Category Archives: Operating Systems

In 1983 Raymond Noorda of Novell picked up on work originally done by Superset Software, a group that included Drew Major, Dale Neibauer, Kyle Powell and later Mark Hurst, who were later hired to continue work on the project. They were assigned the task of creating a disk sharing system for CP/M, the dominant OS for the hardware that Novell sold. Not confident in the future of CP/M, the team instead built a file sharing system based on the relatively new IBM-PC architecture. This spawned the first commercial network application, a game called Snipes used to test and demonstrate the network’s capabilites. Snipes is considered the beginning of multiplayer network games.

The resulting network operating system became known as Netware, with the first product being Netware 68 released in 1983. Subsequently, Netware 86 arrived in 1985, followed by Netware 286 in 1986, and Netware 386 in 1989. Novell dominated the NOS market from the mid 80s to the early 90s due to Netware’s high performance. Netware was so stable, there are reports of Novell servers running for years without interruption. Later Windows NT began killing the competition, and Novell was one of the few that barely survived, thrown from it’s top spot. Today Novell still produces Netware and recently acquired SUSE Linux and is actively developing new products.

A family of operating systems for personal computers originally released in 1985 with version 1.0 from Microsoft. Windows dominates the personal computer world, running, by some estimates, on 90 percent of all personal computers. The remaining 10 percent are mostly Macintosh computers. Like the Macintosh operating environment, Windows provides a graphical user interface (GUI), virtual memory management, multitasking, and support for many peripheral devices.

In 1980, IBM and Microsoft joined forces. IBM, the venerable computer manufacturer, wanted Bill Gates and Paul Allen, founders of Microsoft, to design an operating system for its PCs. IBM decided to let Microsoft keep the rights to the MS-DOS operating system, allowing Gates and Allen to sell it to other computer manufacturers.

Before long, MS-DOS swept through the computer universe, and the young upstarts of Microsoft started raking in huge profits. Microsoft became an operating system Goliath to IBM’s David, an unexpected role reversal. Still, the companies continued to develop operating systems together until 1990. At that point, Microsoft pursued its Windowsand DOS line of operating systems, and IBM continued with OS/2, a graphical operating system it developed in 1985 with Microsoft.

OS/2 is comparable with Windows 95 (Win95), but there are significant differences. For starters, OS/2 is a true 32-bit operating system, making it more powerful than a 16-bit operating system such as Windows 3.1 or than one built on 16-bit code as Win95 is. OS/2, however, still can run 16-bit applications. In fact, OS/2 can run most programs designed for Windows 3.1 or Win95. The OS/2 GUI (graphical user interface) looks a bit different from Win95’s, but its operation is basically the same. Users click icons to open and run programs. One also can drag icons to perform various functions. OS/2 developed a reputation as a robust operating system that outdid Windows at tasks such as helping several applications work together.

If many people today know of CP/M at all, they think of it as the predecessor to DOS. CP/M was developed on Intel’s 8008 emulator under DEC’s TOPS-10 operating system, so naturally many parts of CP/M were inspired by it, including the eight character filenames with a three-character extension that every early Windows user was familiar with.

The CP/M operating system has its roots in the very genesis of microcomputing. Gary Kildall was a software consultant for Intel in the early 1970’s. They were one of the first manufacturers of integrated circuits, and the inventor of the first “microcomputer on a chip,” the 8088. Kildall’s everyday job was as a computer science professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. His two jobs put him in a unique position to observe and tinker with the fledgling microcomputer industry. Gary began collecting the pieces, that by 1973, formed a home grown microcomputer system. The main processor (the brains of the computer) and its memory were integrated circuits from Intel; the disk drive was a recycled computing drive from Shugart; the input and output console consisted of a Teletype device.

Needing something to tie all these components together into something that could be used, Kildall wrote a simple “operating system” in his then-favorite language, PL/M. The result he called Control Program/Monitor, or CP/M for short. CP/M, then, is a set of software that controls the basic components of the computer–an operating system.

From Lucent Technologies’  “Creation of the UNIX Operating System”

After three decades of use, the UNIX computer operating system from Bell Labs is still regarded as one of the most powerful, versatile, and flexible operating systems (OS) in the computer world. Its popularity is due to many factors, including its ability to run a wide variety of machines, from micros to supercomputers, and its portability — all of which led to its adoption by many manufacturers.

Like another legendary creature whose name also ends in ‘x,’ UNIX rose from the ashes of a multi-organizational effort in the early 1960s to develop a dependable timesharing operating system. The joint effort was not successful, but a few survivors from Bell Labs tried again, and what followed was a system that offers its users a work environment that has been described as “of unusual simplicity, power, and elegance….”

The system also fostered a distinctive approach to software design — solving a problem by interconnecting simpler tools, rather than creating large monolithic application programs. Its development and evolution led to a new philosophy of computing, and it has been a never-ending source of both challenges and joy to programmers around the world.