Last Updated on: 10th November 2023, 04:42 pm
Web site: www.df.ru/~andos/ (not active)
Origin: Russia
Category: workstation
Desktop environment: CLI
Architecture: Electronika BK
Based on: DOS
Wikipedia: ANDOS
Media: Install
The last version | Released: 3.30 | 1997
ANDOS – a disk operating system for Soviet personal computers BK-0010, BK-0010-01, BK-0011 and BK-0011M. Initially, the system was created by Sergey Avdyushin (the author of the idea) and Alexei Nadezhin. The latest version of the operating system 3.30 was released in 1997.
The system had the following features:
– Allowed to run old programs for BK-0010
– Calls of old programs to the tape recorder were redirected to the disk drive
– The file system used was FAT12, compatible with MS-DOS.
– For compatibility with other operating systems for BC, the MicroDOS file system, which was widely used at that time on BC, was supported for reading.
– A single compatible environment was created on all computers of the model range; ROM from BK-0010 was loaded into computers BK-0011 and BK-0011M for compatibility with old programs.
– It allowed to work with several drives (up to 4) and a hard disk (which could be divided into 63 logical partitions). The main external media were 800 KB floppy disks. The system automatically, without installing additional drivers, could work with various formats of floppy disks and disk drives (1 or 2-sided, regular or double density, etc.).
– If there was enough memory, a virtual ramdisk was created.
– Subdirectories were supported in recent versions.
– The OS had several multifunctional graphical shells with a number of loadable modules (initially, the SHELL shell was used, which later gave way to the Norton Commander-like Disk Master shell. Third-party programmers also developed the NET11 network shell (Authors Chaban S.P. and Ryabtsev D.Yu.) .
The format of the file name depended on the media and file system. On FAT16 disks, the name format was 8 (name) + 3 (extension), for files on magnetic tape – a standard file name for BK of 16 characters, for disks in MicroDOS format, available only for reading – from 14 characters, for RT- 11, which could be accessed through loadable modules – 6(name)+3(extension). When old programs accessed downloadable files with a long name, they were automatically redirected to a file with a shortened name stored on disk.
ANDOS took from 4 (no GUI) to 16 KB, while allowing the rest of the memory to be used for an ramdisk. Many useful utilities have been developed for ANDOS, many of which were bundled with the distribution.