Books on Operating Systems History?

An introspective member of Clan Anonymous Coward asks: "Having moved to Linux only recently from Microsoft I have become interested in the history of computer systems and how they evolved. Does anyone know of a really geat book that would go through this history, ideally centred around Unix (and all of its variants) but including other systems like IBM, Next, Apple, Microsoft, Sun and everyone else in a way that would show how we got to where we are today? Webpages would be nice suggestions, too, but it's really a good read I'm after."

Comments

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

[rjamestaylor]

Find Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution . It will inspire you (good read). It stops soon after the Apple II, so you'll need something else for more recent history.

Re:Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

[Kaufmann]

Hackers is an excellent book, but of very limited scope: it deals only with the "original" hacker community at MIT (and later Stanford) in the 1960s, the hardware hackers at Northern California in the 1970s, and the game hackers up to 1984 (when the book was published). It makes very little mention of operating systems proper, discussing only MIT's ITS at length (it also mentions Lisp Machines in the epilogue, but doesn't talk about Symbolics' brilliant and innovative OS, Genera). More generally, it's a book written by a layman for laymen, and as such it doesn't get really deep about any of the technical topics which are of most interest to many of us.

My own suggestion, although not wholly fitting the OP's desires either, is a technical book which does discuss some history of OSs from a technical perspective: Prof Andrew Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems (I'm too lazy to go look up an URL), a time-honoured college-level textbook which focuses mostly on Unix and traditional OS designs, although more than half of it is about distributed systems.

A Quarter Century of Unix

[dnxthx]

It's not about all operating systems, but A Quarter Century of Unix is all about, well, a quater centruy of Unix. ;) (ISBN: 0201547775)

here are some links

[dutky]

• First, here are lecture notes from a college course on operating system design.
• Second, some more meterial from another university (it's not clear to me that this is from a course).
• Third, a terse document detailing broad set of features common to operating systems of different periods (also part of an operating sytems course).
• Fourth, another page, which seems to be part of college course, with a section on the history of operating systems.
• Fifth, a web-slideshow on the topic.
• And Finally, a smattering of other links to the same topic by even more authors: another lecture from a college course, chapter 3, section 1 from the book Introductory Information Protection by Fred Cohen & Associates, Operating Systems - Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, and Evolution of Operating Systems User Interface Design

Just one further note, I got these links by using a new-fangled invention called a search engine on another moder dohicky called the world-wide-web. You aught to give it a try sometime, rather than having other folks do all the work for you.

Re:Accidental Empires

[Captain Teflon]

I can recommend Accidental Empires, by Robert X. Cringely. His writing style is a little, er, idiosyncratic, but I personally find it most entertaining.

Check out his own website:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/

to get a taste.

The book doesn't really document OS history as much as that of the computer industry, but IMHO it's essential reading for anyone who sees themselves as a pundit on such matters.

"Triumph of the Nerds", is worth a look in the same vein. From memory, Cringley did an earlier program as well, to do with computers rather than the Internet, which is primarily what "Nerds" is about.

Neal Stephenson's essay "In the beginning was the Command Line" is not really historical, but is worth reading to appreciate some of the differences between modern OS's, if you haven't seen it before:

http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html

Unix Family Tree

[SEWilco]

Here's the Unix Family Tree. Predates Linux...although I've seen versions with Linux included, I seem to have neglected to bookmark one.

A much better family tree

[AliasTheRoot]

http://www.ehlis.com/adam/solaris/hi story.html - covers Linux & SVR5 type Unices too

Deitel and Tannenbaum

[ader]

Lots of people seem to be recommending the last book they read, whether it was about the Internet or Unix...

Harvey Deitel's "Introduction to Operating Systems" is used for many college courses (including the one I took). It may be a bit out of date now, and of course it's more about the design than the history, but you can piece together the history from the content. It is fairly agnostic and covers everything from MacOS to MVS.

Tannenbaum's "Modern Operating Systems" is also quite readable from what I recall.

Books describing general OS history are harder to find. ESR's jargon file (aka "The New Hacker's Dictionary") has some interesting nuggets though.

Ade_
/