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What Was The First Computer Operating System?
somethinsfishy asks: "A shell and a kernel is a fine description of a 'primitive' OS, but back in the days of vacuum tubes and mercury delay lines, a programmer had to be intimately familiar with the hardware. No source I've seen in print or on-line definitely says 'x' is the first OS. I've looked. This seems like it could be a grey area. Any thoughts?"
Version 2 (which included support for subroutines, amongst other incredible inventions) was introduced on August 1949. It loaded the program, translated it from what could be described as a simple assembler. As 'Initial Orders 2' added the subroutine stuff; a library function that was used by the program while running, maybe it counts as the first OS. A few details about EDSAC are available here
FORTRAN, however, does predate emacs by quite a few years...
John
John_Chalisque
Well, it would have supported at least FORTRAN, and I think Lisp was developed on a 7040 or a 7090.
Rev. Dr. Xenophon Fenderson, the Carbon(d)ated, KSC, DEATH, SubGenius, mhm21x16
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
I've been informed of some brain farts in my post (thanks Clem!).
First, I don't know why I said MVT stood for "Mutliple Virtual Tasks" instead of "Multiple *Variable* Tasks". I guess my mind was running faster than my fingers and I was already thinking about SVS. MVT didn't have virtual memory.
Also, Clem reminded me that the second "S"s in SVS and MVS stood for "storage" not "system". My mind is going, I guess, I should have remembered that.
Finally, Clem mentioned that there was an OS called PCP (Primary Control Program) that came between DOS and MFT.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
No, VSE/ESA, which is a direct descendent of DOS/VSA, is still sold and supported by IBM.
Also, the OS/390 does *not* have a Unix Kernel, but it can support a POSIX compliant program program (TCP/IP, Hierarchical directories, etc.) under OS/390. Yes, you can do Unix development on a mainframe, under a mainframe operating system, and recompile that application under Unix.
Yup, mainfames still use JCL. They also,
- use REXX and CLIST as batch scripting languages, giving the mainframe user access to any feature hosted on the box (batch processes, LU6.2 and TCP/IP communications, etc.)
- support transnational networks with a single point of control.
- support 200 to 300 simultaneous users with 10 to 15 large scale batch processes all running concurrently.
- support tetra-byte size databases with response times measured in single seconds.
- etc., etc., etc.,
PC's never took over. PC's added to the mix and skill set that professionals learn and understand.
hehe, that's straight out of the Bill Gates marketing book! At least Bill knew that his was the first internet ready OS, the UNIX systems that were on the internet before then just weren't ready for it were they? IE2 was also ahead of its times with support for things like the marquee tag which made Netscape innovations such as frames and tables.
:)
Ahh well you can tell from your post you were taking the piss. Mark the AC as funny
was built by Konrad Zuse who probably was the
first hacker too since the living room of his
parents appartment was pretty completely filled
out by his computer in 1941.
Zuse
--
Did not come into existance until 1974. If you are going to spout off at least know your stuff. The "Internet" and related techologies did not come until the 1980's and that technology was created by a working group at Berkley with funding from DARPA.
Well, they do have to post up to ten stories a day. Sometimes even three or four per person. That's a story every, what, 2 hours? Whew, what a workload. Glad I'm not doing it.
There was also the IBM 1401, IBM 7090 in the same era.
Most of the "Operating Systems" of that era were not that much more functional than CP/M-80, delivering an ability to to handle I/O as a reasonably abstract call w/o needing to know what the I/O addresses were and writing the necessary channel program.
Beyond the "Monitor" routines (for these I/O services) were additional layers to load in programs from the specified media (early JCL).
You'll need someone a bit older than me (46yo) who dates back to the days when programmers were still called "logicians".
My wife's one great aunt is 95+ and, during the 1920s, held a job AS a COMPUTER. Sheesh, times change. (In those days, apparently I/O was handled by the boys carrying the ledgers to/from the shelves.)
"When I was your age, we didn't have none of these fancy graphics you kids have, no, if we wanted to see pictures, we ran jobs out to the card punch and held the deck up to the light!"
-soup (GNUrd, Speaker to Machines) "Laugh at yourself- Why should everyone else have all the fun?" -Romanchek's 6th Ru
There are times when record-oriented I/O (rather than character oriented) makes more sense. (Just not very often)
All kidding aside, there are some things that mainframes excel at:
IBM's channel architecture (originally seen on the S/360) was mimicked by Xerox (Sigma Series) as well as Sperry-UNIVAC (in the 1100/40 and later systems). This architecture, while best for record-oriented I/O, did it's utmost to move the data where it was needed in order to keep the processor fed.
When CPUs exceeded I/O speeds by a huge margin (happening with the 7090s, for instance) the advantage of having multiple programs running simultaneously started to make sense.
BTW- an early OS on the 709/7090 was CTSS - the Compatible Time Sharing System. Much that was implemented there ended up in VM/CMS.
-soup (GNUrd, Speaker to Machines) "Laugh at yourself- Why should everyone else have all the fun?" -Romanchek's 6th Ru
Even better, the paper tape speed was limited due to the problem of disintigration at even higher speeds! 8)
Read my online journal: http://chris.carline.org
If we define an OS as a means for scheduling hardware usage, then the first OS must have been the clipboard outside the lab!
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
I don't think this is a really easy question to answer. Originally, jobs were scheduled by a person, where the whole machine was available to one program at a time, and you had a person manually entering jobs on cards. This person was replaced with a program which scheduled the programs called "The Resident Monitor". AFAIK, this was the first job control program, but this is the stuff that led to developing OSs, certainly not a full fledged OS in and of itself.
Actually, if you are interested, MVT can be downloaded and run via the s/360 emulator, Hercules.
finkployd
IBM probably started it with the 360, but maybe GE was first. I was with Honeywell from 1964, and when the H200 was introduced they didn't call any of the software OS200. That came later probably 66/67. Before that everything was done by people. Most everyting was batch, and on larger systems punched cards controlled things, and the OS were called Operators. They mounted tapes, and often controlled or changed the jobs through the console card reader.
I didn't see much Interactive stuff 'till we joined with GE in 1968. Gecos was there then, and I can recall logging in to Dartmouth College on a GE hardcopy terminal to have my first exposure to Basic.
BTW if you look in the Password file layout in your Linux (or any othe Unix like) system, you'll see that the GECOS field is still there.
Well I guess I was wrong in my earlier comment. The Mercury system used by Metropolitan Life Insurance from 1960 on their Honeywell 800 machines did this. I always considered it a program loader but it did allocate memory to different programs as they were loaded. The rest of the job was looked after by the H-800 hardware.
The standard configuration used 8 Mag tapes, and was able to run 2 or 3 jobs simultaneously on the multitasking hardware. The hardware itself was capable of running up to 8 programs at once, but I/O considerations kept the practical number low.
Job scheduling was done using JCL, fed through a card reader. The machines were not particularly reliable by today's standard, but you could usually run a small diagnostic in an unused program group to help isolate a problem while the machine was still running.
The whole thing, though, was never considered an "Operating System". By '65 though IBM claimed TOS for the 7040/7090, and DOS as well for the machines that had disks. At that time these things were not much more than program loaders, and those machines did not multitask.
Oh, and TWM is much prettier? Don't forget how old this is...
I hope to die peacefully in my sleep like grandpa, not screaming like his passengers.
I belive that the operating systems on IBM 7090 as well as IBM 1800 series machines predated the OS/360 which cam as late as mid 1960's
Nothing wrong with it. twm is still great when low CPU load is needed. And it is very easy to configure.
X-Window + twm is, IMHO, more powerful than MS Windows. But who do still remind twm ? everybody knows MS Windows, even if they don't own a computer or own a MAC/Unix station.
That's how the history is written, by what the people know well... The less known facts are shadowed by the most known. Even if that lead to inaccurate information...
Most of the people forget that steam engine was discovered by the greeks, BC. (steam machine from Heron). The ancient greek did use science for amusement only. It was funny, not useful. Even if in mathematics we use very often the fact that only one line may contain 2 given points, who still think of this as one of the Euclide's postulates ? It's something that everybody know as "common sense" and don't try to put a name on it.
Seek time was nice however, with one head per track. A 1960 drum beats a 1990 harddisk. :-)
This is Bugs, very low quality UK TV. Accuracy would not have been a concern. They probably did claim a PC had 10Gig of RAM, and was intelligent.
