With the growth of LSI (Large Scale Integration) circuits, chips containing thousands of transistors on a square centimeter of silicon, the age of the personal computer dawned. With regard to architecture, personal computers (in the beginning called microcomputers) were not all that different from minicomputers of the PDP-11 class, but regarding price they undoubtedly were different. Where the minicomputer made it possible for a department in a company or university to have its own computer, the microprocessor chip made it possible for a single individual to have his or her own personal computer.
In 1974, when Intel came out with the 8080, the first general-purpose 8-bit CPU, it required an operating system for the 8080, in part to be able to test it. Intel asked one of its consultants, Gary Kildall, to write one. Kildall and a friend first built a controller for the newly released Shugart Associates 8-inch floppy disk and hooked the floppy disk up to the 8080, thus producing the first microcomputer with a disk. Kildall then wrote a disk-based operating system called CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers) for it. Since Intel did not think that disk-based microcomputers had much of a future, when Kildall asked for the rights to CP/M, Intel granted his request. Kildall then established a company, Digital Research, to further develop and sell CP/M.
In 1977, Digital Research rewrote CP/M to make it suitable for running on the many microcomputers using the 8080, Zilog Z80, and other CPU chips. Many application programs were written to run on CP/M, allowing it to completely dominate the world of rnicrocomputing for about 5 years.
In the early 1980s, IBM designed the IBM PC and looked around for software to run on it. People from IBM contacted Bill Gates to license his BASIC interpreter. They also asked him if he knew of an operating system to run on the PC. Gates recommended that IBM contact Digital Research, then the world's dominant operating systems company. Making what was certainly the worst business decision in recorded history, Kildall declined to meet with IBM, sending a subordinate instead. To make matters worse, his lawyer even declined to sign IBM's nondisclosure agreement covering the not-yet-announced PC. As a result, IBM went back to Gates asking if he could provide them with an operating system.
When IBM came back, Gates realized that a local computer manufacturer, Seattle Computer Products, had a suitable operating system, DOS (Disk Operating System). He approached them and asked to buy it (allegedly for $75,000), which they gladly accepted. Gates then offered IBM a DOS/BASIC package, which IBM accepted. IBM wanted certain alterations, so Gates hired the person who wrote DOS, Tim Paterson, as an employee of Gates' fledgling company, Microsoft, to make them. The revised system was renamed MS-DOS (MicroSoft Disk Operating System) and quickly came to dominate the IBM PC market. A key factor here was Gates' (in retrospect, extremely wise) decision to sell MSDOS to computer companies for bundling with their hardware, compared to Kildall's attempt to sell CP/M to end users one at a time (at least in the beginning). After all this transpired, Kildall died suddenly and unexpectedly from causes that have not been fully revealed.
By the time the successor to the IBM PC, the IBM PC/AT, came out in 1983 with the Intel 80286 CPU, MS-DOS was firmly established and CP/M was on its last legs. MS-DOS was later widely used on the 80386 and 80486. Although the initial version of MS-DOS was quite primal, subsequent versions included more advanced features, including many taken from UNIX. (Microsoft was well aware of UNIX, even selling a microcomputer version of it called XENIX during the company's early years.)
CP/M, MS-DOS, and other operating systems for early microcomputers were all based on users typing in commands from the keyboard. That finally changed due to research done by Doug Engelbart at Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s. Engelbart created the GUI Graphical User Interface, complete with windows, icons, menus, and mouse. These ideas were adopted by researchers at Xerox PARC and included into machines they built.
One day, Steve Jobs, who co-invented the Apple computer in his garage, visited PARC, saw a GUI, and immediately realized its potential worth, something Xerox management famously did not. This intentional mistake of gargantuan proportions led to a book entitled Fumbling the Future (Smith and Alexander, 1988). Jobs then embarked on building an Apple with a GUI. This project led to the Lisa, which was too expensive and failed commercially. Jobs' second attempt, the Apple Macintosh, was a massive success, not only because it was much cheaper than the Lisa, but also because it was user friendly, meaning that it was intended for users who not only knew nothing about computers but furthermore had absolutely no intention whatsoever of learning. In the creative world of graphic design, professional digital photography, and professional digital video production, Macintoshes are very extensively used and their users are very excited about them.
When Microsoft decided to build a successor to MS-DOS, it was strongly influenced by the success of the Macintosh. It produced a GUI-based system called Windows, which originally ran on top of MS-DOS (i.e., it was more like a shell than a true operating system). For about 1 0 years, from 1985 to 1995, Windows was just a graphical environment on top of MS-DOS. Though, starting in 1995 a freestanding version of Windows, Windows 95, was released that incorporated many operating system features into it, using the underlying MS-DOS system only for booting and running old MS-DOS programs. In 1998, a slightly modified version of this system, called Windows 98 was released. However, both Windows 95 and Windows 98 still contained a large amount of 16-bit Intel assembly language.
