation □ Communications □ GEC 4000 family □ Nucleus □ Functional spec. □ Babbage assembler □ Instruction set manual □ Nucleus manual
Prime
□ Overview □ The company □ Primos Operating System □ Systems □ Communications □ Software □ Prime and UMIST □ Office Automation □ The Schools Project □ Prime 750 □ FOREST preprocessor □ META II TWS □ META II definition □ FINGS graphics system □ ROOTS extended FORTRAN □ Prime User Manual

GEC 4070 Operating System

The first GEC 4080 at Chilton system was delivered to the Atlas Computer Laboratory in the Autumn of 1974. Its role was to act as a Front End Processor to both the ICL 1906A and the IBM 360/195. GEC 2050 RJE stations in universities would be able to submit jobs to either machine. Initially it ran a core-based operating system called COS which was superseded by a disc-based operating system called DOS. By 1977, the team working on the ICF had several years experience with GEC systems albeit with a different operating system. A novel feature of both operating systems was a Nucleus, in hardware, that handled protection, low-level communication, interrupt handling and scheduling. It received the Queen's Award to Industry for its innovative design.

In 1976, GEC released OS4000, the multi-user operating system for the GEC 4000 series. It was a message-oriented operating system, that is, it consisted of a set of processes which performed tasks based on the messages it received. Although such operating systems usually appear in real-time environments, it also worked well as a general purpose operating system especially as the Nucleus provided good hardware support.

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