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Softpanorama
(slightly skeptical)
Open Source Software Educational Society |
May the
source be with you,
but remember the KISS principle ;-)
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Softpanorama
OS
History Education Project Library
The history of operating systems is closely related to the development of
computer technology. Current monster OSes like Windows Server 2003,
Solaris 10, AIX 6 and Linux 2.6 like (Suse 10, RHEL 5,etc) would be impossible without tremendous
increase in the capabilities of the computers for the last 50 years.
1950s:
- Era of large, vacuum tubes-based computers. First primitive OSes.
Programs, were
loaded into RAM by punched cards or tape drives. These were batch jobs
run consisting of several programs which run one after another as the CPU is finished with the previous job. Long
jobs, such as printing large number of pages, can be deferred until night to
avoid waiting and wasting expensive user time.
1954. IBM 650 -- one of the first commercial vacuum-tubes
based programmable computers that was used in pseudo time-sharing mode.
On IBM650, users were actually given a block of time and could run their
programs, see what went wrong, fix it and try again. It was really
fascinating... See
Knuth Biographic Notes
- 1957
- USSR launches Sputnik, first artificial earth satellite. In
response,
President Eisenhower requested funding for the establishment of the
Advanced Research Project Agency ARPA). His request was approved and
the USA forms the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA),
the following year, within the Department of Defense (DoD) to
establish US lead in science and technology applicable to the
military.
Late 50th. First semiconductor-based computers.
Early 1960s:
- IBM 360 series machines was made by IBM with the pioneering OS/360.
Contains high quality compliers including compiler from PL/1. Used special
language called JCL for batch jobs control.
- CTSS was written by
a team of MIT Computation Center programmers led by
Prof. Fernando J.
Corbató, known to everybody as Corby. Corby's title was Deputy Director
of the Computation Center. An early version of the M.I.T. Compatible
Time-Sharing System (CTSS) was first demonstrated in November, 1961, at the
M.I.T. Computation Center. It evolved over the years and in the Fall of 1963
began daily operations at the Laboratory for Computer Science as well as at
the M.I.T. Computation Center where it operated until July, 1973.
- Development of VM/CMS started on what was then called the "CP-40
Project", working with a modified System 360 Model 40, at IBM's Cambridge
Scientific Center (CSC) in the Fall of
1964. CP-40 was a virtual machine operating system; a simple
interactive computing single-user operating system, CMS, was designed to
go along with it. Actual implementation started in
1965, and the complete system was first available to users in early
1966.
Late 1960s:
- In 1965, most of the CTSS development group had moved over to Project MAC
and was beginning the design of Multics, where many future designers of Unix
were trained. Project MAC chose the GE 645 as the platform for its next
generation system, instead of IBM's proposal of a System/360 machine.
- After IBM announced the System 360 Model 67, the software was converted
to run on that; CP-40 was renamed CP-67 at that point. An early version of
the system was installed at
MIT's
Lincoln Labs in
1967, because of Lincoln's dissatisfaction with the "standard" IBM
time-sharing offering, TSS (Time Sharing System), which was at that time
very slow and unreliable. Lincoln personnel co-operated with CSC is improving
the system.
Union Carbide, also decided to run VM/CMS, and also contributed to its
development.
- Unix was started in 1969 after AT&T withdraw from the project.
1970s:
- DEC PDP machines become popular due to their low price and promoted Unix.
The Unix code was distributed free by Bell Labs and many companies and
universities started modifying it to create two strains of Unix, later called
System V and BSD. Larger numbers of users mean the systems have to manage
larger programs but RAM is very expensive thus leading to development of
virtual memory systems where cheaper storage devices are used to simulate
the availability of RAM at the expense of speed.
- VM/CMS became official IBM product. IBM finally accepted the inevitable
with relatively good grace, having learned through internal experience just
how useful it was.
-
1972 – Ray Tomlinson, a computer scientist in Cambridge
Massachusetts, introduced the electronic mail. The symbol @ was used
in the email address to separate the name of the user and the name
of the network.
