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History of Operating Systems

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HISTORY OF OPERATIMG SYSTEMS Operating systems (OS) provide a set of functions needed and used by most application programs on a computer, and the linkages needed to control and synchronize computer hardware. On the first computers, with no operating system, every program needed the full hardware specification to run correctly and perform standard tasks, and its own drivers for peripheral devices like printers and punched paper card readers. The growing complexity of hardware and application programs eventually made operating systems a necessity. THE 1ST GENERATION (1950’s) The operating systems of the 1950s were designed to smooth the transition between jobs. Before the systems were developed, a great deal of time was lost between …show more content…

The concept sold a lot of computers, but it took its toll. Users running particular applications that did not require this kind of power and this played heavily in increased run-time over head, learning time, debugging time, maintenance, etc. Third generation operating systems were multimode systems. Some of them simultaneously supported batch processing, time sharing, real-time processing, and multiprocessing. They were large and expensive. Nothing like them had ever been constructed before, and many of the development efforts finished well over budget and long after scheduled completion. These systems introduced to computer environments a greater complexity to which users were, at first, unaccustomed. The systems interposed a software layer between the user and the hardware. This software layer was often so thick that a user lost sight of the hardware and so only the view created by the software. To get one of these systems to perform the simplest useful task, users had to become familiar with complex job control languages to specify the jobs their resource requirements. Third generation operating systems represented a great step forward, but a painful one for many users. Examples include: 1. 1966, DOS/360. 2. 1969, UNIX. THE 4TH GENERATION (mid 19670’s- present) Fourth generation systems are the current state of the art. Many designers and users are still smarting from their experiences

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