History of Operating System

OS have evolved through a number of distinct generations which corresponds roughly to the decades:-

1. The 1940’s – First generation: the earliest electronic digital computers had no OS. Machines of the time
were so primitive that programs were often entered one bit at time on rows of mechanical switches (plug
boards). The individual user was responsible for all machine set up and operation. Programming languages were
unknown. OS were unheard of.

2. The 1950’s – Second generation: By the early 1950’s, the routine had improved somewhat with the
introduction of punch cards. The General Motors Research Laboratories implemented the first OS in early
1950’s for their IBM 701. Early computers could perform only one job at a time and their users often had to
wait for long time to complete their job. The OS of 50’s generally ran one job at a time. The system was named
as batch processing systems. Main OS of this generation was batch processing OS.

3. The 1960’s – Third Generation: In the year of 1960’s, OS designers thought that the single user batch
processing sytem was inefficient because most of the time was spent waiting for slow I/O devices to complete
their tasks. Therefore OS designers developed the concept of multiprogramming in which several jobs are in
main memory at once; a processor is switched from job to job as needed to keep several job advancing while
keeping the peripheral devices in use.

Another major feature in 3rd generation OS was the technique called spooling. Another feature present in this
generation was time sharing technique. OS of this generation were- Multiprogramming OS, Time Sharing OS,
Multitasking OS.

4. Fourth generation and present: with the development of large scale integration circuits, chips, OS entered
in the system, personal computer and workstation age. Microprocessor technology evolved to the point that it
becomes possible to build desktop computers as powerful as the mainframes of 1970’s. Two OS have
dominated the personal computer MS-DOS and UNIX.

In this generation, the distributed OS were developed for the computers that could run tasks on several
interconnected processors. In mid 1980’s the network OS were introduced for connecting the computers in a
local area network.

Today’s OS provide the fundamental services to the users so that computer hardware can be accessed easily and
hardware resources can be shared among different users. The multitasking OS such as UNIX and Windows
divide the job among multiple processes in form of threads. And thus introduced concept of multithreading.
Main OS of this generation are:

· Distributed OS

· Network OS

· Parallel OS