- 1973/74 Kildall created the first version of CP/M and showed it to
Intel, but the company declined to market or further develop the project.
Late 70th.
- 1975 several small companies were marketing microcomputers with CP/M 1.0
to curious hobbyists
- 1976 Digital Research was created. Kildall
introduced the idea of BIOS in
CP/M 2.0. By 1977, CP/M had become the most popular operating system (OS) in
the fledgling microcomputer (PC) industry.
- 1976, Steve Wozniak had completed his
6502-based computer and would display enhancements or modifications at
the bi-weekly Homebrew Computer Club meetings. In July of 1976 the Apple-1
was released and sold for $666.66
- Others jump into the market with the TRS-80 and Zilog machines
running CP/M.
- April 1977 Apple II was released.
See Apple II History
Early 1980's: .
- DEC markets the popular VAX series to compete with IBM and others jump
into the market with Unix offerings.
- August 1981 Original IBM release
of PC-DOS (IBM Personal Computer DOS 1.0)
based on CP/M v2.2. It became the first
highly successful operating system that Microsoft wrote for the
IBM-PC.
It becomes a hit with the corporate world. Due to this Intel will soon become
the leading microprocessor vendor.
- February 1983. Version 2.0 of MS/DOS was announced with IBM's new
XT computer.
- November, 1983. Microsoft Corporation
formally announced Microsoft Windows, a next-generation operating system that
would provide a graphical user interface (GUI) and multitasking environment
for IBM computers.
- August, 1984. Microsoft releases MS-DOS 3.0 for PCs. It adds
support for 1.2 MB floppy disks, and bigger than 10 MB hard disks.
- November, 1984. Microsoft releases MS-DOS 3.1. It adds support
for Microsoft networks.
Mid to Late 1980's:
- 1985. The Commodore Amiga (the initial name of the Amiga 1000) was
unveiled at the Lincoln Centre in New York on July 23rd in a media frenzy.
- January, 1986. Microsoft releases MS-DOS 3.2. It adds support for
3.5-inch 720 KB floppy disk drives.
Microsoft releases MS-DOS 3.25.
- 1986. NetWare/86 was released
- August 1987. Microsoft ships MS-DOS 3.3.
- Fall of 1987. Windows 2.0 was introduced.
- November 1987. Compaq ships his version of MS-DOS 3.31 with
support for over 32mb drives.
- December, 1987, OS/2 1.00
- Apple computer markets the first widely available windowing GUI OS with
the Macintosh computer. Larger systems still hold sway in the back office as
DEC upgrades its PDP offerings to VAXes running VMS and various versions of
Unix.
- June 1988. Microsoft releases MS-DOS 4.0, including a
graphical/mouse interface.
- Late 1988. Macintoshes could be supported by NetWare version 2.15,
filling the Mac server hole left by Apple.
- 1989. OS/2 1.20 - with REXX
- March 1989. The
original proposal of the WWW by Tim Berners-Lee.
- 1989, NetWare/386 (also known as version 3) was released; version 3.20
was the most popular.
Early 1990's:
- May, 1990. Digital Research releases DR DOS 5.0.
- May, 1990. Microsoft
Windows 3.0 was released
- June 1991. Microsoft releases hugely successful MS-DOS 5.0. It
adds a full-screen editor, undelete and unformat utilities, and task
swapping. GW-BASIC is replaced with Qbasic, based on Microsoft's QuickBASIC.
- August 1991. Linus letter about Linux
- September 1991. Digital Research Inc. releases DR DOS 6.0, for
US$100.
- September 1991. Linux version 0.01 is released and put on the
Net.
- Unix is available from many commercial vendors like Sun, DEC, HP and IBM.
- Minix, a small OS teaching project developed by Andy Tanenbaum is
rewritten by Linus Torvalds into a freeware system called Linux. Usenet
becomes the first global communication system.
- Spring of 1992. OS/2 2.00 was released: the first true non-Unix 32 bit
operating system for personal computers.
