This document contains all the information necessary to design and implement an operating system for the Z502 computer. It describes the assignment for each part of the project, the development environment, and gives complete details on the machine architecture.
After reading this material the reader should be ready to start working on his/her operating system.
This manual has three chapters and four appendices. The first chapter is an Introduction that describes the project goals and introduces the machine and the development environment.
Chapters 2 and 3 describe each part of the project. They explain in detail what should be achieved in each phase, what software has been provided, and how to test the resulting system.
The appendices contain reference material. Appendix A describes the functional aspects of the Z502 computer architecture, that is, its interface to software. Appendix B describes the test programs provided, and gives details on how to use them. Appendix C gives definitions of the system calls, while Appendix D describes the scheduler_printer and its interface.
The Z502 Project, Release 1.0 was written in the Summer of 1990. The inspiration for the project came from the "cSOS Project" developed at Harvard and the Wang Institute. The goals of cSOS are somewhat different from that required at WPI. In particular:
While these are worthy goals, they don't work for an evening course at WPI, where students come from diverse locations, and may rarely see the campus. It's not to be expected that they can get together to work in teams; similarly, it's unreasonable to expect students to travel to Worcester just to log on a machine or to require netting into that particular machine.