Bits of history – software

They needed to get something really quick. I figured later I'd go hack and work out the finished operating system with multitasking and all that.

Tim Paterson, original designer of MS-DOS

MS-DOS. Shortly after Intel first offered the 16-bit 8086 chip in 1979, a small hardware firm called Seattle Computer Products needed an operating system for an 8086 product under development To satisfy this need, it developed an operating system called QDOS (for Quick and Dirty Operating System) with an eye to making it as compatible as possible with CP/M. This operating system was renamed 86-DOS and licensed to Microsoft for development of 16-bit software to run on Intel chips. Microsoft eventually bought the system, renamed it MS-DOS, and later licensed it to IBM for use on the original IBM PC as PC-DOS.

UNIX. The oldest operating system for small computers, UNIX was developed in 1970 by Bell Labs (now AT&T) for use on its in-house minicomputers. When personal computers became popular in the early 1980s, UNIX was modified to run on these smaller computers. It has since been licensed to other companies, such as Microsoft, to be sold for 16-bit computers under the name XENIX. IBM has a version called AIX, and a version of UNIX is the operating system used on Steve Jobs's NeXT computer.

OS/2. The newer PC operating system, OS/2, was developed jointly by Microsoft and IBM and announced in April 1987. Designed as a successor to MS-DOS that offers multitasking and expanded memory management, OS/2 has gone through various stages of development leading up to the current version. Currently, OS/2 offers an easy-to-use graphical interface and robust multitasking capabilities.

Macintosh. The graphical interface approach of the Macintosh operating system is based on work done in the 1970s at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) of Xerox (the same people who were involved in the development of the computer mouse). Of central importance at this laboratory was finding ways to make the computer easier to use rather than requiring the user to become an expert on a given machine. It is said that Steve Jobs—a co-founder of Apple Computers-visited this center in the late 1970s, saw what they were doing, and decided that this same approach should be used for future Apple computers. The people at Apple adapted the earlier work to develop the operating system on the Lisa computer and then on the Macintosh computer.

Microsoft Windows. This is a series of software operating systems and graphical user interfaces produced by Microsoft. Microsoft first introduced an operating environment named Windows in November 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal computer market, overtaking Mac OS, which had been introduced previously. At the 2004 IDC Directions conference, it was stated that Windows had approximately 90% of the client operating system market. The most recent client version of Windows is Windows Vista; the most recent server version is Windows Server 2008. Vista's successor, Windows 7 (currently a release candidate), is scheduled to be released on October 22, 2009.

Linux. It is a generic term referring to Unix-like computer operating systems based on the Linux kernel. Their development is one of the most prominent examples of free and open source software collaboration; typically all the underlying source code can be used, freely modified, and redistributed by anyone. Linux is predominantly known for its use in servers, although it is installed on a wide variety of computer hardware, ranging from embedded devices and mobile phones to supercomputers. The name "Linux" comes from the Linux kernel, originally written in 1991 by Linus Torvalds. The rest of the system usually comprises components such as the Apache HTTP Server, the X Window System, the K Desktop Environment, and utilities and libraries from the GNU operating system (announced in 1983 by Richard Stallman). Commonly-used applications with desktop Linux systems include the Mozilla Firefox web-browser and the OpenOffice.org office application suite.

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