- October, 1992. Windows 3.1 released
- Early 1993. Netware became the first widely deployed network OS. NetWare
4 introduced NDS
- February 1993. NCSA release first alpha version of Marc Andreessen's
"Mosaic for X".
- March 1993. Microsoft introduces the MS-DOS 6.0 Upgrade,
including DoubleSpace disk compression. 1 million copies of the new and
upgrade versions are sold through retail channels within the first 40 days.
Microsoft
Windows NT 3.1 was
released August, 1993 and captures an increasing share of the market for
corporation PCs. IBM realizes it has lost control of the PC OS market to
Microsoft and begins divorce proceedings against MS by trying to develop a
competing system for PCs called OS/2. It flops. GUIs become the standard
presentation tool for PC users.
- March 1993. WWW (Port 80 HTTP) traffic measures 0.1% of NSF backbone
traffic. WWW presented at
Online
Publishing 93, Pittsburgh.
- June 1993. Slackware, by Patrick Volkerding, becomes the first
commercial standalone distribution and quickly becomes popular within the
Linux community.
- October 1993. Over 200 known HTTP servers.
- November 1993. Microsoft releases MS-DOS 6.2.
- March 1994. Linux 1.0 is released.
- June 1994. Microsoft releases MS-DOS 6.22, bringing back disk
compression under the name DriveSpace. This is the last version of MS DOS.
- June 1994. WWW explosion started. Over 1500 registered
servers.
- September, 1994. Microsoft
Windows NT
3.5 was released Windows NT 3.5provides OLE 2.0, improved performance
and reduced memory requirements. Windows NT 3.5 Workstation replaces Windows
NT 3.1, while Windows NT 3.5 Server replaces the Windows NT 3.1 Advanced
Server.
- October 1994. OS/2 Warp for Windows
- Start of demise of mainframes. Vast expansion of smaller minicomputers and
desktop PCs.
Mid to Late 1990's:
- February 1995. Web is the main reason for the theme of the
G7 meeting hosted by the European Commission in the European Parliament
buildings in Brussels (BE).
- February 1995. IBM announces PC DOS 7, with integrated data compression
from Stac Electronics (Stacker). This is the last version of PC DOS.
- August, 1995.
Microsoft Windows 95
was released and sells more than 1 Million copies within 4 days.
Windows 95 provides first consumer platform with WWW connectivity out of the
box.
- Late 1995. WWW overtakes early protocols like Gopher.
- August, 1996.
Microsoft Windows NT
4.0 was released .
- November 1996. First Windows CE 1.0 devices.
- Palm became popular with PalmOS for PDAs.
- Early 1998. Windows CE 2.0 became available. Addesses most
problems in Winsowd CE 1.x
- Linux arise as an important OS and was adopted by IBM. Multiple
distribution from well-fed start-ups like Red Hat, SuSE, and others.
- BeOS was launched
- June, 1998. Windows 98 was released.
- January 1999. Samba 2.0 is released. It contains a
reverse-engineered implementation of the Microsoft domain controller
protocols, allowing Linux servers to provide complete services to Windows
networks.
- Amiga is dead.
2000:
- Aging Mac OS is replaced by BSD Unix engine with a Mac-based kernel
called OS X. More systems continue to be developed from the pioneering ideas
from the 1960s.
-
February 2000, Windows 2000 cemented Microsoft dominance
in OS for personal PCs. Linux is dead as a mass market personal PC
desktop OS alternative to Windows but still remains viable alternative for
hobbists and special categories of users.
-
Septemeber, 2000 Microsoft released Windows Me, the last version of
Windows 95 line.
-
October 2001. Windows XP was introduced.
