GCOS: /jee'kohs/ n. A quick-and-dirtyclone 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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