Another Microsoft operating system is Windows NT (NT stands for New Technology), which is compatible with Windows 95 at a certain level, but a complete rewrite from scratch internally. It is a full 32-bit system. The lead designer for Windows NT was David Cutler, who was also one of the designers of the VAX VMS operating system, so some ideas from VMS are there in NT. In reality, so many ideas from VMS were present in it that the owner of VMS, DEC, sued Microsoft. The case was settled out of court for an amount of money requiring many digits to express. Microsoft expected that the first version of NT would kill off MS-DOS and all other versions of Windows since it was a vastly superior system, but it fizzled. Only with Windows NT 4.0 did it finally catch on in a big way, particularly on corporate networks. Version 5 of Windows NT was renamed Windows 2000 in early 1999. It was intended to be the successor to both Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0.
That did not quite work out either, so Microsoft came out with yet another version of Windows 98 called Windows Me (Millennium edition). In 2001, a slightly upgraded version of Windows 2000, called Windows XP was released. That version had a much longer run (6 years), basically replacing all previous versions of Windows. Then in January 2007, Microsoft finally released the successor to Windows XP, called Vista. It came with a new graphical interface, Aero, and many new or upgraded user programs. Microsoft hopes it will replace Windows XP completely, but this process could take the better part of a decade.
The other main competitor in the personal computer world is UNIX (and its various derivatives). UNIX is strongest on network and enterprise servers, but is also increasingly present on desktop computers, particularly in rapidly developing countries such as India and China. On Pentium-based computers, Linux is becoming a popular alternative to Windows for students and increasingly several commercial users. As an aside, throughout this blog we will use the term "Pentium" to mean the Pentium I, II, Ill, and 4 as well as its successors such as Core 2 Duo. The term x86 is also sometimes used to indicate the complete range of Intel CPUs going back to the 8086, whereas "Pentium" will be used to mean all CPUs from the Pentium I onwards. Admittedly, this term is not perfect, but no better one is available. One has to wonder which marketing genius at Intel threw out a brand name (Pentium) that half the world knew well and respected and replaced it with terms like "Core 2 duo" which very few people understand - quick, what does the "2" mean and what does the "duo" mean? Maybe "Pentium 5" (or "Pentium 5 dual core", etc.) was just too hard to remember. FreeBSD is also a popular UNIX derivative, originating from the BSD project at Berkeley. All modem Macintosh computers run a customized version of FreeBSD. UNIX is also standard on workstations powered by high-performance RISC chips, such as those sold by HewlettPackard and Sun Microsystems.
Many UNIX users, particularly experienced programmers, prefer a command-based interface to a GUI, so almost all UNIX systems support a windowing system called the X Window System (also known as Xll) produced at M.I.T. This system handles the basic window management, allowing users to create, delete, move, and resize windows using a mouse. Often a complete GUI, such as Gnome or KDE is available to run on top of Xll giving UNIX a look and feel something like the Macintosh or Microsoft Windows, for those UNIX users who want such a thing.
An interesting progress that began taking place during the rnid-1980s is the growth of networks of personal computers running network operating systems and distributed operating systems (Tanenbaum and Van Steen, 2007). In a network operating system, the users are aware of the existence of various computers and can log in to remote machines and copy files from one machine to another. Each machine runs its own local operating system and has its own local user (or users).
Network operating systems are not basically different from single-processor operating systems. They apparently need a network interface controller and some low-level software to drive it, as well as programs to achieve remote login and remote file access, but these additions do not change the essential structure of the operating system.
A distributed operating system, on the contrary, is one that appears to its users as a traditional uniprocessor system, although it is in fact composed of multiple processors. The users should not be aware of where their programs are being run or where their files are located; that should all be handled automatically and efficiently by the operating system.
True distributed operating systems need more than just adding a little code to a uniprocessor operating system, because distributed and centralized systems vary in certain critical ways. Distributed systems, for example, often allow applications to run on various processors simultaneously, thus requiring more complex processor scheduling algorithms in order to optimize the amount of parallelism.
Communication delays within the network often mean that these (and other) algorithms must run with incomplete, outdated, or even incorrect information. This situation is completely different from a single-processor system in which the operating system has complete information about the system state.
Tagsoperating system, software, microcomputers
- Memory-Mapped I/O
- EXAMPLE FILE SYSTEMS
- Defragmenting Disks
- File System Backups
- Implementing Directories
- An Example Program Using File System Calls
- IMPLEMENTATION ISSUES
- Shared Libraries / Mapped Files
- Page Size
- The Least Recently Used (LRU) Page Replacement Algorithm
- The Not Recently Used Page Replacement Algorithm
- PAGE REPLACEMENT ALGORITHMS
- RESEARCH ON PROCESSES AND THREADS
- Process States
- Large Programming Projects
- Header Files
- Large Memories
- Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny
- Real-Time Operating Systems
- Handheld Computer Operating Systems
- Booting the Computer
- COMPUTER HARDWARE REVIEW
- The Third Generation (1965-1980) ICs and Multiprogramming
- The Second Generation (1955-65) Transistors and Batch Systems
- The First Generation (1945-55) Vacuum Tubes
- HISTORY OF OPERATING SYSTEMS
- The Operating System as a Resource Manager
- The Operating System as an Extended Machine
- WHAT IS AN OPERATING SYSTEM?
- Introduction To Operating System