I think the first OS with a kernel was the OS for the RC 4000, circa 1963. This predates OS/360 by a couple of years. I grabbed the following blurb from a dead web site via the Google cache.
Developed by Brinch Hansen the RC 4000 system had a very interesting and innovative feature. Hansen implemented a layered OS in the RC system which featured something called the kernel at the center. The kernel was responsible for the primary OS functionality. The kernel featured a round robin CPU scheduler, it allowed processes to share memory, and it also produced messages. The idea behind the kernel was to separate the functionality of the OS, with the kernel handling the most important and basic hardware interactions. Today the kernel is an important part of most modern operating systems.
Quite a bit of that happend.
While your Dad was just playing around and had no plans for his code quite often the theft was of code the original author had quite a few plans for.
Hence GPL...
GPL is basicly "I have given this to the world... Don't you dare take it away"
Thats pritty much the whole idea behind open source liccenses.
To address liccens war...
No I would agree BSD is more free than GPL but whats even the point of the BSD liccens? It dosn't even try to address the problem of code theft and instead says "Yeah it's ok to turn it into a product". Thats cool for BSD etc where the whole objective is to create a product in the end anyway.
To me thow for the avrage open source develuper who isn't trying to make money but trying to give something to the community. The GPL is saying "This is for everyone.. and so are it's changes...". Otherwise it's just public domain...
I don't actually exist.
Since the first computer was the Jacquard Loom, wouldn't the first OS be the programmer creating the instruction cards?
A lot of this comes down to what we might consider an OS. If kernel and shell is it, Unix is my best guess (though I haven't much knowledge of pre 1970s computers). In my mind, an OS just provides the basics of software to hardware interactions, and anything else that it does is just fluff. When I install Debian, I don't think that all the software that comes with it is the OS; I don't even think that everything on the base#.tgz is the OS (if you've never installed over PPP or with disk, you probably never had to use the base install).
-- Gordon Worley
I would think anyone who knows the history of UNIX would know about MULTICS.....
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Dos couldn't handle anything more then 640k, actualy. Anything more, and you had to write you own memory manager (or used a prefab one like EMM386 or whatever), anyway.
:P
Anyway, since you had to use your own memory manager, you could make it work however you wanted to. Asking if DOS was 16-bit or 32-bit would be like asking if Linux uses MySQL or PosgreSQL.
The code that was there was 16bit, though...
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
you sir, are an idiot.
delete lilo, and linux won't boot either, does that mean that linux is just an operating environment (whatever the hell that's supposed to mean). Windows has a lot of stuff added to it to make it work with old programs, and old hardware drivers (calling int21, etc). Uninformed people use this to say that it isn't an OS. These people don't know what an OS is. Windows code loads programs (windows even has its own program file format), Windows code does memory management, windows code task switches, windows code does TCP/IP, and windows code does the filesystem (try loading a large file in edit.com in dos mode and then in windows-dosbox mode, windows mode is way faster). Windows is an OS. What matters is what the program does, not how it gets loaded....
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Seems like there was a PCP (Primary Control Program) (Single Tasking) prior to MFT. Don't know if that counts in your definition of a real OS. Seems like virtual memory was introduced in 370/135. Kinda fun when the dinky 135 will run jobs too big to fit on the 165.
Wait a minute, didn't Al Gore invent the OS?
Good luck with your spell checker 2000!
--
Let's not all suck at the same time please
Let's not all suck at the same time please
Why did you pass it up? If you never opened the box, you could have been paid good money for it!
For more information, click here.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
while i dont discount what you have said and i do run an AS/400 in house so i know what the capabilities of a midrange/mainframe system are (huge bandwidth), any PC can kick a mainframes arse when it does CPU bound processing.
And to discount some others :
VMWARE does the same for PCs - run mulltiple OSes concurrently.
Sun sparc boxen (ok not PCs) can allow you to hot swap processors. i believe motorola has introduced the ability for linux to hot swap processors on specialised motorola PC compatible hardware
If you have a MOSIX cluster you can sperate the CPUs out across the planet..or any SSI based clustering technology.
Crypto copro cards arte available for PCs.
im not discounting mainframes--just that PCs are getting there and will catch up eventually and surpass mainframes since the sheer CPU/$ rating of PCs cant be beat.
If the universe were like Windows it would have crashed aeons ago...
I'm not sure, but it's gotta be after the Windows version(whatever it may be) that we had running on 8086 RM Nimbus machines back in high. Man, what pieces of shit they were ;)
Boy, I sure do. TDI Modula-2 on an Atari 1040ST floppy-only system. Beat the C compilers available at the time (at least until MWC came out with their ST version complete with Unix-like shell).
Even traced a nasty bug in their runtime library where the track and head parameters were popped off the stack in the wrong order (according to the docs and header file) for a disk write call (can't recall exact function name.)
GEM and Geoworks were two entirely different products. GEM had the interesting distinction of running on at least two platforms that I knew of: PC-compatibles (x86) and Atari ST (68000). Programming for GEM on the latter in the mid-to-late '80s was my introduction to "event-driven programming".
There was an article in one of the computer magazines at the time when Geoworks was released talking about how it was more efficient and responsive than Windows at that time because it was all done in assembly language. Like GEM, it was an "operating environment" that needed to be running on top of an actual OS - if, that is, you can call DOS or its relatives an "operating system"...
I always thought `OS' meant a program used to run other programs. If we define it that way, who wrote the first program loader?
Think of old 8-bits that came with basic and some routines built into the ROMS; the TI 99/4A and Atari 800s come to mind as somewhat modern examples. The Atari for instance, had routines to display characters and even to fill shapes in the OS but had no DOS unless it bootstrapped one in. Just how primitive can you make this sort of thing and still have the computer "boot" itself to a semi-usable state?
I had heard that 4.4BSD was finally the point at which they were able to completely abstract the OS interface from the device drivers.
So, if you define an OS to have a complete abstraction layer between the interface and the hardware, wouldn't 4.4BSD be the first OS?
As it seems and from all the threads here, it's very important to define "What is an OS?" in order to see which was the first.
After all, computers weren't created, they EVOLVED.
Yes yes yes!!!
<br>Finally someone who isn't so goddamm microsoft brainwashed!!!
<br>Yes, acording to ArsTechna, when they were talking about how rediculous it was to ask when the x86 processors woudl become obsolete, they refered to the IBM 360 that came out in the 1960', fully 20 years before any of that old windows crap everyone kept thinking was the first operating system. Windows back then WASN'T an OS, it was and still is up to 98 SE an operating environment. DOS was the underlying OS! Microsoft will tell you otherwise, but we all know that if you delete io.sys, msdos.sys and command.com from 98 SE IT WON'T BOOT!!!
<br>By the way, if anyone wants to see Windows 1.0 in a fairly recent place, in any Dos 6.0, 6.2, or 6.22 system, type dosshell at a command prompt and see how similar the screen that you are in now resembles all those Windows 1.01 screen shots...
<br>
<br>Chris
Every rule has an exception, and this is the only rule with no exceptions! Huh? -- Spatch
Every rule has an exception, and this is the only rule with no exceptions! Huh? -- Spatch
When you had to hand your punch cards to someone behind a counter and wait several hours (if you were lucky) for your printout, it sure didn't seem like an interpreter.
I believe the "OS" you are looking for is IBSYS and was popular for many years on the 7040 and 7090. My recollection is that it ran on the 70x (vacuum tube versions).
It used "control cards" (JCL before it was called "JCL") and allowed the first abstraction of physical device addresses by logical addresses. It didn't support multi-programming, that came later.
I kept one of the manuals and it makes interesting reading. We HAVE come a LONG way!
Cheers
Wish I had a mod point handy. Any 1984 reference (that isn't just "Big Brother is here") deserves karma.
Intolerant people should be shot.
Finding the first operating system is a tough job because of the earliest history of computers. Initially, everybody wrote to the "bare metal", the way some embedded systems still do today, but people quickly collected common routines into code libraries that they could reuse. Those code libraries eventually became operating systems and higher-level programming languages.
The problem, of course, is that there is no sharp dividing line between a code library with common conventions for calling the routines within and a primitive operating system. That means that there is a certain arbitrariness about any such selection.
Given that a lot happened that year, it's not really clear that the IBM is the first. But Atlas, same year, was certainly the most advanced, pioneering quite a lot of the features that wouldn't appear elsewhere for a decade or more.
jim frost
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
What are you going to define as "an OS"?
