DEMOS (original) (raw)

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Unix-like operating system from the Soviet era

Operating system

DEMOS

DEMOS-DVK 3.0, 2011
Developer Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, DEMOS Co-operative
OS family Unix-like (BSD)
Working state Discontinued
Initial release 1982; 43 years ago (1982)
Final release 2.x / 1991; 34 years ago (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

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.

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,[1] 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.

  1. ^ "THE WHOLE TRUTH ABOUT DEMOS". web.archive.org (in Russian). December 1998. Retrieved 2 January 2025. [DEMOS 2.x] could work in two encodings KOI-8 and YUKOD