This made it easy to delegate otherwise complex operator tasks to non-technical office and shop-floor staff, especially given the intricacies of working with multiple floppy disks.
BOS had a p-code interpreter so efficient that programs, even the BOS/Writer word processor, ran sufficiently fast to satisfy users.
A technical subsystem of the system programming software was made available to programmers wanting to write their own p-code microcobol instruction extensions.
In the early 1980s, a minimum hardware BOS configuration might have comprised: North Star Horizon Z80 cpu 48Kbyte ram & 2x 5.25" SA-400 single-density double-sided minifloppy drive (each side used 35/40 tracks to give 176 Kb formatted, ie.
Frequent diskette swapping was required during a program run, a good programmer/operator could minimise these essential changes by detailed logical planning.
Not every business could quickly afford the newly available hard drives and many company managers were just reluctant to spend more and more upon what they already thought was expensive enough in the first place.
The genius of CAP, or CAP-CPP as it was more correctly called, was to anticipate these technical problems and the initial reservations of a suspicious middle-management, and this was essentially the success of BOS.
With user-management tools in the 1980s, and application programming interfaces in the mid-1980s, BOS was considered an alternative even to the platform-specific operating systems on machines such as the PDP-11 and the VAX.
The reemergence of BOS has escalated the number of users requested to be entered into the PMM system, and may require consistent server updating.