I don't think it's about abstraction layers.
IMHO, an OS is something that controls and mediates access to common resources between programs. A computer running just one program accessing ram, disk etc directly, does not have an OS under this definition.
That link has some good screenshots... but damn, they have a lot of misinformation on there! They confuse WFW with Windows 3.11, think 5.25" floppies help 380K instead of 360K, etc.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
FORTRAN interpreters
If you're going to bring up language interpreters as possibles OS'es then I've just got one thing to say:
Emacs.
After all it presents an interface to the user that allows them to run programs, send mail, surf, etc. (And it probably counts for real on a Lisp machine...)
Steve
---
In An Introduction to Operating Systems, Harvey Deitel mentions several generations of OS's. The zeroth generation "had no operating system". The First Generation was defined as sometime in the '50s as the beginnings of batch processing systems. Unfortunately, he didn't name names.
Disclaimer: I have the "Revised First Edition" from the early '80s. Deitel does a good job of explaining OS's, if he can be forgiven (in this edition at least) his IBM mainframe bias.
The "About the author" states that "Since 1965, Dr. Deitel has been interested in operating systems". This would lead me to believe that an OS existed in at least 1965.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
(hint all - do not /. - bookmark and come back l8r)
+++ATH0
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I Do!!!!
Geoworks!!!!
That system was so much cleaner
than it's contemporary MS windows...
I've always wondered what happened
to the GEM system... i know it's
still out there in some wierd form.
I had a zeos 286 laptop with
Dr.DOS 4.4 or something, and
GeoWorks...
-L
Old truckers never die, they just get a new peterbilt
Wait, didn't the great innovators at Microsoft create the first OS? Surely there was nothing filling the great void until they came along. Not only did they create the first true OS (DOS), but they created the first user-friendly GUI'd OS (windows). I thought everyone knew this. Don't you read they're press releases?
--------- Beware the dragon, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
my buddy, ClevertronAl, has decided that the first OS was whatever source code that was copied from the first computer program to the second; no matter what the actual hardware (or wetware?) was.
Your username is not correct as per your tag line. I'm guessing that you got it from Ferris Bueller...and the name is Abe FROman, not Ferlman...just thaought I'd let you know.
Vlad sucks
"Most of my heros won't appear on no stamps..." Chuck D from Fight the Power
The only word he had an opprtunity to spell correctly was "asks" and he did. The rest was provided by someone who asked the question. Should he really change someone else's words?
--
Seeing is believing; You wouldn't have seen it if you didn't believe it.
Moderation sucks - but it sucks less than any other system.
/.
:) )
You'll notice the meta-moderation link. If you follow it, and meta-mod some posts as unfair, you can lower the karma of some moderators, and they won't be allowed to moderate any more.
As for banning anonymous posting - I've seen that debate before, and I don't want to live through it again.
And as far as *this particular* question is concerned, the real question is at what point does an application written for one specific machine magically turn into an operating system for one particular machine turn into an operating system for more than one machine? That's debatable, and can turn into a good discussion here on
Some things are news for nerds.
Some stuff is stuff that matters.
The rest just breeds discussion. And discussion is the stuff that matters.
(Pretzel logic at it's finest.
Is this post not nifty? Sluggy Freelance. Worshi
Surely it would be Windows 3, ummm, 95, that is, I meant to say 98, which of course was a joke, I meant to say 2000, just testing, it was ME.
Good job we have M$ to invent computing for us every couple of years eh?
--
Listening for the sound of the coming rain...
The date of first use of the expression "operating system" is at least a well-defined quantity. Is it a known quantity? Who first described what they had as the "operating system", and when did it get abbreviated to "OS"?
mt
So where would you class the simpler Disk Operating System (DOS) for the System/360 that was entirely disk-resident (i.e., for those who *gasp* didn't have enough tape drives)?
OS/360 came out in the middle of the life of the System/360 which really was the same hardware with differing resources attached to it.
UNIX was probably the first OS that was ported to radically different platforms.
Of course you shouldn't complain until you actually read the article. The word they're using is "definitively," not "definitely."
I'm no MS fan, but what about NT/Alpha?
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
Gem may be ugly, but it was stable. *grin*
:)
And who didn't like Doodle and Locomotive Basic 2 heh?
I guess one would be technically correct in pointing out that the first OS was the human brain of whoever played with the first abacus several hundred (thousand) years ago...
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
It's already happening now. You can't get on the Internet without using Internet Explorer, can't download mail without Outlook/Outlook Express, not use free e-mail without Hotmail or chat on IRC without mIRC (that's Microsoft Internet Relay Chat to the public at large).
The graPH
Substance that makes techies tick
http://www.gra.ph/
Does the abacus not include Bead Calculation Technology (BCT)? So why must we all mock it? It has an excellent UI that was designed thousands of years ahead of its time. You had the option of programming even in binary (should the bead go to the left or the right?)
I had a copy of Windows 286 (came in the box with a mouse). Was it before or after Windows 1.0?
I'd agree with your general point that OS (and indeed Disk OS) were around in the '50s, long before OS/360.
OTOH though, The Zuse ABC machine never had anything that resembled a monitor, let alone an OS.
I'm even better (or worse) I actually own the install disks, and I've still got an XT to install it on.
Bizar technology?
this site is fuckin k-rad, mod this puppy up! -Jon
this is my sig.
I volunteer in the used book sale room of my local library... occasionally we get donations of old software, and being the only computer geek around, I often take home the DOS stuff to mess around with on my DOS machine. Ocassionally there's something cool (Walls of Rome, Wing Commander), but the other day we ended up with what appeared to be an unopened windows 2.0 box. I decided against it onthe grounds that win3.1's interface was clumsy enough; now, looking at those screenshots people provided, I'm really glad I did. :)
-J
Karma: T-rexcellent.
The "Operating System" is "The System That Operates." Everything else is just fluff or secondary applications.
Duh.
Yousa speaka English?
sig fault
I found a link to an article about a lot of old computers and their (often proprietary) operating systems...mainly 8-bit systems. The article is kind of long, and there's a lot of hardware issues that are worked into the discussion, but there's some neat OS stuff in there.
There doesn't appear to be much out there about any old mainframe OSes...my father used to use a mainframe in college (late 1960s...punchcards and all) and claims that he doesn't recall what the OS was. Oh well, what else would you expect from a business major? =)
http://www.armory.com/~spectre/tech.html
"The future belongs to those who can look at a challenge and see an opportunity."
Some Win 1.x infos and Screenshots
Before you email me, remember: "There is no god!"
I've watched BUGS (that UK TV-Show) today while beeing bored. They used a lot of laptops etc .. all loaded with Windows 3.11 =)
and one of the computers was "Full MXX, 100 Gigs of removeables HD and 10 gigs ram" .. and guess what it was running ;)
Must be fun to have Drives A-Z.
And 10 Gigs ram are a lot.. but if you are only able to utilize 640k of it ;)
Before you email me, remember: "There is no god!"
Yes, i'm aware of JCL and it's function. I dunno why i included. There was some point i was going to make about it, but i've forgoten what it is now.
Now, MVT is a new one on me. Time to hit Google methinks.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
No, that doesn't count. A programable machine does not mean it had an Operating System. The easiest way to define and OS is "a low-level software abstraction layer that seperates the function of the hardware from the application". This usually means you have a set of device drivers, and a kernel to provide basic functions.
:)
The Colossus certainly didn't have that.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
This is one reason why PCs took over from the mainframes.
And of course, having a mainframe on your desk would be a pain. Bill Gates visions of "A mainframe on every desk" wouldn't be much to aim for either.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Maybe it did. Is that why the sky is blue? BSOD : Blue Sky Of Death. Aaaargh!
Syllable : It's an Operating System
The first OS would have to be... "BigBangOS"... released about... what? 7.3 billion years ago or something? Orginally thoughted and designed by Mother Nature, and produced and released by Evolution Inc.(tm) It's still updated by Father Time and Mother Nature, of course. And for our Chirstian Readers: First OS : "Genesis Version 1:1-31" (or something like that). Made by the Lord Himself (no, not Linus!), God. Produced and released by The Holy Bible(tm). Maintained by all holy men and women world wide.
www.netsyndrome.net -- designs.netsyndrome.net -- www.mobileasses.com
An OS is an abstract layer to manage files and memory. Hrm. I guess it was of those guys with thick glasses punching in the data which was given to him from the scientists using the most weird interfaces nobody else could understand. Astronauts of the 60s f.ex. where OSs since they did nothing more than that.
