| QDOS The Sinclair 's proprietary . The origin of the name is uncertain (a weak pun on kudos, perhaps, as was on ). There was another OS around from the birth of personal computers called Q.D.O.S. - Quick And Dirty Operating System. QDOS might also stand for QL Data/Disk/Drive/Device Operating System. QDOS did the usual OS sorts of things, as well as multitasking. It was unusual in several ways. It treated all devices (serial ports, mouse ports, screen, , , keyboard, etc.) uniformly, so you could print a text file direct to disk or save a binary to the screen for example. Also logical channels could be assigned to particular physical devices. Output directed to a channel would go to the appropriate in/output. This also meant you could have many windows on screen (the QL booted up from internal ROMs with 3 windows - command line, output and program listing) all independent to some extent. Channels could be redirected without affecting the way the process sent or received the data. (1996-07-22) |