-
June, 2001. Microtel Computer Systems, Pre-Installed with LindowsOS,
a flavour of Linux to Cost Less Than $300 at Walmart.com
Operating systems history reveals that the role of Microsoft as
an innovator in OS design was/is minimal, but does exists. Of course Microsoft
proved to be mostly great player in popularizing of somebody else (ripe for commercialization)
concepts, but still it has several contributions of its own. Moreover few people
now know that Microsoft developed one of
the influential Unix early Unix flavors (Xenix) and in late 80th and early 90th greatly contributed to the
diversity and low prices of the software on Unix as well as the creation of such projects
as FreeBSD and, especially, Linux. Xenix was the most democratic
Unix of the time and the only decent Unix implementation that run even on PC 286
reasonably well. Paradoxically when Linux for ideological reasons became a flagship of the anti-Microsoft
movement it was IBM (previous incarnation of the computer Satan ;-) who served
as Linux main backer.
From the links below one it's also quite clear that Linux is not
an innovative OS as many proponents of open source claim, but can be considered
as a rather conservative reimplementation on traditional System V Unix.
I would also like to pay attention to VM/CMS and other VM based
OSes -- a branch of OS development with great and unrealized potential. VMware
are probably the latest and greatest in this line of OSes and it's definitely
distinct from the plain vanilla Unix reimplementation like Linux.
Dr. Nikolai Bezroukov
Notes:
- This is a Spartan WHYFF (We Help
You For Free) site written by people for whom English
is not a native language.
Some amount of grammar and spelling errors should be
expected.
- The site contain some broken links
as it develops like a living tree...
Please try to use Google, Open directory,
etc. to find a replacement link (see
HOWTO search the WEB for details). We would appreciate
if you can
mail us a correct link.
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In this
present age, the Internet is considered the most important means of
global communications, and it has truly created a platform for a
borderless world. People from all walks of life are making use of
the Internet to perform a wide variety of activities, both
work-related and recreational. The Internet has become so accessible
and efficient today because of a lot of developments that took place
in the past. Here is a timeline to give you a better understanding
of the history of the Internet.
A new location. Link in "Recommended Links" corrected...
Hobbes' Internet Timeline Copyright (c)1993-2006
by Robert H Zakon. Permission is granted for use of this
document in whole or in part for non-commercial purposes as long as
this Copyright notice and a link to this document, at the archive
listed at the end, is included. A copy of the material the Timeline
appears in is requested. For commercial uses, please contact the
author first. Links to this document are welcome after e-mailing the
author with the document URL where the link will appear. As the
Timeline is frequently updated, copies to other locations on the
Internet are not permitted.
November 10, 2007 |
Jos Kirps's Popular
Science and Technology Blog
This is extraordinary news for all nerds, computer scientists
and the Open Source community: the source code of the
MULTICS operating system (Multiplexed Information and
Computing Service), the father of
UNIX and all modern OSes, has finally been opened.
Multics was an extremely influential early time-sharing
operating system started in 1964 and introduced a large number
of new concepts, including dynamic linking and a hierarchical
file system. It was extremely powerful, and UNIX can in fact be
considered to be a "simplified" successor to MULTICS (the name
"Unix" is itself a hack on "Multics"). The last running Multics
installation was shut down on October 31, 2000.
From now on, MULTICS can be downloaded from the following page
(it's the complete MR12.5 source dumped at CGI in Calgary in
2000, including the PL/1 compiler):
http://web.mit.edu/multics-history
Unfortunately you can't install this on any PC, as MULTICS
requires dedicated hardware, and there's no operational computer
system today that could run this OS. Nevertheless the software
should be considered to be an outstanding source for computer
research and scientists. It is not yet know if it will be
possible to emulate the required hardware to run the OS.
Special thanks to Tom Van Vleck for his continuous work on
www.multicians.org, to the
Group BULL including BULL HN Information Systems Inc. for
opening the sources and making all this possible, to the folks
at
MIT for releasing it and to all of those who helped to
convince BULL to open this great piece of computer history.
By the early 1950s, businesses using computers were looking
for ways to solve that problem. In 1955, programmers at the
General Motors Research Center came up with a solution for their
IBM 701 computer: a batch-processing monitor program that let
operators put a series of jobs on a single input tape. It was
the first step toward a full-scale operating system.
