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Operating Systems:

A Short History of Their Development

BY: PETRA KUMI 9F

Contents:

Before Operating Systems (OS)


The earliest computers lacked any kind of operating systems. They were simple machines that required punched paper cards to operate the required program and data. People would have to wait for hours to get their turn on using the computer, and then theyd have to wait again, until the machine finished the process, or the program crashed. The need for faster processing and less waiting gave birth to the first concepts of primitive OSs

The Earliest, Most Primitive OSs


As machines became more powerful, the queue time became shorter, until it fully diminished into a stack of punched cards, which the machine selected using magnetic fields to select and process, now a lot faster. While jobs used to get done manually by each user, now there was a specialized person who took care of maintenance of the computer, and later that was replaced by automated machines that also fixed data loss caused by system crashes and announced when people had to change magnetic tapes. They also started doing multiple jobs at once. This was the most primitive form and the beginning of the Operating System, which slowly evolved to become a fullfunctioning OS

An underlying program offering basic hardware-management, software-scheduling and resource-monitoring may seem a remote ancestor to the user-oriented OSes of the personal computing era. But there has been a shift in the meaning of OS. Just as early automobiles lacked speedometers, radios, and air-conditioners which later became standard, more and more optional software features became standard features in every OS package, although some applications such as data base management systems and spreadsheets remain optional and separately priced. This has led to the perception of an OS as a complete user-system with an integrated graphical user interface, utilities, some applications such as text editors and file managers, and configuration tools. It may seem that this monitoring machine is a remote ancestor to the useroriented OSes of the personal computer era. But throughout history, there have been changes. What was optional at first, later became a neccessity, just like optional things like speedometers, radios and air conditioners became usual in cars. This has led to a different perception of OSes. They are thought to be integrated graphical interfaces, containing software like utilities, text editors, etc.

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