The Hamsterdome

GM-NAA I/O

Robert Patrick (General Motors) and Owen Mock (North American Aviation)

The first operating system for the IBM 704. Before it, operators set up the computer by hand for each program; this let the machine move from one job to the next by itself.

No screen at all: jobs ran one after another, in a batch.

Led to: OS/360

CTSS

Fernando Corbató and his team at MIT

The Compatible Time-Sharing System was the first general-purpose time-sharing system: many people at terminals could use one computer at the same time. It was also the first system with password logins.

Led to: Multics

OS/360

IBM, managed by Fred Brooks

The operating system for IBM's System/360 family, one of the biggest software projects of its time. Fred Brooks wrote about what he learned managing it in his famous book The Mythical Man-Month.

Job Control Language (IEFBR14 is a program that does nothing)

//HELLO    JOB
//STEP1    EXEC PGM=IEFBR14

Came from: GM-NAA I/O

In my museum: IBM System/360

Multics

MIT, Bell Labs and General Electric

An ambitious time-sharing system for the GE 645 with lots of new ideas. Bell Labs pulled out in 1969 when it was taking too long, and two of its people went on to build a smaller, simpler system, Unix.

Came from: CTSS

Led to: Unix

Unix

Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and others at Bell Labs

First written in assembly language on a PDP-7, moved to the PDP-11 in 1970, and rewritten in C in 1973, which let it move to other computers. Its ideas of small tools, plain text files and a command-line shell are still everywhere.

Came from: Multics

Led to: Unix V6, HamsterOS 95

In my museum: DEC PDP-7, DEC PDP-11, Teletype Model 33

CP/M

Gary Kildall of Digital Research

Control Program for Microcomputers, written for Intel 8080 machines. It became the standard for early disk-based microcomputers, from the Altair 8800 to the Osborne 1.

The CP/M prompt (A is the current disk drive)

A>

Led to: 86-DOS

In my museum: Altair 8800, Osborne 1

Unix V6

Bell Labs · also called Sixth Edition Unix

Released in May 1975 for the PDP-11, it was the first version of Unix to be released widely outside Bell Labs. John Lions at the University of New South Wales wrote a famous commentary on its source code, and UC Berkeley's add-on programs for it grew into BSD.

Booting it on a PDP-11

@rkunix

login: root
# ls

Came from: Unix

Led to: Unix V7, BSD

In my museum: Unix V6, DEC PDP-11

[try Unix V6 in your browser] [read my V6 field guide]

Apple DOS

Shepardson Microsystems, for Apple

The Apple II had no disk operating system, or DOS, at first. In April 1978 Apple paid Shepardson Microsystems $13,000 to write one within 35 days, to go with Wozniak's new Disk II drive.

Listing a disk from the Applesoft BASIC prompt

]CATALOG

In my museum: Apple II

BSD

Bill Joy and others at UC Berkeley

The Berkeley Software Distribution started as add-on programs for Unix V6 at UC Berkeley, and later releases were built on V7. With DARPA funding it added networking, and its code lives on in FreeBSD, macOS and more.

The C shell prompt and the vi editor, both written by Bill Joy

% vi hello.c

Came from: Unix V6

Led to: NeXTSTEP, FreeBSD

In my museum: DEC PDP-11

Unix V7

Bell Labs · also called Seventh Edition Unix

The first Unix that was easy to move to other computers, and the last Bell Labs release to be widely shared before AT&T started selling Unix. It added the Bourne shell, awk and tar. Its port to the VAX, called 32V, was the direct ancestor of System V and of later BSD releases, and the first Microsoft Xenix came from it too.

Came from: Unix V6

Led to: Unix System V, MINIX

In my museum: DEC PDP-11

86-DOS

Tim Paterson at Seattle Computer Products

Known inside the company as QDOS, for "Quick and Dirty Operating System," it worked a lot like CP/M but ran on Intel's 8086. Microsoft licensed it and then bought it, and it became MS-DOS.

Came from: CP/M

Led to: MS-DOS

[try 86-DOS]

Xerox Star

Xerox

Introduced April 27, 1981, the first commercial computer with the now-familiar desktop: windows, a mouse, and icons for documents and folders. David Canfield Smith invented the icons and the desktop metaphor. It grew out of the Xerox Alto.