Computer vendors soon offered their own batch monitors. In the
early 1960s, they began to add what would become critical
operating system features. The Burroughs 5000 Master Control
Program offered virtual memory and the ability to run several
processes at once. Univac's EXEC I allocated memory, scheduled
CPU time and handled I/O requests. IBM's OS/360 allowed the same
software to run on a variety of machines.
In 1963, a team at MIT led by Fernando Corbato developed the
Compatible Time Sharing System (CTSS), the first practical OS
that let several users at once run programs from terminals. Much
of that team soon went to work on a far more ambitious OS:
Multics, a joint project with General Electric Co. and AT&T Bell
Laboratories that would offer a tree-structured file system, a
layered structure and many other modern OS features.
AT&T pulled out of the Multics project in 1969. But AT&T
programmers Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie began to develop
their own scaled-down version of Multics, which they punningly
called Unix. Unix was easy to port to new computer architectures
and grew popular at universities because AT&T made the Unix
source code available for students to study. By the 1980s, Unix
had spawned a generation of workstations—and displaced many
existing operating systems.
[Nov 11, 2006] Multix page was created
The word "mainframe" originally referred to
the physical layout of the IBM System 360 series
because the primary CPU was mounted in a
separate wiring cabinet or "main frame." Today's
mainframe, although a direct descendant of that
360 in terms of software, differs dramatically
from it in internal architecture.
That divergence started in the late nineties
when IBM decided to standardize its AIX, OS/400,
and zOS hardware on the same basic components
and same basic plug together design. Thus
today's z9 "enterprise" and "business" class
servers look a lot like older iSeries and
pSeries machines internally and are really
distinguished from those at the hardware level
only in terms of packaging and accommodations
made to legacy mainframe software and related
ideas.
The latest z9 series CPU board, called an MCM
in IBMese, is embedded in what IBM calls "a
book" and comes with up to 16 enabled CPU cores
(aka processing units) and up to 128GB of
enabled memory. Single z9 machines now max out
at four books, or 64 CPU cores. Of these,
however, at least two cores per board have to be
dedicated to "storage assist processing" (i.e.
I/O support), and at least two per machine have
to be set aside as spares -i.e. the machine
offers a maximum of 54 processing units, and
512GB of accessible memory.
The CPU used is the 1.65Ghz dual core Power5+
with some changes in the enabling firmware and
socket wiring to support traditional mainframe
features like CPU sparing and up to 40MB of
shared cache per MCM. Interconnects across the
MCM have relatively low latency, enabling dual,
eight-way, SMP blocks in the pSeries and
allowing zOS to co-ordinate up to four, eight
way, blocks to form a 32 processor virtual
machine - the largest logical partition yet
supported on the IBM mainframe.
The z9 supports up to 32 way clustering via
processor dedication. It also offers a very wide
range of external I/O capabilities built around
a maximum of 64 standardized ("self timing")
interface boards each capable of handling up to
2.7GB/Sec in flows from plug in Ethernet, disk,
or other controllers.
All of this comes in a nicely packaged
"mainframe" drawing from 6 to 19 KVA and
typically taking up about a square meter of
floor space.
In many ways this is an entirely admirable
machine: physically small, relatively
power efficient, reasonably
fast for many small tasks done in parallel;
capable of connecting to a lot of legacy
storage; and, capable of supporting hot plug
replacement for almost everything from I/O
devices to processor books.
IBM stresses both reliability and
virtualization in its sales presentations on
this product line. Of these two, the reliability
claims are mostly a case of saying what the
customers want to hear - because, in reality,
things like having spare CPUs on line are just
costly hangovers from the System 360 and there's
nothing otherwise significant in the
architecture that isn't matched in IBM's other
high end Power products.
Notice that this doesn't mean that Z9
machines aren't highly reliable, they are; but
the reliability gains over the comparable AIX
and OS/400 machines are due to the management
methods and software that go with the box, not
the hardware.
The heart of the system lies in its
virtualization capabilities. The maxed out z9
can be broken up into 60 logical partitions each
of which looks like an entire machine to its
operating systems code. Load VM on one of these
and it, in turn, can host a significant number
of concurrent guest operating systems like Linux
or one of the older 360 OS variants.
