The Lancaster University Operating System
A J T Colin · ITNOW · 1968
The use of computers, even in small, ‘new’ universities, has increased to such an extent that daily loads of 300 to 500 jobs are commonplace at university computer laboratories. Good automatic operating systems are clearly necessary to handle such flows of work. Manufacturers have now begun to realise this fact and to supply operating systems as part of their standard software. Unfortunately these systems are designed for use over a very wide spread of problem types and over a complete range of ‘compatible’ machines. This makes them bulky, difficult to use and inefficient when applied to any one particular configuration. A more satisfactory solution to this problem lies in the construction of an operating system which is ‘tailored’ to a particular installation and pattern of workload. In this paper, it is shown that so long as full use is made of existing, proved ideas and of software which is already available, such a system can be designed and written in a reasonably short time – three man-months in the present instance.