History and development of Operating Systems

Essay by shademusicCollege, UndergraduateA, November 2004

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Software Systems CA

History and development of Operating Systems

Table of contents

Page 1 : Contents

Page 2 : Introduction

Page 2-3 : History of Operating Systems

Page 3 : Timesharing and Multiprogramming 1960s

Page 4 : The personal computer era

Page 4-5 : The Significant types of Operating Systems

Page 5-6 : The Functions of Operating Systems

Page 7 : Why OS is so critical

Page 7 : Conclusion

Page 8 : Bibliography

Introduction

"Operating Systems have earned the reputation for being the most critical software in a computer system "

In this paper i will be talking about :

1. The history of operating systems (OS)

2. The function of OS

3. The reason why OS are considered to be so critical

History of Operating Systems

Early History: 1940s - 1950s:

At first, computers lacked any form of operating system. The computer user had sole use of the machine.

The user would arrive at the machine armed with his or her program and data, often on punched paper tape. The program would be loaded into the machine, and then the machine set to work, until the program stopped. Later, computers came with libraries of support code which were linked to the user's program to assist in operations such as input and output. This would become the start of the modern-day operating system. However, these machines still only ran a single job at a time.

Originally, each user wrote all of the code necessary to implement a particular application, including the highly detailed machine level input/output instructions. Very quickly, this input/output coding needed to implement basic functions was consolidated into an input/output control system (IOCS). Users wishing to perform input/output operations no longer had to code the instructions directly. Instead, they used IOCS routines to do the real work.