The Evolution of the Operating System

This is every engineer's bedtime story

Definition of Operating System: "Abstracting away the horrors of hardware"

In September 1968 I was sat at a Teletype terminal creating print and 8-hole tape copies of an Algol program for an Eliot something computer in the room next door. A year later I was using a 80 column card device to produce Fortran code to run on a Univac batch processing machine that was a 45 minute train ride away from the office. No mention of operating systems yet. My first OS encounter was on a Ferranti computer controlling a nuclear power station - an interrupt driven system using a physically huge (wardrobe size cabinet) drum for secondary memory. That was the foundation for working with desktop Personal Computers from 1977 and following all these names like CP/M, UCSD p-system, PCOS, MS-DOS, Windows, and UNIX (several flavours). This video seemed to map my leaning curve over almost 60 years in computing - as @KangJangkrik wrote 3 hours ago an engineer's bedtime story. Thank you for this rewind.

In an alternate universe, the asianometry dude is the Matrix's Architect.

Imagine few hundred years later, a museum will play these videos to tell the early days of computer history .

10 print "obscene word" 20 goto 10 run My first program for BASIC when I was 7. I was very impressed the first time I saw windows and a mouse as a kid. I tried to explain it to dad at supper; he didn't pay any attention.

Never had I thought I'd hear about the human centipede on this channel, let alone using that as an analogy to Unix pipes. You've outdone yourself there, Jon.

"Its like the human centipede of computer processes" "... written in the high-level C language" "So there was Kildal, in his room, with just a naked floppy drive" Goddamn our boy comin in HOT

That grass, those rolling hills, those clouds. A little bit of me was home and back in a more innocent time looking at that.

I am waiting on the Plan 9 from Bell Labs story.

Love your channel. When YT feels like it's getting dumber, I'm happy to find your insightful videos.

ima use "the sun doesn't shine on the same dog's butt everyday" phrase from now on.

Man….where in the world did that sunshine on a dog’s butt saying come from?

I think Tanenbaums definition is the best (he probably didn't come up with it, but it's what he states in one of his books.) He says that an operating system perfoms two functions. One is resource management and the other is to provide an abstraction layer. A sort of extended machine. If you use the definition most people use (erroneously in my opinion), then you'll end up having to argue that Edge is part of the Windows OS. Which is pretty ridiculous. It's just a program shipped with the OS.

Whenever I see the mighty VAX mentioned in a documentary I always smile.

Symbian OS was born from the PDA world, focused on optimising limited hardware resources. Programming on it had a very steep learning curve, due to this optimization and the absolute difference from typical PC programming. It was very hard for any programmer not experienced with Symbian to move to it and port any of the existing software. No matter what we did to improve the tools, it was hard to program. The other issue was that Symbian was owned by companies that were competitors with eachother: no one wanted to share tools for developers (e.g. no common ask ) and they didn't want a common user interface

I'm sorry that the Commodore AmigaOS gets left out of these conversations. It's preemptive multitasking would have fit in to this video well. Excellent video, as usual!

I already want a video on the SAGE system.

Well done John in making the distinction between operating systems and IPLs, kernel-mode programs, and HALs. Many operating systems, antique and modern, don't fit directly into any of those boxes. Well done also for picking points that most people will connect with while still keeping it to 30 minutes, too. This could easily be a 20 part series if you wanted it to. I particularly like that you've addressed the economic impact of the "IBM PC" marketing. The rise of the PC in the face of cheaper and more powerful options has always puzzled me.

Imo the OS is a HAL and IO/resource management. Everything else are tools or UI.