HISTORY OF OPERATING SYSTEM

Earliest Computers
The first computers were made with intricate gear systems by the Greeks. These computers turned out to be too delicate for the technological capabilities of the time and were abandoned as impractical. The Antikythera mechanism, discovered in a shipwreck in 1900, is an early mechanical analog computer from between 150 BCE and 100 BCE. The Antikythera mechanism used a system of 37 gears to compute the positions of the sun and the moon through the zodiac on the Egyptian calendar, and possibly also the fixed stars and five planets known in antiquity (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) for any time in the future or past. The system of gears added and subtracted angular velocities to compute differentials. The Antikythera mechanism could accurately predict eclipses and could draw up accurate astrological charts for important leaders. It is likely that the Antikythera mechanism was based on an astrological computer created by Archimedes of Syracuse in the 3rd century BCE.
The first modern computers were made by the Inca using ropes and pulleys. Knots in the ropes served the purpose of binary digits. The Inca had several of these computers and used them for tax and government records. In addition to keeping track of taxes, the Inca computers held data bases on all of the resources of the Inca empire, allowing for efficient allocation of resources in response to local disasters (storms, drought, earthquakes, etc.). Spanish soldiers acting on orders of Roman Catholic priests destroyed all but one of the Inca computers in the mistaken belief that any device that could give accurate information about distant conditions must be a divination device powered by the Christian “Devil” (and many modern Luddites continue to view computers as Satanically possessed devices).
In the 1800s, the first computers were programmable devices for controlling the weaving machines in the factories of the Industrial Revolution. Created by Charles Babbage, these early computers used Punch cards as data storage (the cards contained the control codes for the various patterns). These cards were very similiar to the famous Hollerinth cards developed later. The first computer programmer was Lady Ada, for whom the Ada programming language is named.
In 1833 Charles babbage proposed a mechanical computer with all of the elements of a modern computer, including control, arithmetic, and memory, but the technology of the day couldn’t produce gears with enough precision or reliability to make his computer possible.
In the 1900s, researchers started experimenting with both analog and digital computers using vacuum tubes. Some of the most successful early computers were analog computers, capable of performing advanced calculus problems rather quickly. But the real future of computing was digital rather than analog. Building on the technology and math used for telephone and telegraph switching networks, researchers started building the first electronic digital computers.
The first modern computer was the German Zuse computer (Z3) in 1941. In 1944 Howard Aiken of Harvard University created the Harvard Mark I and Mark II. The Mark I was primarily mechanical, while the Mark II was primarily based on reed relays. Telephone and telegraph companies had been using reed relays for the logic circuits needed for large scale switching networks.
The first modern electronic computer was the ENIAC in 1946, using 18,000 vacuum tubes. See below for information on Von Neumann’s important contributions.
The first solid-state (or transistor) computer was the TRADIC, built at Bell Laboratories in 1954. The transistor had previously been invented at Bell Labs in 1948.
VON Neumann architecture
John Louis von Neumann, mathematician (born János von Neumann 28 December 1903 in Budapest, Hungary, died 8 February 1957 in Washington, D.C.), proposed the stored program concept while professor of mathemtics (one of the orginal six) at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Services, in which programs (code) are stored in the same memory as data. The computer knows the difference between code and data by which it is attempting to access at any given moment. When evaluating code, the binary numbers are decoded by some kind of physical logic circuits (later other methods, such as microprogramming, were introduced), and then the instructions are run in hardware. This design is called von Neumann architecture and has been used in almost every digital computer ever made.
Von Neumann architecture introduced flexibility to computers. Previous computers had their programming hard wired into the computer. A particular computer could only do one task (at the time, mostly building artillery tables) and had to be physically rewired to do any new task.
By using numeric codes, von Neumann computers could be reprogrammed for a wide variety of problems, with the decode logic remaining the same.
As processors (especially super computers) get ever faster, the von Neumann bottleneck is starting to become an issue. With data and code both being accessed over the same circuit lines, the processor has to wait for one while the other is being fetched (or written). Well designed data and code caches help, but only when the requested access is already loaded into cache. Some researchers are now experimenting with Harvard architecture to solve the von Neumann bottleneck. In Harvard arrchitecture, named for Howard Aiken’s experimental Harvard Mark I (ASCC) calculator [computer] at Harvard University, a second set of data and address lines along with a second set of memory are set aside for executable code, removing part of the conflict with memory accesses for data.
Von Neumann became an American citizen in 1933 to be eligible to help on top secret work during World War II. There is a story that Oskar Morganstern coached von Neumann and Kurt Gödel on the U.S. Constitution and American history while driving them to their immigration interview. Morganstern asked if they had any questions, and Gödel replied that he had no questions, but had found some logical inconsistencies in the Constitution that he wanted to ask the Immigration officers about. Morganstern recommended that he not ask questions, but just answer them.
