History Of Operating System

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An Operating System (OS) is an interface between a computer user and computer hardware. An operating system is a software which performs all the basic tasks like file management, memory management, process management, handling input and output, and controlling peripheral devices such as disk drives and printers. Operating systems have evolved through a number of distinct phases or generations and we will describe these successive generations of computers to see what their operating systems were like.The first true digital computer was designed by the English mathematician Charles Babbage (1792–1871). Babbage was trying to build his analytical engine for that he hired a young woman named Ada Lovelace,as the world’s first programmer. The programming …show more content…

At the same time Z3 computer built out of ectromechanical relays. In 1944, the Colossus was built and then the Mark I was built and then ENIAC was built and so on. Some were binary, some used vacuum tubes, some were programmable, but all were very primitive. In this early time, Programming languages were unknown (not even assembly languages). Operating systems were unheard of. All programming was done in machine language by wiring up electrical circuits by connecting thousands of cables to plugboards to control the machine’s basic functions. By 1950s, procedure improved with the introduction of punched cards. It was now possible to write programs on cards and read them in instead of using plugboards. The Second Generation (1955–65): Transistors and Batch Systems In the early 1950's, The first operating system was introduced and they were called single-stream batch processing systems. These new machines were called mainframes and these were built with the use of transistor in it. They were programmed in FORTRAN and assembly language. Due to their high prizes only government agencies or large corporations were able to afford …show more content…

Gary kildall then came up with a disk based operating system called Cp/m(control program for microcomputers). In 1977 this CP/M was able to run on many micro computers using the 8080, zilog Z80 and many other cpu chips. IBM also needed a software to manage their hardware,which opened an opportunity for Bill Gates to write OS for them. Gates approached a local computer manufacturer and asked him if he could provide him with a suitable OS. Gates after sme modifications in the OS offered IBM with MS-DOS which quickly started to dominate IBM PC market. By 1983 MS-DOS held a firm hold in the market while CP/M was on its last legs.MS-DOS began to be widely used in many other computers with some advanced featres though from UNIX. But all these OS were based on typing in commands from keyboards. xerox parc adopted all new GUI concept proposed by Doug Engelbart. Steve Jobs then embarked on building an apple with GUI which led to creation of LISA and subsequently apple macintosh which inspired Gates to build a successor of MS-DOS. after about 10 years in 1995 microsoft came up with windows 95 which incorporated many OS features and contain large amount of 16 bit intel assembly language. then came windows NT which was full 32 bit system. windows NT was renamed to windows 2000 including some modifications which was not a great success either. on the other hand

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