History of OS (Operating Systems)

we use computers every single day from desktops laptops tablets and smartphones but in many ways we've become almost oblivious to how they actually work the user interfaces used across all of these operating systems have become intuitive and almost anonymous to us when you look at your windows pc your mac or linux machine and indeed your android or ios device you are looking at the collective sum total of years of software and hardware progress and development to reach the current look and feel you see before you so in many ways the features we take for granted were in one day very alien concepts to those early computing pioneers the modern os has come from somewhere and in this video i'm going to talk to you about how history has given birth to the modern operating system this is the history of the operating system let's go back in time to the invention of digital computers they could handle around five thousand complex calculations per second impressive for the time but today supercomputers perform nearly 34 trillion calculations per second programs were written on punch cards pieces of cardboard with holes these were fed one at a time into the central processing unit or cpu and enabled the earliest form of computer batch processing in some cases one person was in charge of making sure the cards were fed in correctly their job was to correct jams and schedule when the next program could be run as computers became faster they were able to process punch card tasks quicker than the cards could be fed in there was another problem different computers resources that is the components within them such as ram and the devices attached to them such as printers were all different from one another a programmer had to write very different types of programs specific to the machine it would be running on it's all getting a bit complicated isn't it in the 1960s ibm were the leading computer hardware vendor and developed the os 360 but it wasn't until later in the decade that the rise of unix would change everything at t bell laboratories developed the system for their old pdp-7 mini computer by today's standards there was nothing mini about it but back then a computer that didn't take up half a room was considered small it cost seventy two thousand dollars it used flip chip technology and would support a keyboard printer paper tape and dual transport deck tape drives by today's standards it had a memory capacity of just nine kilobytes but of course back then memory wasn't measured in bytes it was measured in words of which you could store only four thousand unix proved popular because it was easy to obtain easily modified and completely free the 1970s would bring us 8-bit processors including the intel 8080 a precursor to the 386 processor and later the intel 486 but it wasn't until the 1980s that we started to see a giant leap in computing development this was because it had finally become commercially viable to produce smaller computers for the home these included the commodore 64 the apple 2 series the atari 8-bit machine and of course who could forget the zx spectrum in 1981 xerox introduced the star office information system which would ultimately prove revolutionary because it gave apple the idea to produce a gui graphical user interface based operating system for the first time and include mouse-based input this was the first time anyone had ever seen icons represent files and folders on a computing system we take it for granted now but back then that was high-brow stuff and a lot of people found it very difficult to actually get to grips with even to this day you can still see where modern operating systems take their design cues and their general conventions and behaviors from all the work that xerox did back in the day it gave us terms like desktop and property settings but also delete copy and move functions to this day we still owe the majority of these breakthroughs to xerox and not apple or microsoft of course at this time microsoft dos and pc does sold on ibm computers was the market leader and would remain relatively intact beneath windows 95 98 and millennium as a software compatibility mode for older applications backing things up a little bit though it was apple's lisa office system in 1983 that gave us the first graphical user interface based operating system that was commercially viable as you can see it bears a striking resemblance to xerox interpretation however lisa was way too expensive for the average consumer and the machine itself was a commercial failure later apple would develop system 1.0 in 1984 for the original macintosh and then everything changed even today you can see that the first mac operating system has some striking similarities to what we use today the apple logo the general layout of folders the taskbar at the top and the trash can in the bottom right hand corner in many ways it's kind of like a primitive version of os 10 or more accurately more like os9 but you can still see that apple have retained the general layout of their desktop operating system after all these years microsoft would copy apple in developing windows and of course windows 95 was the biggest operating system of the 90s when you look at these operating systems developed by microsoft and apple over the years although a lot's changed in many ways they still retain the same design elements and ui conventions that we see today but of course operating systems have evolved beyond the mouse and keyboard with the advent of touchscreen devices and social media operating systems have begun to go through their next major evolution now social media networks pervade desktop environments with reminders and notifications they've become far more simplified and appliance-like users expect them to be ever more intuitive and easier to use with all of the complexity and technology hidden away from them we take so many of the great features and functions of our operating systems today for granted and it can be all too easy to forget where the ingenuity and creativity actually came from there's no doubt that the operating systems of today are light years ahead of what we had in the 70s 80s and 90s but the fundamental principles and core commitment to meet the user's needs and recognize the importance of breaking down the barrier between the hardware and the software and the human interface remains an evolving project we can only speculate where operating systems will be in the next 10 or 20 years but one thing's for sure wherever we're headed the progress we make will be built on a mountain of developmental successes and failures made by those first computing pioneers from the dawn of the computing age

Channel: Harrison Crettol

Views: 40,431

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Id: e-YI-fjI8Nc

Length: 6min 58sec (418 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 21 2020