This structure reflects the machine's data
processing heritage in which it assumed that all
jobs are batch (even the on-line ones), all
batches are computationally small and severable,
and real work consists of sequential read,
manipulate, and write operations on each of many
very small data sets. Thus most jobs need
fractional CPU shares, eight way SMP more than
suffices for the largest jobs, and the use of
logical partitioning and guest operating systems
offers a proven way to both enforce job
severability for scheduling and to protect one
job from another during run-time.
This role conceptualization also has many
consequences for hardware and software
licensing. In particular software is usually
licensed by the processor count and relative
performance - meaning that limiting licensed
code to a particular logical partition size or
resource constrained guest operating system
reduces costs significantly. Since it's
difficult to apply this logic to software IBM
wants to promote or stuff that can use the whole
machine, IBM has developed licenses based on
specified uses for processors. Thus the IFL
(integrated facility for Linux) is an ordinary
CPU licensed only to run Linux, while the zAAP (zSeries
Application Assist Processor) is one licensed
only to run JAVA, and SAPs (CPUs used as storage
assist processors) don't usually count for
licensing.
An ultra-low end machine, with a fractional
single CPU license, starts at about $100,000
before storage and application licensing.
A maxed out, 54 processor, 1.65Ghz, 2094-754
z9 "enterprise" machine with 5124GB of
accessible memory
is thought to cost about $22.5 million at
list plus about $92,700 per month in maintenance
before software and storage.
According to
an IBM TPC filing, an IBM p5-595 with AIX,
2048GB of accessible RAM, and 64 cores at 1.9Ghz
lists at about $12.4 million -or about 48% ($10
million) less than the mainframe.
Similarly, list price on an IBM 9133-1EB 550Q
rackmount P550 with eight cores and 16GB of
memory is about $37,100. In other words, four
racks filled with a total of 64 of these
machines would provide about twice the total
memory offered by the z9, about eight times the
total CPU resource, about eight times the total
I/O bandwidth, four more "hard wired" logical
partitions, and just over $20 million (90%) in
change.
Tomorrow I'm going to talk about running
Linux on the z9, but the conundrum to ponder
here is a simple one: if the value of the
mainframe lies in its virtualization
capabilities, why doesn't the 64 way rackmount
offer a better solution?
Virtualization exists in
the AIX line as well
Re:
your last paragraph
"...the value of the
mainframe lies in its
virtualization
capabilities", I have to
point out that
fractional cpu
virtualization exists in
the AIX line as well
(probably an inheritance
from the z series).
I'm not an AIX pro - my
experience is dated, but
I did get a chance to
evaluate a "Regatta" 690
high end server for a
few months. One of the
truly interesting
abilities was its use of
HACMP with virtual
machines. You could
create a "stub"
environment with a
fraction of a CPU--just
enough to keep the OS
running--and then on
failover, it (as the
failover target) would
be dynamically expanded
to a pre-defined amount
of cpu, memory,
interfaces, etc. Think
of the expense of a
typical active-passive
cluster and you'll see
the appeal. This was
very efficient, very
slick, and IBM got there
first.
It's not advocacy of
IBM, just
acknowledgement of a
nice feature set. But I
also think it runs
against your comment the
other day about
virtualization as "a
palliatve for shoddy
systems design and
sloppy thinking." Too
broad a
characterization, I
think.
(Ok, now that I'm
contrarian, does this
make me "hugely
valuable" in the "loyal
opposition" ? : )
|
Plan 9 is a UNIX clone. But it presents a consistent interface which is easy
to use. I am not going to go into it at any length. But, it was the successor to
UNIX, which, Rob Pike said, was dead: "It's been dead for so long it doesn't
even stink any more." 1
Rob delivered the keynote address at the UKUUG: "Plan 9 from Bell Labs." He's
now at Google.
Dave Presotto then spoke about "Multiprocessor Streams for Plan 9." He's at
Google, too.