Hmmm, sounds like the sort of guy I might have met at a DECUS symposium.
Essentially, RT-11 served as an OS dedicated to running your program, and only your program. Your program became a part of the OS itself - equivalent to doing a linux kernel build, and including it as part of the kernel - not a module. Except there was no runtime program loader - your code got pulled in and executed when the machine booted the OS.
Actually, the term "single-user" is useful only metaphorically. RT-11 (like DOS) wouldn't know how to authenticate anything from a login point of view.
--
If R is the set of all sets which don't contain themselves, does R contain itself?
I think Windows 286 was windows 2.1, which had two versions: one for the 286 and one enhanced for the new 386 processer
Fact - the first operating system must have been on the first computer and I'd say the abacus would most likely have been first.
I have to many "O'Reilly" books!! -- me
Soon after this, they received the visit of their in-house IBM engineer. Yes, in those days, they actually had an IBM engineer working full-time on the client site. Proudly, they showed him this clever little software. The guy asked for the source code, which they supplied, open source-like. The blue-suited engineer thanked them and walked away with the source. My dad and his colleagues just went back to work.
So soon they forget...
IBM was prosecuted for anti-trust because they wouldn't sell the software or hardware, but would just lease it, and own anything written on their machines. They got their pee-pee slapped big time. I believe the sunset provision on the settlement just passed.
All big computer companies will be as big assholes as we will let them be.
--
Oracle and unix guy.
thats horrible. Looks like Gem on the st, same font and everything!
I saw a quote on a post at /. the other week, but the ability to search /. is crap.
it was something like ` i had to fix a bug in my code and i realized the possibility that my code wouldnt work first time and i`d spend hours of my life debugging programs`. i think it was dated 1956. i could be wrong.
any ideas who/when etc...?
Thanks for that! Thats the one!
Another guy mentioning the awful spelling got +3 insightful. And I think it is worth to have your voice to be heard not only closely on topic, but also on "meta-topics" (such as bad spelling on the front page) ;)
:)
BTW, I DO have moderator access right now, too bad I can't moderate myself
Perhaps I should submit the question in my original post and then I could do on-topic posting
Real life is overrated.
Especially with the early computer years, qualifications on "firsts" got way out of hand, and actually don't matter all that much. Do you mean the first software OS, the first system used to control electrical "computing" equipment, etc? Vannevar Bush and his Differential Analyzer at MIT (analog computer) could argue that the rods and gears that connected the different "components" are a form of OS, same goes for ENIAC and the cables running everywhere. Can a stack of punchcards that run through an early census machine be considered an OS?
When the stored program computer realm opened up, there were several different manufacturers of hardware, each requiring its own "OS".
So, I guess to find the answer to your question, you want to qualify the type of computer that it ran on, and then look for the earliest of its type.
As the license plate that shows up in Cupertino says, UNIX is just MULTICS without balls. However, before Multics the GE timesharing computers were certainly running an OS in the late 60's. At the same time GECOS was running on the 600 series, Exec8 on the Univac 1100 series, IBM came out with OS/360, and Honeywell had no less than three OSs. Gawd, I feel old. And for those who think that those systems were just loaders - think again - MP systems were running at that time as well, and I was working on systems with fully protected partitions by '68.
When I upgraded my C64 to the Commodore 128D, it had a 1 MB HDD and came with GEOS, an DAMN good GUI OS.
It resembled the Mac OS and the AtariST.
Both GEOS and the AtariST OS's were worlds better than any crap MS produced, so how come they continue to exist?
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
The unanswerableness and questionable use of this question aside, I have certainly enjoyed the debate.
icqqm [ICQ:11952102]
funny... i prefer that UI to W95!
now the best was running Windows 3.0 in B&W CGA mode...
Control Program for Babbage?
Required a minimum of 50 gears and 100 toggles in order to run. 15 wheel graphical display.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
But, couldn't it have been NT 3.5? I think Bugs is great - the way half the time they seem to have some technological accuracy, and half the time they come up with ludicrous ideas that make no sense at all.
My first encounter with the words 'Operating System' also involved the word 'disk'. My point is, in my mind, an OS is simply a System used to Operate the computer.
What we refer to now as an OS and what once was an OS are likely terribly different things. MSDOS wasn't the only Disk OS or DOS. I remember TRSDOS, among others. DOSen generally would perform basic disk maintenance as well as loading programs from disk into memory, to be executed. It's more likely that the first OS had no application library features and was simply a media control system.
---
[ approaching AI ]
I doubt if anything as complex as this could have run on a vacuum tube machine though.
Jeff
stty erase ^H
Lots of appliances have OS's in them. eg. mobile phones, video recorders, digi cameras etc.
Jeff
stty erase ^H
And I actuallty had to use that sh*t!.. When I saw those screenshots my stomach tried to kill me.. My eyes tryed to escape.. My heart tryed to end the pain... jeezus... Gotta go get some fresh air..
--
"No se rinde el gallo rojo, sólo cuando ya está muerto."
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
AFAIK, WinNT 3.5 was ported to Alpha, PowerPC and MIPS, all of which (I think with the exception of PowerPC...) were 64 bit architectures.
If I can recall correctly from the book "Hackers Heros of the Computer Revolution" it talked about one computer at MIT it was the IBM 704 or the TX-0 (tixo) someone wrote a small program that would make better use of the binary language. And they stored it in a draw and advised anyone one who was programming they should use this as it would make their life easier. It was around 4 months since I read that part of the book so I am not sure if that is totally right. -Norulez
I still use it, it even runs good on an old 386.
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
Are we POSIX compliant?
--
When that wouldn't work, I sprung for windows 3.0 for my 1000, and installed it in somewhere between 2 and 4 megs of HD space. (My copy came on 4 720k floppies.)
Win3.0 was nice in that it would run in CGA and in under 640k.
And I think it goes without saying, but I wouldn't DREAM of trying a win98 install on there--even if I could find a 100-200MB drive for that old machine! ;p
Modified opening screens were quite common around 1993-1994 from companies like Packard Bell or Compaq in Windows 3.1. :)
I've seen them modified in 95 and 98 as well, but AFAIK they were all 320x240 resolution. Think they were actually BMP format in win9x though.
But I've never seen anyone with the gall to modify the NT4 startup banner. Anyone up for a challenge?
The www would probably not exist in the form most people acknowledge it (I'm not talking about computer gurus, I mean the average joe who would be scared to tears at the thought of spending countless hours using something like lynx or Gopher to browse) and we UNIX users might not yet even have something like X.
And like it or not, Windows did bring computers into the home faster than any other single product, so it does deserve some respect--even if we do hate it now.
And I still have 2 boxes in my room, one running win3.0, and one running 3.1. Sure, the only reason I use the 3.0 box is for reading old 5 1/4" floppies, and the 3.1 box is mainly used as a terminal in a pinch, but they are here and they still work. They survived Y2k, and they're still chugging along happily. ;p
I just wish I could say that for my copies (beta and release) of win95!
What's interesting is, by this standard, microsoft has yet to make an operating system.
Although it never gained wide adoption, and was subsequently dropped, Microsoft did have an alpha flavor of Windows NT, so, well, Microsoft has made an operating system meeting this definition, valid or not.
Somebody please, tell this machine I'm not a machine.
And because it were so time consuming loading the operating system from punch cards the computers had huge uptimes...
:-(
Not as my blue screen computer at work...
He was imitating Jeff K. Couldn't you tell that? :)
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
This has tooken Eons of Deliberations by my giant computer, but I would say it is safe to say the First Os was...."42"
Wasn't it... 320x480x16 was what it displayed, but you had to edit/create one at 640x480 as it was horizontally halved (640 -> 320) at runtime. It didn't runtime alias real well either. :P It took a while before I figured out that I should edit at 320x480, then double it, then let windows shrink it.
I don't think a monitor or loader program qualifies as an operating system. I don't know that it was the first, but IBM had a system called TSX ( for Time Share Executive) in the 60's that ran on the IBM 1800. It ran 24/7 and did process control as a foreground task, while doing batch jobs in the background.
Apple Mac System 1. Doesn't look too different to System 7 to me...
Is that the one that burned up the tape as it read it? Oh wait, that was in a work of fiction.