Led to: Lisa OS, Windows 1.0

In my museum: Xerox Alto

[Darkstar, a Xerox Star emulator from Living Computers] (a download for Windows, or Linux with Mono)

MS-DOS

Microsoft

Microsoft's Disk Operating System, released in 1981 as PC DOS for the IBM PC, and as MS-DOS for the many clones that followed. Early versions of Windows ran on top of it.

The prompt most people remember

C:\>DIR

Came from: 86-DOS

Led to: Windows 1.0, Windows 95

In my museum: IBM PC 5150, Gateway 2000

[try MS-DOS]

Lisa OS

Apple

Apple's first graphical operating system, unveiled with the Lisa on January 19, 1983. Its ideas went into the Macintosh a year later.

Came from: Xerox Star

Led to: Macintosh System 1

In my museum: Apple Lisa

Unix System V

AT&T

AT&T's commercial version of Unix, first released in 1983. With BSD, it was one of the two main branches of the Unix family tree.

Came from: Unix V7

Macintosh System 1

Apple

Released January 24, 1984, with the Macintosh 128K. It had the Finder and the menu bar, and it brought the mouse-and-desktop style to a wide audience.

The startup message

Welcome to Macintosh.

Came from: Lisa OS

Led to: GEOS, Mac OS 8

In my museum: Macintosh 128K

[try System 1]

Windows 1.0

Microsoft

Released November 20, 1985, as a graphical program running on top of MS-DOS. Its windows couldn't overlap, so they were tiled side by side, and it came with the game Reversi.

Came from: MS-DOS, Xerox Star

Led to: Windows 3.0

[try Windows 1.0]

AmigaOS

Commodore

Introduced with the Amiga 1000 in 1985. Its preemptive multitasking let several programs run smoothly at once, years before most home computers could. Its desktop was called Workbench.

The famous Amiga crash message

Software Failure.    Press left mouse button to continue.
Guru Meditation

In my museum: Amiga 500

GEOS

Berkeley Softworks

A graphical desktop for the Commodore 64, with a word processor and paint program, that closely resembled the early Mac. It squeezed a mouse-driven desktop onto an 8-bit computer with 64 KB of memory.

Came from: Macintosh System 1

In my museum: Commodore 64

MINIX

Andrew Tanenbaum

A small Unix-like system written for teaching, that ran on affordable IBM PCs. It was built to work like Unix V7, though it didn't use any of V7's code. A student named Linus Torvalds used it, and it inspired him to write his own.

Came from: Unix V7

Led to: Linux

[try MINIX]

NeXTSTEP

NeXT

Steve Jobs's company built it on the Mach kernel and BSD Unix. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser and web server on it, and when Apple bought NeXT, it became the foundation of Mac OS X.

Came from: BSD

Led to: Mac OS X

In my museum: NeXT Computer

[try NeXTSTEP]

Windows 3.0

Microsoft

Launched May 22, 1990, with icons you could click instead of lists of file names, and a new card game: Solitaire. It was a huge hit, selling 10 million copies.

Came from: Windows 1.0

Led to: Windows NT, Windows 95

Windows 3.1 followed in 1992 and was what most people actually got, bundled on top of MS-DOS by every PC maker.

In my museum: Gateway 2000

[try Windows 3.0]

Linux

Linus Torvalds

Torvalds, then 21, announced it on August 25, 1991, in a post to the MINIX newsgroup, and released the first version that September. Today Linux runs on everything from servers to supercomputers, and Android is built on it.

Linus Torvalds's announcement, August 25, 1991

Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free)
operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.

Came from: MINIX

Led to: Debian, Fedora, Android

[try Linux]

Windows NT

Dave Cutler's team at Microsoft

A brand-new, much sturdier Windows written from scratch, first released as Windows NT 3.1 on July 27, 1993, for businesses. Home users got it with Windows XP in 2001.

Came from: Windows 3.0

Led to: Windows XP

[try Windows NT]

FreeBSD

the FreeBSD Project

A free descendant of BSD, first released in 1993. Its code is inside the PlayStation 4 and 5's system software.

