DEMOS
DEMOS (Dialogovaya Edinaya Mobilnaya Operatsionnaya Sistema: Russian: Диалоговая Единая Мобильная Операционная Система, ДЕМОС, lit. 'Interactive Unified Portable Operating System') is a Unix-like operating system developed in the Soviet Union. It is derived from Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix.
Developer | Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, DEMOS Co-operative |
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OS family | Unix-like (BSD) |
Working state | Discontinued |
Initial release | 1982 |
Final release | 2.x / 1991 |
Available in | Russian |
Platforms | SM-4, Elektronika-1082, Elektronika-85, BESM, ES EVM, VAX-11, PC/XT, Motorola 68020 |
Kernel type | Monolithic |
Default user interface | Command-line interface |
Preceded by | MNOS |
Development
DEMOS's development was initiated in the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy in Moscow in 1982, and development continued in cooperation from other institutes, and commercialized by DEMOS Co-operative which employed most key contributors to DEMOS and to its earlier alternative, MNOS (a clone of Version 6 Unix). MNOS and DEMOS version 1.x were gradually merged from 1986 until 1990, leaving the joint OS, DEMOS version 2.x, with support for different Cyrillic script character encoding (charsets) (KOI-8 and U-code, used in DEMOS 1 and MNOS, respectively).
Initially it was developed for SM-4 (a PDP-11/40 clone) and SM-1600. Later it was ported to Elektronika-1082, BESM, ES EVM, clones of VAX-11 (SM-1700), and several other platforms, including PC/XT, Elektronika-85 (a clone of DEC Professional), and several Motorola 68020-based microcomputers.
The development of DEMOS effectively ceased in 1991, when the second project of the DEMOS team, RELCOM, took priority.
The originally suggested name was УНАС (UNAS), which is a volapukish word play on Unix; "у них" ("u nih") in Russian means "with them", "у нас" ("u nas") means "with us". Management dismissed this idea in favor of a traditional alphabet soup.