Still, I find that Stephenson often has connections to reality; Is that accurate?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Obviously, it is the adverbial form of "intamate." Though the prefix "in-" could indicate something infused, I tend to think in this case that the prefix is being used in this case to deny the root word.
The root here is obviously "tame." The suffix "-ate" indicates something that is acted upon by something else, in this case presumably a "tamer."
So, something that is "intamate" is something that has not been tamed. I fear to ask what it means to be "intamately familiar" means with regard to hardware!
Do children read this site?
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who know binary, and those who do not.
I belive the oldest would be UNICS, from September 1969. Grandpappy to UNIX Time Sharing System, System V, BSD, Linux, plan9, Minix, NeXTSTEP, Darwin and of course OS X. Course I could be wrong. What about the enigma?
some OS for IBM 360 predate UNIX. They were MFT (Multiple fixed tasks) very old MVT (Multiple variable tasks) old SVS (Single Virtual Store) recent MVS (Multiple Virtual Storage) current Of course the 1403 autocoder predates that, and EAM (Electronic Accounting Machines which were programmed by interchangable plug boards) predate the 1403.
If you really think about it, the first OS has been the Universe, and the Universe seems a lot like Windows. Ever since 'booting' (ie big bang) since the 'epoch' (0 seconds afterward), it has slowly grown bigger and bigger, and no one really knows when it will stop. However we are all pretty sure that it will come crashing down and have to be rebooted sometime in the future.
thelocust[dot]org
I should of just gave the link my bad
If we refuse to be flexible, we are in effect opting out of the game of life. The world moves on without us.
No - It's from a KS10. The emulator doesn't run ITS, yet. It's from AI:KSHACK;BUILD DOC, and I changed DX to SN. :P
I did have exec DDT running on the emulator though...
[Slashdot ate the tabs! Darn!]
:PDSET
DSKDMP
ITS
774400$G
Salvager 215
THE KS-10 CLOCK HAS BEEN RESET, IF THE TIME CANNOT
BE DETERMINED FROM THE NETWORK, YOU MAY HAVE TO
YEAR, PDTIME OFFSET, NOT ON DISK.
PLEASE SETLOC APPROPROATELY
SN ITS 1631 SYSTEM JOB USING THIS CONSOLE.
LOGIN TARAKA 0
TARAKA DMPCPY . _DMPCP OUTPUT WRITE
TAKAKA DMPCPY . @ ITS DELRNM
^Z
SN ITS.1631. DDT.1513.
TTY 0
You're all alone, Fair share = 75%
(ITS does not know the date, so messages cannot be reviewed right now.)
[Log ends here]
Long Live the Incompatible Timesharing System! ^_^
(Of course, I bet that's too old for all you UNIX types to remember...)
... not yet anyway ... for big volume processing, mainframes still are the bread and butter of large companies ... although clueless executives want to move it all onto the network/smaller boxes, we ain't there yet ... at least in terms of reliability and recoverability and basic number crunching too ...
i work for a large charge card company and am responsible for a system that processes any charge made by a u.s. cardmember and/or u.s. merchant/establishmenht ... we have 6 tera-bytes of storage (most just plain ol DASD) and run 5-6 K batch JCL jobs a day that are dynamically generated "on the fly" - each "file" consists of millions of records (200-1500 byte records - up to a set of 9 for a simple transaction ...) ...
mainframes arn't dead yet ... even GUI front ends that you would never suspect are hitting big iron DASD ...
AZspot
It came with Windows 3.0 as a 16-colour BMP file.
Windows 3.0 was beset with tha annoying 'Unrecoverable Application Error'. a dialogue box which appeared in the centre of the screen whenever something went wrong, but gave no clues as to what went wrong. In early 1991 I tested a network monitoring tool under Windows 3.0, and it kept crashing with such errors. I eventually, purely by trial and error, traced it to a problemw with the Mouse Systems mouse driver.
The wierd thing is that I was starting, The Cathedral and the Bazaar before reading this post. Within A Brief History of Hackerdom, at this site paragraph 5 it references an OS being entered by Seymour Cray trough switches.
Discussion Never Hurt Anyone.
Libertarians
While I cannot quite remember its name, I do remember reading (more than 12 years ago) a computer history book that stated that IBM put together what was considered to be the first OS.
I also remember an odd fact about this OS. Apparently IBM spent 5,000 man YEARS creating this operating system. (meaning that it could have taken 2,500 people 2 years to create)
sig. "I didn't do it."
Here. Ain't Google wonderful.
Check out this link for an interesting look at early electronic computers.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
The number of users logged on reflects all of the people actually doing work (2959 to make it easy for you)... the disconnected sessions (747) have timed out, so there could be a great deal more (also keep in mind that this is Friday before one of the last weekends of the summer so there are probably on the order of 15% more people on other days). Those two processors also run approximately 12 LPARS (like running 12 copies of Windows on two PC's) consisting of 6 production images and 5-6 test images (including a Linux LPAR strictly for testing & diddling around - it also runs an instance of Apache) and an LPAR dedicated to Lotus Notes (which uses the Posix shell & HFS) which has more than 3000+ users defined. Our Development LPAR also runs Lotus Domino Go Webserver, so we have two different webservers on the same physical machine, and could potentially have 100 or more if we chose to run that many instances of Linux.
And BTW IBM does add more features to JCL from time to time as they find necessary. Add to that the fact that we run 6+ instances of DB2 UDB (supporting dozens of concurrent inquiries from stinkin' PC desktops via Datajoiner - these are people not even logged onto the mainframe, and aren't even aware that the data they see delivered to them comes from the mainframe) as well as an instance of IMS (another DBMS) and their associated interface regions... most of your sad little PC's just don't stack up. Sure some of the stuff seems archaic, but it's often actually more flexible in many ways than more current competing technologies in use today, just too difficult for some lamers to wrap their minds around. The real reason that PC's took over from mainframes is that processor technology advanced to the point that the computer could fit onto a desktop and support one user instead of thousands, and those desktop size computers were cheaper. Just go to your bank or insurance company and ask them what they use to process the bulk of their important corporate data, or the DOD which is the most secure OS they know of. IBM also offers cryptographic co-processors (CPUs specifically for encryption) on S390 hardware. These cryptographic coprocessors are the only security devices of their kind to be awarded the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-1 Level 4 validation by the U.S. government (from the S390 website).
OS/390 (formerly MVS) has had dataset directories for over a decade, something that MS is just now implementing with Active Directory.
Can your little PC have more than one image of your OS access the same hard drive (OS/390 can have up to 5 or 6 OS images access the same hard drive), and has multiple redundant physical and logical connections to any given piece of hardware. Can you pull one of your processors in your SMP PC out and not have it crash or even hiccup? I thought not. Can you separate your clustered CPU's by 5-10 miles so some natural or man-made disaster doesn't interrupt your processing? I thought not. Well, that's too bad because OS/390 and S/390 can.
----
----
Slán leat agus go n'eirí an bóthar leat
Wasn't OS/2 warp the first "internet ready" OS?
I do. I even wrote some software for this thingee. In Modula-2. Anyone remeber that?
-M-
I would like to die like my grandfather did - sleeping. And not screaming in terror, like his passengers.
If Charles Babbage created the first operating system with his machines (first programable computer with which Ada Lovelace became the first programmer, even though her programs never ran as the machine itself was never completed in her lifetime.)
Then surely the programmable loom (I don't recall the name) which was used as the basis for the program storage for the analytical engine. Information was punched out in connected cards which were fed through the loom which converted the holes into the desired pattern. For the analytical engine the holes represented numbers and operators. The loom it was colour and design.
Both system operated similarly, by using a block of these cards, the machine would perform operations desired by the user. Both machines were programmable, but the loom was first.
here is the truth in it all. Any system that acts to interpret input and output by means of memory space, is an OS. If it had ANY hint of self control, then it was an OS. Heck, even the BIOS on your computer contains a small OS, how else would it interpret keyboard input and display it correctly on the screen?
:) ).
I belive that the first OS was on some early IBM machines that preceded the 360. Not so much a user controlled OS, but an OS no less. I think all it did was direct input to the CPU in something like 256bytes of ram(no not 256k, 256b
Actually, OS/2 Warp 3 shipped before Windows 95 was in beta.
It came out of the box with a mail, news, gopher, archie and FTP client...
Also a free 30 day evaluation for IBM's Global Network.
WebExplorer had to be downloaded (free).
(it had a pretty neat feature which allowed web-sites to change the little animation from the default)
All that in around 1993, 94-ish.