Came from: BSD

[try FreeBSD]

Debian

Ian Murdock

Announced on August 16, 1993, a few weeks before Murdock finished his undergraduate degree, and named for himself and his then-girlfriend Debra: Deb and Ian. It has never belonged to a company. The project is run by volunteers under a written social contract and its own constitution, which is part of why so many other distributions are built on top of it.

Came from: Linux

Led to: Ubuntu

[the Debian project]

Windows 95

Microsoft

Introduced the Start button and the taskbar, and launched with an ad set to the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up." Its startup sound, "The Microsoft Sound," was composed by the musician Brian Eno. Microsoft asked for a piece just 3¼ seconds long, and he made 84 of them before picking one.

Came from: Windows 3.0, MS-DOS

Led to: Windows XP, HamsterOS 95

In my museum: Windows 95

[boot it in my Time Machine]

Palm OS

Palm Computing

Designed in 1996 for the Pilot handheld. You wrote with a stylus in a simplified alphabet called Graffiti, and synced to your desktop computer with HotSync.

Palm wrote it from scratch rather than building on another system, but it didn't come from nowhere. Jeff Hawkins had designed the GRiDPad, a pen tablet from 1989, and Palm's first products were handwriting and organizer apps for the Zoomer, a handheld that ran PEN/GEOS (a cousin of GEOS). Working on the Zoomer convinced them they could build better hardware themselves, and Palm learned from the struggles of earlier handhelds like Apple's Newton.

In my museum: Palm Pilot

Mac OS 8

Apple

Released July 26, 1997, with the gray 3D "Platinum" look, and it sold over 1.2 million copies in its first two weeks. It kept the Mac going while Apple built Mac OS X.

Came from: Macintosh System 1

Led to: Mac OS X

In my museum: Mac OS 8.1, iMac G3

[boot Mac OS 8.1 in my Time Machine]

Mac OS X

Apple

Version 10.0, "Cheetah," came out March 24, 2001. It put NeXTSTEP's Unix underneath a new look called Aqua, with the Dock. Today it's called macOS.

Came from: NeXTSTEP, Mac OS 8

Led to: iOS

In my museum: iMac G3

[try Mac OS X 10.0]

Windows XP

Microsoft

Released October 25, 2001, bringing the sturdy Windows NT core to home users, along with the colorful Luna look and the rolling green hill wallpaper, "Bliss."

Came from: Windows NT, Windows 95

In my museum: Compaq Presario 5000

Fedora

Red Hat and the Fedora Project

Red Hat Linux ran from 1994 to 2003, when Red Hat split it in two: a paid, slow-moving version for businesses, and Fedora, free and community-run, where new ideas get tried first. New Linux features often show up in Fedora a few years before other distributions get them.

Came from: Linux

[the Fedora Project]

Ubuntu

Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical

Debian underneath, but on a schedule: a new release every six months, each one named after an animal, starting with Warty Warthog on October 20, 2004. The goal was a Linux an ordinary person could install, and for six years Canonical would mail you a pressed CD of it anywhere in the world for free. The name is a Nguni word, roughly "I am because we are."

Came from: Debian

[Ubuntu]

iOS

Apple

Unveiled with the first iPhone in January 2007 as "iPhone OS." Steve Jobs said "iPhone runs OS X": it shares the same Darwin core as the Mac.

Came from: Mac OS X

In my museum: iPhone

Android

Android Inc. and Google

Built on the Linux kernel. The first Android phone, the HTC Dream, was announced September 23, 2008, and Android is now the most widely used operating system in the world.

Came from: Linux

In my museum: T-Mobile G1

[try Android]

HamsterOS 95

Hammy

The made-up operating system running the terminal on my home page. A Unix-style shell, a Windows 95-style name, and a lot of sunflower seeds. Like any good Unix, it can compile and run the classic "hello, world": type cc hello.c, then ./a.out.

neofetch, in my terminal

  n _____ n      guest@hamsterdome
 (  o   o  )     -----------------
((   =w=   ))    OS: HamsterOS 95
 (")_____(")     Shell: hsh 1.0

Came from: Unix, Windows 95

[open the terminal]