The development project for the operating system at Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation was started when three major manufacturers (NEC, Hitachi, and Fujitsu), who were competing with each other to develop domestic models, joined forces in cooperation with the Electrical Communication Laboratories to develop a universal operating system that could offer versatility, flexibility, standardization, and compatibility, with the mission of improving the software development process.
In the development of the DIPS-100OS, such functions as virtual memory, multi-processor operation, and local memory support were investigated for implementation. The Electrical and Communication Laboratories of NTT and the member companies considered it difficult to develop all these functions in the first version and decided to postpone the multi-processor functions for the next version implementation. Their plan was to put the operating system into practical use through staged development by first developing 101OS as a prototype for further OS development, then developing 102OS for batch processing, 103OS as the standard OS for duplex operation, and then 104OS for multi-processor operation.