The History Of Operating Systems

It takes a true geek to successfully engage in a deep conversation about technological advances that were released 5 years before his birth

. More specifically it was a discussion of old CP/M Operating Systems between myself and a colleague that prompted the recognition of this.

The trip down memory lane got me thinking that perhaps it would be nice to remind ourselves of the path we have walked to have become unfortunate enough to end up with Windows as the most popular choice of Operating System.

CP/M - Created back in 1976, this command line based Operating System was developed to provide 8-bit computer users with an easier way of managing the most basic of computer functions, as well as installing and programming applications. It would be fair to say that the younger MS-DOS was very closely based on CP/M and indeed many of the Operating System structures and commands were retained.

DOS ' Many of you will be aware that several versions of DOS were available from various companies; however MS-DOS fast became the accepted standard. Launched in the early 80's, and then continually developed by Microsoft until the release of Windows 95, after which it was phased out. Similar to CP/M , DOS was also command based and is faster and less hardware intensive than graphical interface based OS's like Windows (and was even required to run Windows). Up until Windows 95, your computer would use DOS to load itself by default so Windows users would have to load it on top of MS-DOS as a secondary Operating System.

GEOS - This remarkably compact Graphical Operating System was originally designed for the Commodore 64; a machine with just 64k of RAM and a 1 MHz processor. Released in 1986 by a company called Berkeley Softworks, GEOS went on to become the third fastest selling Operating System in the world at one stage. Despite the ridiculously miniscule system requirements, GEOS was a nippy Operating System which looked very similar to MacOS which ran on a machine costing ten times the price.

OS/2 ' A superior operating system and publically declared as such by Microsoft, OS/2 was a joint venture between IBM and Microsoft in 1987. However they went on to bundle Windows 3.0 with many new PC's (setting a trend that would be followed for many years) giving OS/2 the undesirable unofficial title of "the pricey alternative". Predictably, the relationship between the two companies then fell apart but IBM battled on until 2001, however OS/2 never managed to enjoy the success that Windows had.

AmigaOS ' To me the Amiga OS was one of the most revolutionary Operating Systems ever and I remember it fondly for the extraordinary advances Windows would not manage to emulate until many years later. The speedy, reliable and fully featured AmigaOS was introduced back in 1985 for the Commodore Amiga line of machines, it also included support for multitasking; which is fairly standard to us nowadays but was the pinnacle of computing back then. Commadores financial issues led to bankruptcy resulting in the Amiga platform being abandoned unfortunately.

by: Chris Holgate

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