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…
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…
This operating system originally began life as QDOS, created by computer company Seattle Computer Products in 1980. Microsoft would eventually purchase the system for $50k and license it to IBM. MS-DOS 1.0 was released in 1981 for IBM-PCs. The latest version is MS-DOS 6.22, released in 1994. Originally, IBM and…
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…
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…
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…