Tom Duff talked about "Rc -- A Shell for Plan 9 and UNIX Systems." Tom's now
at Pixar, the proud owner of parts of several Oscars.
Fifteen years later, what had been the UNIX group (1127) has been dispersed.
In addition to Rob, Dave and Tom,
- Ken Thompson retired to California;
- Brian Kernighan is a Professor at Princeton;
- Phil Winterbottom is CTO at Entrisphere;
- Gerard Holzmann is at NASA/JPL Laboratory for Reliable Software;
- Bob Flandrena is at Morgan Stanley;
- Sean Dorward is at Google;
Dennis Ritchie and Howard Trickey remain at Lucent/BTL.
But, before it disappeared, the "1127 group" made yet another contribution to
OS development: Inferno.
Inferno is a compact OS designed for building "cross-platform distributed
systems." It can run on top of an existing OS, or as a stand-alone. The
nomenclature owes much to Dave Presotto, who founded it firmly in Dante. The
company marketing Inferno is Vita Nuova; the communications protocol is Styx;
applications are written in type-safe Limbo, which has C-like syntax.
The 4th edition of Inferno was released in 2005 as free software, but under a
mixture of licenses.
IBM User's Guide,
Thirteenth Edition software on VM/CMS
Video Terminals--System Terminal Setup Operating Systems of Historical
Interest
RC22534 Thirty Years Later: Lessons from the Multics Security Evaluation."
VM history
Melinda Varian (Princeton University)(PDF
or PostScript (615K)
I strongly recommend to read at least the beginning of this 73 pages paper -- it
provides new insights into how two most interesting operating system Unix
and VM/CMS were influenced by Corbato's CTTS and MIT Multix project).
Netizens On the
History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet by Michael Hauben and Ronda Hauben
(chapter from the book. Another chapter is here
ch106.x09
In 1961, MIT was to celebrate its centennial anniversary.
Martin Greenberger, who had joined the MIT faculty in 1958, describes how a
call went out for appropriate ways to celebrate:
I proposed a series of lectures on the computer and the
future. We threw open the hatches and got together the best people we
could assemble - whatever their fields. We asked these thinkers to project
ahead and help us understand what was in store [1].
Charles Percy Snow, a British writer, was invited to be the
keynote speaker, His talk, "Scientists and Decision Making," discussed the
need for democratic and broad-based participation in the decisions of society
"We happen to be living at a time of a major scientific revolution," he
observed, "probably more important in its consequences, than the first
Industrial Revolution, a revolution which we shall see in full force in the
very near future" [2].
He and the other speakers expressed their concern that the
challenges represented by the computer be understood and treated seriously.
They felt that there would need to be government decisions regarding the
development and application of the computer. They cautioned that these
decisions be entrusted to people who understood the problems the computer
posed for society. Also, they were concerned that the smaller the number of
people involved in important social decisions, the more likely serious errors
of judgment would be made. They urged that it was necessary to open up the
decision-making process to as broad a set of people as possible.
Present at this gathering were several of the pioneers who
had helped to set the foundation for the developing cybernetic revolution.
What was the revolution they were describing? John Pierce, a pioneer in
electronics research at Bell Labs, was one of the speakers at the MIT
Centennial Conference. In an article published several years later in
Scientific American, Pierce described the foundation of the cybernetic
revolution that was then unfolding [3]. Pierce noted the
intellectual ferment that accompanied two publications in 1948. One was "The
Mathematical Theory of Communication" by Claude Shannon, published in July
and October 1948 in the Bell Systems Technical Journal. The other was
the publication of Norbert Wiener's book Cybernetics: Control and
Communication in the Animal and the Machine.
Prologue
In case of broken links
please try to use Google search. If you find the page please notify
us about new location
Timelines
Hobbes'
Internet Timeline - the definitive Internet history
by Robert H'obbes' Zakon
Hobbes' Internet Timeline Copyright (c)1993-2006
by Robert H Zakon. Permission is granted for use of this
document in whole or in part for non-commercial purposes as long as
this Copyright notice and a link to this document, at the archive
listed at the end, is included. A copy of the material the Timeline
appears in is requested. For commercial uses, please contact the
author first. Links to this document are welcome after e-mailing the
author with the document URL where the link will appear. As the
Timeline is frequently updated, copies to other locations on the
Internet are not permitted.