Von Neumann occassionally worked with Alan Turing in 1936 through 1938 when Turing was a graduate student at Princeton. Von Neumann was exposed to the concepts of logical design and universal machine proposed in Turing’s 1934 paper “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entschiedungs-problem”.
Von Neumann worked with such early computers as the Harvard Mark I, ENIAC, EDVAC, and his own IAS computer.
Early research into computers involved doing the computations to create tables, especially artillery firing tables. Von Neumann was convinced that the future of computers involved applied mathematics to solve specific problems rather than mere table generation. Von Neumann was the first person to use computers for mathematical physics and economics, proving the utility of a general purpose computer.
Von Neumann proposed the concept of stored programs in the 1945 paper “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC”. Influenced by the idea, Maurice Wilkes of the Cambridge University Mathematical Laboratory designed and built the EDSAC, the world’s first operational, production, stored-program computer.
The first stored computer program ran on the Manchester Mark I [computer] on June 21, 1948.
Von Neumann foresaw the advantages of parallelism in computers, but because of construction limitations of the time, he worked on sequential systems.
Von Neumann advocated the adoption of the bit as the measurement of computer memory and solved many of the problems regarding obtaining reliable answers from unreliable computer components.
Interestingly, von Neumann was opposed to the idea of compilers. When shown the idea for FORTRAN in 1954, von Neumann asked “Why would you want more than machine language?”. Von Neumann had graduate students hand assemble programs into binary code for the IAS machine. Donald Gillies, a student at Princeton, created an assembler to do the work. Von Neumann was angry, claiming “It is a waste of a valuable scientific computing instrument to use it to do clerical work”.
Von Neumann also did important work in set theory (including measure theory), the mathematical foundation for quantum theory (including statistical mechanics), self-adjoint algebras of bounded linear operators on a Hilbert space closed in weak operator topology, non-linear partial differential equations, and automata theory (later applied to cmputers). His work in economics included his 1937 paper “A Model of General Economic Equilibrium” on a multi-sectoral growth model and his 1944 book “Theory of Games and Economic Behavior” (co-authored with Morgenstern) on game theory and uncertainty.
I leave the discussion of von Neumann with a couple of quotations:
“If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.”
“Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random numbers is, of course, in a state of sin.”
bare hardware
In the earliest days of electronic digital computing, everything was done on the bare hardware. Very few computers existed and those that did exist were experimental in nature. The researchers who were making the first computers were also the programmers and the users. They worked directly on the “bare hardware”. There was no operating system. The experimenters wrote their programs in assembly language and a running program had complete control of the entire computer. Debugging consisted of a combination of fixing both the software and hardware, rewriting the object code and changing the actual computer itself.
The lack of any operating system meant that only one person could use a computer at a time. Even in the research lab, there were many researchers competing for limited computing time. The first solution was a reservation system, with researchers signing up for specific time slots.
The high cost of early computers meant that it was essential that the rare computers be used as efficiently as possible. The reservation system was not particularly efficient. If a researcher finished work early, the computer sat idle until the next time slot. If the researcher's time ran out, the researcher might have to pack up his or her work in an incomplete state at an awkward moment to make room for the next researcher. Even when things were going well, a lot of the time the computer actually sat idle while the researcher studied the results (or studied memory of a crashed program to figure out what went wrong).
computer operators
The solution to this problem was to have programmers prepare their work off-line on some input medium (often on punched cards, paper tape, or magnetic tape) and then hand the work to a computer operator. The computer operator would load up jobs in the order received (with priority overrides based on politics and other factors). Each job still ran one at a time with complete control of the computer, but as soon as a job finished, the operator would transfer the results to some output medium (punched tape, paper tape, magnetic tape, or printed paper) and deliver the results to the appropriate programmer. If the program ran to completion, the result would be some end data. If the program crashed, memory would be transferred to some output medium for the programmer to study (because some of the early business computing systems used magnetic core memory, these became known as “core dumps”)
device drivers and library functions
Soon after the first successes with digital computer experiments, computers moved out of the lab and into practical use. The first practical application of these experimental digital computers was the generation of artillery tables for the British and American armies. Much of the early research in computers was paid for by the British and American militaries. Business and scientific applications followed.
As computer use increased, programmers noticed that they were duplicating the same efforts.