Every time - windows is a "me too"
-- The universe began. Life started on a billion worlds...
-- Except on one where stupidity was there first.
Reversi is the best game ever shipped with Windows. They have gone downhill since then.
Also in which version did they introduce the blue screen of death ?
Windows 95 does not have a built in TCP/IP stack.
Amiga had true (TRUE true) 32 bit multitasking in 1985, (and there IS no 16-bit code on the Amiga, NONE, 95 has 16 bit crap all over it)
Plug and Play was only needed because the platform sucks, I never needed IRQ's for my devices on my Amiga or my Quark.
Breaking new ground? The only thing Microsoft broke was wind.
Fear the government that fears your guns. Fear the government that fears your computers. Remove them from my email.
That's the truth.
When I got my Amiga, and for a period of time was selling Amigas, I would demonstrate the video/audio/multitasking capabilities to people who came in the store (Electronics Boutique). Of course, the clueless drones would look at it running a full speed animation, then try to find out where we hid the VCR. That's the general reaction of those who unloaded a large sum of money for an IBM compatible with CGA graphics. I'm pretty sure their reactions to the Amiga were jealosy ridden. They would say things like "Well, I don't need that..."
Months later after they spend more money on sound cards and VGA, they would be like "Look what I've got. Great graphics and sound." My first experience in computer founded hypocracy.
I've always enjoyed people's reactions that my 7MHz processor could allow me to download files and watch an anim at the same time (Oh, and drag the window down for a second to check the DL status without interrupting the anim). Their 386-16's were breaking sweat on anything that was done.
Ray, ever work with Earl O'hera at Honeywell? He is the coolest old skool dude I ever met (and worked with). I believe he lives in Montreal now... email me if you know him... rekkid@digifunc.com. thanx.
That You should define an OS, as HARDWARE INDEPENDANT. We all know it usually isn't, but in the "early days" it was revolutionary when Intel though up the x86 architechture that truely allowed programmers to reuse their code on new machines, regardless of the "new and improoved" CPU/harddrive/whatever. In "the old days" we (Ok, my brother did the most work) had to rewrite all code for a new CPU, even a new network interface would screw things up. The microcode interface was REVOLUTIONARY (It still is if You ask me), as the old instructions would just be interpreted difrently, but do the same thing they've always done.
Though I do not know which was the actual FIRST OS to implement these changes, I know the first machine we got to work on with this interface was an IBM mainframe.
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?
I think the Navy used Univac "Fastran" (sp?) drums, which pretty much matched your description. There was a Fastran unit on the 1108 mainframe at the U. of Utah when I was a student there around 1969. The unit consisted of a horizontal counterrotating pair of (basically) machined sewer pipes filled with sand and coated with oxide about eight feet long, one above the other in the cabinet. They took a half hour to spin up to speed when power was applied -- but once they got there, the RPMs were stable. There was a rumor floating around that one time a bearing seized up in one such unit on a ship, resulting in the drum being ejected through the side (hopefully, above the waterline).
Yeah, that was von Neumann. I think the quote you're referring to comes from a time magazine article on him written by Nathan Myrhvold (top 20 inventors of the century or something), search for "godel" and stuff, you'll find it on time's site.
That would be PcPtOS (Punch card and Paper Tape OS), v. 1.0.
Humans were the first OS, preparing human input into machine-readable instructions, and interpreting machine-output as human-readable information.
Isn't that all the OS really does? Tell the hardware what to do, so it does what a person wants? That was a human's job first.
Find the first computer that took human-readable input and converted it to machine instructions automatically, and that's the first non-human OS.
Even then, the OS would have been a custom job, depending on the hardware. Since each computer was different at each site, the OS would have been different, too. And not like my version of Linux is different from yours, I mean fundamentally different. The first common OS couldn't come about until hardware was becomming widespread (and commoditized), so I think UNIX would qualify as one of the first common OS's.
I do not belong in the spam.redirect.de domain.
I don't define an OS as a mediator between programs. That's a multitasking OS.
A basic OS does two things: 1) Present a mechanism for applications to control hardware in a unified way; and 2) automate certain functions (making CPU idle calls, driving the video, controlling disks, etc.), with the express purpose of accomplishing part 1 transparently (i.e., no ML required). For the purposes of this definition, an application program is any program that accepts and processes user input, and then manipulates hardware based on that input. Things like flushing the IO buffers, then, are not functions of application programs, but of the operating system, because the data doesn't need to be modified during the flushing process (flushing an input buffer presents raw data to the application program for processing; flushing an output buffer completes hardware manipulation requested by pre-processed data--for example, flushing the stdout buffer to write to the screen only prints remain characters to the screen--but the actual data processing and system calls have already been made by the application program).
Using a system like Linux helps make this apparent. The kernel is an operating system, because it automates functions required to provide a unified API for hardware control to any application program. init, which is called by the kernel, is an application program, because it reads user input (from /etc/inittab), and manipulates hardware (changing states of CPU, memory, video, etc. by calling more programs). It calls on the core OS (the Linux kernel) to get the input (file I/O, like fopen() or open()) and perform the output (execv() or something similar). Therefore init is not an OS itself.
Whether or not system libraries (libc or glibc on Linux) should be considered part of the OS is up for grabs. I personally believe they are not part of the OS. The kernel provides the basic system calls. The libraries only provide C functions to access these system calls. We don't even need the libraries--we could statically link whatever we want to run. The kernel is complete in providing an API to control hardware transparently; the libraries just map these system calls to human-usable functions. Consider the libraries primitive application programs, then, and you'll see why they aren't part of the OS.
Now about the single program running with direct hardware access. That is an OS by my definition. Actually, it is an application/OS combination. So you may ask "Why don't all programs then use this application/OS combo?" The answer is fourfold: 1) It is costly in code, time, and money to provide OS functionality in each program. 2) It is harder to guarantee stability when every program controls hardware its own way. 3) It is extremely difficult to support a wide range of hardware, even on a generic program like a word processor. 4) We want to do things like multitask and share information. This requires outside help.
Unfortunately, as computing comes to the masses, the definition of OS becomes watered-down in an effort to make people understand the concept. It is increasingly the case that OS now means "Any set of software that will help me get my work done." Few average people see the point in having a PC without Microsoft Office installed, and they consider Office a core part of their operating system.
A very low percentage (too low) of the computing population know what a Linux kernel is, let alone that it is an operating system. All that extra stuff, including the bash shell I depend so heavily on, is nothing but UI utilities.
I do not belong in the spam.redirect.de domain.
You *can't* be serious... UNIX was running around the beaches of computerdom in the late 60's to early 70's with all the above features included. Sheesh....kids these days.....
#!/Jerald
John von Neumann:
:P
"A pioneer of computer science who introduced and promoted the stored program concept."
http://www.angelfire.com/ma/kilenm/2k04ppl.html
-----------------------
The "von Neumann Architecture" referred to a computing machine that did not have to be rewired or regeared to solve different problems. Instead, the architecture was flexible enough to accept a "program" which stated (described) the problem and solved it (hopefully).
von Neumann at one point worked with Turing whose theoretical computing machines were tape driven and might also be considered programmable.
In a sense, the register machine architecture of von Neumann and the flexibility that it provided, could be considered the first OS.
From that point, the definition of an OS seems to have been ever expanding to the point where monitoring of human regularity appears to be the ultimate goal.
So notepad was limited to 16Kbytes over 15 years ago... and it's up to a whopping 32Kbytes now! (In win9x anyway)
-thomas
"And like that
its acctually really easy - there are 2 files in your winNT or \system folder (I'm in 2000 here so this is from memory). One is for starting up in vga that is 16 colour and another for normal use using 256 colours. They are easy to find if you use an image browser like PSP. Just open them in your fav image editor and do what you like to them, I have a friend who has done this. Definatly adds a bit of class to a system. I always found modifying the 95 logos a bit tacky but if you modify the NT logs, rather than just replacing them with a random picture, it looks really good.
Hey Sierra, get your lawyers onto that; pronto!
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
I'd say that monitors on punch card systems probably constituted the first OS's. Simple, primitive, and not providing the services of modern OS's, but still. I'm just saying this because it's the first organized step that my OS prof gave in his "history and motivation of the OS" lecture, though. I don't consider an individual program that runs nothing but itself to be an OS, and that's all that I can think of preceeding such systems.
