The design and implementation of a portable operating system for microcomputers

  • H.T. Esendal

    Student thesis: Doctoral ThesisDoctor of Philosophy

    Abstract


    Communication and portability are the two main problems facing the user. An operating system, called PORTOS, was developed to solve these problems for users on dedicated microcomputer systems.

    Firstly, an interface language was defined, according to the anticipated requirements and behaviour of its potential users. Secondly, the PORTOS operating system was developed as a processor for this language.

    The system is currently running on two minicomputers of highly different architectures. PORTOS achieves its portability through its high-level design, and implementation in CORAL66.

    The interface language consists of a set of user cotnmands and system responses. Although only a subset has been implemented, owing to time and manpower constraints, promising results were achieved regarding the usability of the language, and its portability.
    Date of AwardApr 1981
    Original languageEnglish
    SupervisorI.H. Gould (Supervisor)

    Keywords

    • operating systems
    • portability
    • high-level languages
    • microcomputers

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