Internet Timeline
In this
present age, the Internet is considered the most important means of
global communications, and it has truly created a platform for a
borderless world. People from all walks of life are making use of
the Internet to perform a wide variety of activities, both
work-related and recreational. The Internet has become so accessible
and efficient today because of a lot of developments that took place
in the past. Here is a timeline to give you a better understanding
of the history of the Internet.
Webopedia
Brief Timeline of the Internet
General links
http://www.tuhs.org/ The Unix Heritage
Society website
Open
Directory - Computers History Operating Systems Unix
Yahoo!
Computers and Internet Internet History
Yahoo! Computers and Internet Software Operating Systems UNIX History
-
History & Timeline - chronicles the development of UNIX.
-
History of UNIX before Berkeley - evolution of the operating system from
1975-1984.
-
History of UNIX, The - Ronda Hauben's article on the evolution of UNIX
and the automation of telephone support operations.
-
Ritchie, Dennis M. - technical papers, notes, and personal stories from
one of the creators of the the C programming language and the UNIX operating
system.
-
Unix Heritage Society, The - fosters the preservation and maintenance of
historical and non-mainstream UNIX systems, as well as the further
development of existing ones.
Internet Modern History Sourcebook- Main Page
***
Computer
Science A Brief History
History of Computing Information
-- a lot of interesting links
Web Sites Related to the History
of Information Processing -- useful collection of links
looking.back - January 1996
THE HISTORY OF COMPUTING
- contains a lot of interesting links, including links to rare photographs of
pioneers in computer science
Computers From Past to
Present
VM/CMS is a great operating system -- is some ways as great as Unix. But IBM
(almost) killed it but later revitalized as VM/Linux.
VM history
Melinda Varian (Princeton University)(PDF
or PostScript (615K)
I strongly recommend to read at least the beginning of this 73 pages paper -- it
provides new insights into how two most interesting operating system Unix
and VM/CMS were influenced by Corbato's CTTS and MIT Multix project).
Among descendants I would like to note VMware:
Linux Today The Standard
Why Choose [when VMWare Lets You Switch]
"Since it launched in May, VMware has signed nearly 200,000 customers,
including Cessna Aircraft, Hewlett-Packard (HWP) and IBM (IBM). Cessna's
marketing group needs to support remote sales managers running Windows 95,
Windows 98 and Windows NT. Making networking even more complicated, the company
is upgrading some of its 5,000 desktops to Windows 2000, and is also trying out
Linux. Maintaining such a varied network was an arduous task before the company
installed VMware."
"VMware has also attracted a loyal following among Linux fans. 'A lot of
Linux users are using VMware to run Microsoft (MSFT) productivity applications,'
says VMware's [CEO, Diane] Greene. 'That's the largest single segment that we
have today.'
She says VMware really boils down to choice. 'People don't want to be
restricted in what they do on their computer; different operating systems have
their own unique benefits and capabilities.' "
Complete Story
Related OSes: VMWare
PRNewswire: VMware Is
Analyst Pick for Info World 1999 Product of the Year (Jan 28, 2000)
LinuxTicker: Emulating a
complete PC with VMware (Jan 24, 2000)
LinuxPR: Linuxcare And
VMware Combine Forces (Jan 07, 2000)
Linux.com.sg (Singapore):
Review on VMware (Oct 02, 1999)
PC World: Create Two Virtual
PCs Out of One [with VMware] (Sep 10, 1999)
Sotpanorama Linus
Torvalds page -- contains a lot of information about history of Linux
Copyright © 1996-2008 by Dr. Nikolai Bezroukov.
www.softpanorama.org was
created as a service to the UN Sustainable Development Networking Programme (SDNP)
in the author free time.
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Last modified:
February 25, 2009