Brief History Of Operating System Essay

The History of Operating Systems In our present generation, computers are used by every organization and individuals to store, receive and type information. Smart phones and tablets that we use every day are also computers. These computer is made up of operating systems which help the computer function effectively. The operating system is the most important part of the computer system. Examples of operating systems are Microsoft Windows, Mac OS and Linux which are the most common. This essay will be discussing about the history of operating systems. According to Longman Dictionary, operating systems is a system in a computer that helps all the programs in it to work together. But before I talk about the history of operating systems, I will

It was in use between 1940 and 1958. The problem with the first generation computers was that it could only perform one task at a time and was large in size. The second generation computer was introduced between 1959 and 1966. The computer uses transistors and magnetic tape as a storage memory. This transistor generates lesser heat and also carries out faster operations. The early version of FORTRAN and COBOL were developed (Nosakhare, 2014). But these second generation computers could still not perform different tasks at the same

It created a virtual machine called the control program (CP) on which various operating systems run. The VM contains virtual address and reader’s space, tape drives, disks, printers, and punches. Interruption of the CP was caused by executing privileged instructions or accessing devices. The VM runs special operating systems for certain tasks, it runs several copies of the same operating system. The VM was useful to customers and also gave engineers the ability to test and develop operating systems. “Virtual machines pretty much died off after this untill the 1990s, but are enjoying an Rrenaissance in the 2000s” (Krzyzanowski, 2015). The UNIX was developed in 1973 and was written in C programming language. It was very easy to understand because it comes with an electronic mail, editor, utilities, calculator, assembler, compiler and the system runs on a PDP-11 (Krzyzanowski, 2015). The unique thing about UNIX is that it is mostly written in C which made it easier to maintain the software and debug. It uses high level language, which makes it easier to recompile the operating system for different computer