Softpanorama
(slightly skeptical) Open Source Software Educational Society

May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)

Softpanorama Search

Softpanorama
OS History Education Project Library

News

Recommended Links

Selected homepages

History of Computing

 Donald Knuth: Leonard Euler of Computer Science Internet History

CTSS

 Multics Unix VM/CMS

VAX/VMS

Linux

DOS History

OS/2

Windows 95-98

Amiga

Windows NT

 
OS/360 VMware VM/Linux  Plan9 BeOS OS X

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:

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:

Late 1960s: 

1970s:

Late 70th.

Early 1980's: .

Mid to Late 1980's: 

Early 1990's:

Mid to Late 1990's:

2000:

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.
Google Search
Open directory
Research Index

News

[Feb 25, 2009] 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.

 

[Feb 25, 2009] Hobbes' Internet Timeline - the definitive ARPAnet & Internet history

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.

[Nov 10, 2007] MIT releases the sources of MULTICS, the father of UNIX! -

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.

[Nov 11, 2006] The Story So Far Operating Systems

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

[May 15, 2006]  Reviewing the mainframe Paul Murphy ZDNet.com by Paul Murphy Digg This!

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" ? : )

GROKLAW/The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin ~ by Peter H. Salus. Chapter 14. BTL after UNIX: Plan 9 and Inferno

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,

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.

MVS... a long history OS-360 make-up by Thierry FALISSARD. Very good.

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

Recommended Links

In case of broken links please try to use Google search. If you find the page please notify us about new location
Google     

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

Internet Modern History Sourcebook- Main Page

History of Computing

***     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

General reading on OS history

Internet History

VM/CMS

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)

Linux

Sotpanorama Linus Torvalds page -- contains a lot of information about history of Linux

Copyright © 1996-2009 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. Submit comments This document is an industrial compilation designed and created exclusively for educational use and is placed under the copyright of the Open Content License(OPL). Site uses AdSense so you need to be aware of Google privacy policy. Original materials copyright belong to respective owners. Quotes are made for educational purposes only in compliance with the fair use doctrine.

Disclaimer:

Last modified: August 13, 2009