Overview

MMOS, an operating system for the PDP-8/E with TD8E DECtape interface, was a very small system developed in Australia or New Zealand and supporting assembly and text editing on a 4K machine.

(Source: PDP8 FAQ)

Notes

From Simon Young (one of the original authors):

Well I was surprised to read this as I and a friend wrote this sort-of OS back in 1973 or 1974 when we are still at high school here in Christchurch, New Zealand. We were about 15 years old when we started playing about on the school’s PDP-8/E which had an 4K core memory and an ASR33 only but later they purchased a DECtape unit but couldn’t afford the extra 4K to run OS8 so we wrote this little MOS system to fit in 4K. The only thing is that we called it MOSS (Magtape Operating System Software) so I assume it’s the same thing as you called AMOS in your summary.

We did submit it to DECUS (#8-770 from memory), but I have never heard if anyone ever used it or anything else about it until stumbling across your website. Like many who used DEC systems I still have a great fondness for the company and its products, and I’m really pleased that people such as yourself keep the memory alive. I could kick myself for not keeping the old PDP-8 stuff I had, all I’ve got now is a copy of Introduction to Programming that I learnt PAL-III from (my first language) and a whole lot of PDP-11 stuff. I guess once you get past 40 you start looking back to the things that affected you when you were young, and the PDP-8 certainly had a great influence on my life (I’m a programmer). Anyway just for the record my name is Simon Young and my fellow author of the PDP-8 AMOS [MOSS] system was Ben Lewis. We were probably 16 or 17 when we wrote it.

(Source: http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/pdp8/history.html)

Images/Sources

No copies of MOSS are known to exist.