If you are modding me down because you disagree with me, use the "Flamebait" category, not the "Troll" one.
when reading the comments, besides making me sad at reading that people think that PC Desktop OS's were early OS's, (primitive, Yes. early, NO!).... ...or that UNIX was the "first OS"...
i was really baffled at how all over the map the answers were.
Disregarding historical ignorance, the answers are still widely variant, and i couldn't quite figure out why, then it came to me that it was simple(istic)....(or that i am).... ...the definition of an "Operating System" is dependent on the machine and software paradigm.
setting aside Bletchley Park and Von Neumann's Mk II (as essentially just multi-kilowatt digital calculators)....
the earliest commercial computers delivered in America were the Univacs made by Sperry-Rand and delivered to (who else?) the US government in the early- and mid-fifties....
since then we've had 3 or 4 major h/w and s/w paradigms;
1. STAND-ALONE MAINFRAMES -- these were the room size boxes delivered by Burroughs, Univac, Control Data, Honeywell and IBM...attended by rooms of specialists and the programming was largely done at the "bare metal", usu by math or physics grad students...the "control code" was embedded in each and every program run, every program was completely hierarchical and ran singly in a "first-to-last" manner with no interprocess communication and whatever embedded code existed in the machine was at the hardwired level and mostly served to let the "operators" know that the program bombed.
2. HOST/ED-COMPUTING -- characterized by a "Big Iron" mainframe or mini and connected by some flavor (usu proprietary) network topology to a "dumb" (no or limited local processing ability) terminal. you can start fistfights still over what qualifies as the "first" successful Host Computer, but the GIANT of this category was the IBM 360 running MVS and JCL (if you haven't read Freddy Brooks "The Mythical Man Month", RUN, DON'T WALK, and order it from FatBrain (or whoever). A strong argument can be made that all the follow-on IBM OS's /370, /390, etc were just evolutionary implementations of OS/360.
Many, many people, including most of the "BUNCH" above, made hosted-computer systems, but this category was ruled, in the early days, by DEC, opps!, Digital Equipment Corporation and IBM, this paradigm lasted from the mid-to-late sixties until, well, TODAY.
Sun, HP, and Apollo emerged during this period with the RISC computer running some UNIX variant, which dominates this paradigm today.
Host-computing was the first to bring the computer to the people, instead of having the people go to the "Computer Center". The emergence of HLL's (High Level Languages), such as FORTRAN, COBOL, ALGOL, LISP and BASIC that were routinely used on these machines made the necessity of having some type of 'abstraction layer". UNIX emerged as the (technologically) dominant OS in this period, and the first "portable" (kinda-sorta, hold the laughter) OS.
3. DESKTOP COMPUTING -- oh come on, we should all know this one. starting with Ed Robert's "Altair" (QUICK, where did they name come from? see the end of this if you aren't sure or don't know) and IBM's 5XXX series, including, but not limited to the original 5150 (the first Intel-based PC, IBM had earlier desktops with their own h/w and s/w) and ending up (today) with the G4/500MHZ i'm writing this on, or the Gig Athalon sitting next to it.
The majority of PC's produced to this date are used as "stand-alone" boxes with their own resources, and even if they are networked, they are not, unless acting a servers, contributors to the "Great Pool of Available Cycles", essentially, "Every PC Is An Island".
4. CLIENT-SERVER/DISTRIBUTED/CLUSTERED COMPUTING -- i'm really going to take some liberties here, as you can argue that all three of these are separate paradigms. my counter-argument is that even though they evolved as separate entities, they are all headed in the same direction, down the same road, going towards the same destination. take "Host Computing" divide it by "Desktop Computing" throw in a multi-tasking, multi-process, multi-processor OS and have it enforce a "division of labor" between the high-powered "server" computer and the high-speed networked "clients" (thin or fat, depending on who's stock you own) and have a "load-balancing" schema that offloads latency to local boxes, we're just Getting To The Goods in this paradigm now, and technology like Beowulf (Beowulf.org) will be providing the "clustering" abilities necessary to make this approach ubiquitous.
client-server can potentially provide the affirmative answer to the Biblical Question "Am I not My Brother's Processor?"...
SO WHAT THE HELL DOES THIS ALL HAVE TO DO WITH THE QUESTION OF WHAT IS THE FIRST OS?????????
Each and every one of these OS paradigms have features that are not present in the others, and each are missing things that are present in the others.
The Mainframes and the Mini's have no kernel-level embedded GUI.
The Desktops have no sophisticated Batch capability, and conflict/error/memory/exception handling on the Desktop is non-existent (or worse, harmful) by Mainframe and Mini standards. Desktops File Systems are stone-age by comparison to them as well, and
The Terminals in the Host-Computing have no sophisticated graphical capability (w/o some s/w layer like X-Windows, and which would explain why the recent thin-clients by Sun, et al had some amount of GUI ability built into the box), the Terminals have no independent existence of their own, unlike PC's and Mainframes and Minis, when the network is down, Terminals turn into low-wattage space heaters.
SO, without some additional definition of the term "Operating System", the question of "Which is the First OS?", becomes a version of "Which came First, the Chicken or the Egg?".
hal van rikxoord
***have completely run out of clever sig's, SORRY! positronic matrix in dis-array***
MY FIRST COMPUTER: IBM 360
MY FIRST OS: OS/360 w/MVS and JCL
MY FIRST HLL: FORTRAN 69 (WATFOR)
MY FIRST PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE: OS/360 BAL (BASIC ASSEMBLER LANGUAGE)
MY FAVORITE LANGUAGE: interpreted=APL, compiled="Imperial" VC++
MY FAVORITE COMPUTER: THE year 2015 DELL with a bio-molecular processor array and terabyte speed optical I/O, other than that either a Cray XMP-1A with the Big Word Mod or a NEXTTurbo
MY FAVORITE OS: NEXTStep
THE ALTAIR QUESTION: "Altair" is from Star Trek (the Original, w/the red-faced drunk guy from those really, really bad Priceline dot com commercials who screams all his lines)
Ten quid, she's so easy to blind. And not a word is spoken...
Hum, your not entierly correct...
See to begin with, windows 3.11 was written to run in dos and dos was only written to run on a 32 bit processor. It was never ported to a 64 bit processor (that I've every heard of). Since a 32 bit processor can ony address 4 GB of ram, i hightly doubt that the machine in question either a) was running windows 3.11 and dos b) actually had 10 GB of ram.
as the previous comment to mine says, could have been winNT 3.5? Can anybody clarrify this situation? I know WinNT 4 has been ported to 64 bit machines, but was WinNT 3.5 ever ported? probably, but i'm not certain, so I won't say
please post some early mac screenshots. that would be interesting, because i seem to remember the early mac looked similar to the early windows. afterall microsoft did write both of them didn't they?
1958 Atlas, virtual memory, University of Manchester, England
1962 CTSS, Compatible Time-Sharing System, by Corbato at MIT
These seem to be early milestones in the evolution of Operating Systems.
I practically fell off my seat when they zoomed in on what they called the job queue. It was a peg board with computer program on tape with a secretary sitting there accepting jobs from people coming in the door. If a high priority job came in it got bumped up in the queue. Today we use the same name, but its all done in software.
I remember their libraries (aka BIOS, and standard libraries) were held in a filling cabinet on pre-punched tape. Simply go over and find the library module you needed and append it to your program.
Talking to an old-timer from my department (he's 63 and worked for IBM for 35 years), we determined probably the first O/S was IBM 709/7090 and/or the IBM 1401/1410 that came out around the same time.
|This space for rent|
Hmm, I'm comparing the series of mockups/screenshots of the lisa GUI with those of early releases of Windows, and I'd say that Windows is consistently more awful by a factor of 5 years....
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
please tell me how I can get my computer to do things without interfacing to it.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
I'd much rather be using win3.1/3.11 than the crap that I have to use (win2k)
Wow - looking at those old Winblows snapshots was like walking down Repressed Memory Lane. :)
IIRC, Win 3.0 allowed users to mess with the original opening screen...
C:\windows\system\winlogo.rle
A run-length encoded bitmap file, 640x480x16.
DrQu+xum: Proof that the lameness filter doesn't work.
I was speaking of Win3.0, not 3.1. The 3.0 screen was a dark-blue/black mesh with the M$ logo at top and just the words "Windows version 3.0" in white letters in the middle. No flying windows logo, no fancy sh*t at all.
DrQu+xum: Proof that the lameness filter doesn't work.
