Talk:OS4000

Notability[edit]

Hi - what will it take to get the "not meet notability" nonsense to be removed? OS4000 was a major milestone in British computing, and was known/used by literally thousands at (for instance) University College London, and well as hacked in a "I watched War-Games and bought a modem" kind of way by (again) hundreds of hackers. See http://www.crypticide.com/dropsafe/article/3197 for discussion I have fostered on this matter. -- alecm —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.68.43.14 (talk) 22:58, 2 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Well, the tag itself says: "help to establish notability by adding reliable, secondary sources about the topic" and I can't help but agree with whoever added that tag. The article has only one reference (and that is related to the Series 63 port). Are readers supposed to take it on faith that the rest of the article is based on verifiable facts, that the OS has an illustrious history, that the nucleus architecture ever existed, that the filesystem was as described. Wikipedia relies on the verifiability of its information, so please add references from reliable sources to support claims that it was "a major milestone in British computing, and was known/used by literally thousands" for example. Astronaut (talk) 18:14, 3 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

OS4000 will be known by many thousands of students who went through UCL and Keele Universities in the 1980's and also by all the Engineering and Physics postgrads who used the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC)-provided systems in most UK universities. It was used as the basis for an Operating Systems course in the Computer Science dept at UCL in the early 1980's at least (and possibly later too). It will be very little known outside the UK, and was pretty much dead by the time the WWW started up, which explains the difficulty in finding references. Nucleus references are (correctly) included on the GEC 4000 series hardware platform page to which this page refers, but it would do no harm to include the external reference here too. Sadg4000 (talk) 07:29, 7 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Is there an article in a journal or magazine that talks about this OS? That would be a good source. Dethlock99 (talk) 18:04, 9 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Would you accept scanned documentation? -- alecm —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.68.43.14 (talk) 00:43, 13 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

References can be to publications (even if not online - plenty of those referred to in Wikipedia). If it's not a publication and not online, then you'd probably need to make it online by scanning it and uploading somewhere stable (copyright permitting). Sadg4000 (talk) 10:13, 13 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Architecture[edit]

To say "The architecture of OS4000 is very heavily based around the features of the platform it runs on" tells the reader nothing. OS4000 has already been described as a proprietary operating system. All such operating systems are specific to the platform that they run on.

Much of the content under this heading describes Nucleus not OS4000.

From my experience as a System Manager and beta-tester of OS4000 systems, I know that there is provision for running privileged mode code on the platform (later the article also claims that the AIDA task is privileged). Operations such as Mounting & Dismounting disks and Formatting disks may only be performed by System Managers or Operators.

Only a System Manager could access disks at a sector level outside of the filing system (necessary to repair Filing System corruptions).

Only a System Manager could Add or Remove a User to or from the system and associate privileges for that user. A System Manager could reset a user's password and forcibly log a user off. A System Manager could allocate a user to a priority group that controlled how much CPU resource was available compared to other users.

A System Manager could decipher crash dumps and if required identify malicious users.

Further a System Manager could have a 'super' level of system access not normally required to perform daily operations.

A different specialised user could place operating system processes under test for debugging purposes on a running system. As I had the source for the operating system, I was able to use this in a meaningful way. — Preceding unsigned comment added by BlueWren0123 (talk • contribs) 11:53, 9 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]