Every programmer was writing his or her own routines for I/O, such as reading input from a magnetic tape or writing output to a line printer. It made sense to write a common device driver for each input or putput device and then have every programmer share the same device drivers rather than each programmer writing his or her own. Some programmers resisted the use of common device drivers in the belief that they could write “more efficient” or faster or "“better” device drivers of their own.
Additionally each programmer was writing his or her own routines for fairly common and repeated functionality, such as mathematics or string functions. Again, it made sense to share the work instead of everyone repeatedly “reinventing the wheel”. These shared functions would be organized into libraries and could be inserted into programs as needed. In the spirit of cooperation among early researchers, these library functions were published and distributed for free, an early example of the power of the open source approach to software development.
1950s
Some operating systems from the 1950s include: FORTRAN Monitor System, General Motors Operating System, Input Output System, SAGE, and SOS.
SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment), designed to monitor weapons systems, was the first real time control system.
batch systems
Batch systems automated the early approach of having human operators load one program at a time. Instead of having a human operator load each program, software handled the scheduling of jobs. In addition to programmers submitting their jobs,, end users could submit requests to run specific programs with specific data sets (usually stored in files or on cards). The operating system would schedule “batches” of related jobs. Output (punched cards, magnetic tapes, printed material, etc.) would be returned to each user.
Examples of operating systems that were primarily batch-oriented include: BKY, BOS/360, BPS/360, CAL, and Chios.
early 1960s
Some operating systems from the early 1960s include: Admiral, B1, B2, B3, B4, Basic Executive System, BOS/360, EXEC I, EXEC II, Honeywell Executive System, IBM 1410/1710 OS, IBSYS, Input Output Control System, Master Control Program, and SABRE.
The first major transaction processing system was SABRE (Semi-Automatic Business Related Environment), developed by IBM and American Airlines.w78
system calls
The first operating system to introduce system calls was University of Machester’s Atlas I Supervisor.w78
mid 1960s
Some operating systems from the mid-1960s include: Atlas I Supervisor, DOS/360, Input Output Selector, and Master Control Program.
late 1960s
Some operating systems from the late-1960s include: BPS/360, CAL, CHIPPEWA, EXEC 3, and EXEC 4, EXEC 8, GECOS III, George 1, George 2, George 3, George 4, IDASYS, MASTER, Master Control Program, OS/MFT, OS/MFT-II, OS/MVT, OS/PCP, and RCA DOS.
microprocessors
In 1968 a group of scientists and engineers from Mitre Corporation (Bedford, Massachusetts) created Viatron Computer company and an intelligent data terminal using an 8-bit LSI microprocessor from PMOS technology. A year later in 1969 Viatron created the 2140, the first 4-bit LSI microprocessor. At the time MOS was used only for a small number of calculators and there simply wasn’t enough worldwide manufacturing capacity to build these computers in quantity.
Other companies saw the benefit of MOS, starting with Intel’s 1971 release of the 4-bit 4004 as the first commercially available microprocessor. In 1972 Rockwell released the PPS-4 microprocessor, Fairchild released the PPS-25 microprocessor, and Intel released the 8-bit 8008 microprocessor. In 1973 National released the IMP microprocessor.
In 1973 Intel released the faster NMOS 8080 8-bit microprocessor, the first in a long series of microprocessors that led to the current Pentium.
In 1974 Motorola released the 6800, which included two accumulators, index registers, and memory-mapped I/O. Monolithic Memories introduced bit-slice microprocessing. In 1975 Texas Instruments introduced a 4-bit slice microprocessor and Fairchild introduced the F-8 microprocessor.
early 1970s
Some operating systems from the early-1970s include: BKY, Chios, DOS/VS, Master Control Program, OS/VS1, and UNIX.
In 1970 Ken Thompson of AT&T Bell Labs suggested the name “Unix” for the operating system that had been under development since 1969. The name was an intentional pun on AT&T’s earlier Multics project (uni- means “one”, multi- means “many”).
mid 1970s
Some operating systems from the mid-1970s include: Master Control Program.
In 1973 the kernel of Unix was rewritten in the C programming language. This made Unix the world’s first portable operating system, capable of being easily ported (moved) to any hardware. This was a major advantage for Unix and led to its widespread use in the multi-platform environments of colleges and universities.
late 1970s
Some operating systems from the late-1970s include: EMAS 2900, General Comprehensive OS, OpenVMS, OS/MVS.
1980s
Some operating systems from the 1980s include: AmigaOS, DOS/VSE, HP-UX, Macintosh, MS-DOS, and ULTRIX.
1990s
Some operating systems from the 1990s include: BeOS, BSDi, FreeBSD, NeXT, OS/2, Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT.
2000s
Some operating systems from the 2000s include: Mac OS X, Syllable, Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows ME, and Windows XP.