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What does GCOS stand for? 

What does GCOS mean? This page is about the various possible meanings of the acronym, abbreviation, shorthand or slang term: GCOS.

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GCOS

General Cargo Operational System

Miscellaneous » Unclassified

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GCOS

General Causality Orientations Scale

Academic & Science » Psychology

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GCOS

General Comprehensive Operating System

Governmental » Military -- and more...

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GCOS

General Computer Operational System

Governmental » NASA

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GCOS

Global Change Of Support

Academic & Science » Geology

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GCOS

Global Climate Observing System

Academic & Science » Ocean Science -- and more...

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GCOS

Global Conference on Open Source

Community » Conferences

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GCOS

Google Chrome Operating System

Miscellaneous » Unclassified -- and more...

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GCOS

Ground Computer Operating System

Governmental » NASA

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What does GCOS mean?

GCOS
A quick-and-dirty clone 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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