MOS operating system

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The MOS operating system (formally the 'Micro Operating System', but informally 'Mathis' Operating System', after the creator, Jim Mathis of SRI) was an operating system, originally for the PDP-11, used for a number of packet switches and similar network applications.

It supported processes (but not preemption, or creation/termination of processes - all processes were created at system linking time), queued inter-process messages, asynchronous I/O, and allocation and freeing of main memory; it had no file system or other support for secondary storage.

The original version was written in MACRO-11, the assembly language for the PDP-11; it was later re-written at least three times in C: at BBN, at UCL, and at Proteon. The latter version was portable, and also ran on the MC68000 and AMD29000.

All were somewhat extended from the original; the first two fairly extensively, the latter only to make use of up-calls in the I/O system, and to support pseudo-terminals.

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