The first open OS (for multiple systems), predecessor to many of the actual OS's was none other than OpenVMS.
Remember Sinclair zx80?(1982).
OpenVMS was designed entirely within Digital Equipment Corporation in 1976. The principal designers were Dave Cutler and Dick Hustvedt. OpenVMS was conceived as a 32-bit, virtual memory successor to Digital's RSX-11M operating system for the PDP-11. Many of the original designers and programmers of OpenVMS had worked previously on RSX-11M, and many concepts from RSX-11M were carried over to OpenVMS.
Yes, and aren't we at war with Eurasia?:-)
I have to agree. Most web sites these days are optimised for IE4 and 5, and the good ones deliver a down-graded version of the site for older browsers. However, while Netscape is not as good, the real hassle comes in their different object models. I don't really want say which is better, but the very fact that IE has such market dominance means that you have to aim your effort in that direction. Having said all that, I'm looking forward to the open-source Mozilla as well - assuming they can reduce its size. Isn't someone looking at a streamlined version it?
Does anyone know, where to download win 1 or 2???
(Just for fun)
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m9
If you define an operating system as a collection of routines that provide abstract services on the underlying hardware (eg. I/O, stdlib-type stuff) and/or software that helps the programmer/user write and debug programs, then the answer is easy: 1945. The first detailed implementation description I've read is Alan Turing's "ACE REPORT" from late 1945. In it he describes software libraries, linking loaders, subroutine linkages, and describes the need for (human) librarians to manage and document standard routines, etc. The first running stored-program computer (Manchester "Baby", 1948) had no OS, since it had only 1024 bits of memory (!) and was more of a 'contest winner' than a functional machine, but easily, all of the first real, pre-1950 machines had system software about 15 minutes after someone tried to code to the hardware. (I hereby declare it OK to say Turing's ACE code was first even if it didn't get 'compiled' until much later. ('Source code' was written in 1945.) The computer industry as a whole has preannounced availability right from the start.) vonNeumann may have trumped Turing by a few months on publication, but I can't yet find the Appendices to the "EDVAC REPORT", which makes no mention of such things. In any case, the depth and breadth of Turing's vision of computers as general-purpose, symbolic manipulators beats the shit out of everyone, up until the 1960's. Really, read the "ACE REPORT", it's shockingly modern (once you get past his frumpy British language). I assume we're talking only about "stored program automatic digital computers" also. -- tomj@wps.com http://wps.com
Well, I guess the first question is "what is an OS?" Answers? From there we can kind of look at the following little bits of information I have managed to glean: 1969 Thompson and Ritchie developed the UNIX OS based on the Multiacs OS (developed in the mid '60s). I think that UNIX falls into the category of the first "popular" OS. These are the two earliest multitasking OSs that I know of (any corrections?). The first OS of any type I know of is GM-NAA I/O from 1956, although it wouldn't surprise me if there was something a little earlier. This OS introduced the concept of batch processing, which is with us to today. As a side issue, 1956 seems to be the year that direct keyboard input was added to computers.
According to http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~ch6574/course/os_hist.ht ml the first Operating System was the IBM 709/7090 in 1960. It had Standard file usage routines (SYSIN, SYSOUT, SYSUT1, SYSUT2, SYSUT3) and supported programming languages (quite which languages it doesn't say).
Hmmm... wonder if there's an emulator?
Alex DeLarge
http://www.bristol2600.org.uk
What you fail to realise is that Microsoft had developed a microcomputer version of UNIX (Microsoft Xenix) in 1980, before it bought MS-DOS. Microsoft actually tried to convince IBM to use a 68000 and Xenix in the IBM PC, but IBM refused.
IBM had several reasons for insisting on a primitive CPU and CP/M-like OS, but the key one was cost. In those days, a microcomputer capable of running a minicomputer system like UNIX was simply too expensive to be feasible. Even in 1985, this was still true (although the 68000 would haven't added much to the cost, and would have avoided the horrors of the 16-bit Intel legacy). It wasn't until 386, 68030 and RISC systems became widely used that microcomputers capable of running systems like UNIX became affordable. Not coincidentally, that's when Microsoft began developing NT (on RISC).
Early versions of Windows may have been primitive, but the limiting factor was the PC architecture itself. As bad as it was, IBM's original position proved to be the right one. The pricey systems required to run Microsoft OS/2 were rejected by consumers, who stuck with MS-DOS, and later Windows 3.x, because they had much lower hardware demands than OS/2 (or UNIX, or NT). The Mac was also too pricey (and the core OS was even more primitive than Windows 3.x, despite superior hardware).
It sucked more than I even remembered ;)
BTW http://www.dataservcorp.com/windows.htm has a history of MS-DOS/Windows and has screenshots for V2 V3 and V3.11 too.
Anyone gotta link to some screenshots of Windows 1.0 - I've seen it before and it was a joke, I wonder if the people who haven't seen it have realised how bad it was. Windows 3.1 was a big improvement on it's previous versions. It sucked (badly) but it sucked a lot less! I didn't start using Linux until aroung the time Win95 came out. Hmm if Linux development started a bit earlier or had gained momentum quicker it's growth would have been amazing.
You have to especially appreciate the dialog box with the message: "File too large: FaultLog.txt" Guess some things never change...
You forget, Windows is written for little-endian processors. That means that the least-significant digit is written first, and the most significant digits are written after it. Notice, there are very few meaningful differences (other than gratuitous file-format changes) between MS-Word 5.0, MS-Word 6.0, MS-Word 7.0 (aka Word95), and MS-Word 8.0 (aka Word97). In contrast, there's a world of difference between MS-DOS 3.2 and MS-DOS 3.3, as well as between MS-Windows 3.0 and 3.1. (Don't even get me started about MS-Windows 3.11.)
Tongue firmly implanted in cheek....
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
The Mojo system, currently being discussed as an alternative for the new K5, is one.
The trust metric, as practiced at Advogato, is another.
The bottom line is that there are Better Ways.
--
Peter
It appears that daring to complain that a /. editor can't be bothered to read all the way through a 4-line story is "flamebait". Or perhaps "redundant". No, it's a legitimate complaint. Is it really too much to ask that the editors actually edit?
h tm
Because it's becoming quite clear to me that Slashdot has abandoned any notion of quality journalism in favour of posting stupid questions that could be answered in 5 minutes on Google...
http://www.computer.org/annals/an1997/a1055abs.
Ah well. The advertisers get their clicks and that's what matters these days.
--
Peter
The guy who asked about dealing with W2K and AD in his UNIX network, now that's worthy.
/. editors or not?), nor offtopic (I'm talking about the sodding post, for gawds sake), nor redundant (I'm not mentioning anything twice...). But moderators don't moderate properly any more, if they ever did. Ho hum.
/. should dump the moderation system and ban anonymous posting, and leave it at that.
Daft little questions that can be answered in a few seconds with Google, that's not.
A rule of thumb might be "if, with a search engine, you can turn up something that looks like a halfway reasonable answer within 5 minutes, then it's prolly not worth asking".
And moderation's turned to shite, too; complaining about the editorial state of a post (the spelling's fixed now, I notice) is neither flamebait (do we expect a reasonable standard of spelling and grammar from
Personally, I reckon
--
Peter
If you really think about it, the first OS has been the Universe, and the Universe seems a lot like Windows. Ever since 'booting' (ie big bang) since the 'epoch' (0 seconds afterward), it has slowly grown bigger and bigger, and no one really knows when it will stop.
And we are but the "I Love You" virus running within it? Or just random bits, waiting to be switched off?
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
OS/360 and JCL builds character :-).
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Are there any earlier examples of this?
Other operating systems that I had used, such as RT-11 and RSX-11, put the user command processor in the kernel or made it a special privileged task that directly mucked around in the kernel.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Yes, in those days, they actually had an IBM engineer working full-time on the client site.
That still goes on, most of the larger shops have a full time IBM CE on site.
The scenerio you described is right on the mark. That happened constantly, and usually the code contributers were happy about. Remember in those days, everything was "open source". It wasn't until IBM dropped MVT for MVS and HASP for JESx that things got closed up.
My shop (PSU) was responsible for a good portion of the development in JES2, the job entry subsystem used by most s/390 shops.
Finkployd
then i should imagine that something such as OS/390 & JCL would be one of the first (Though there may be earlier still).
OS/390 is a pretty new name for MVS (multiple variable storage) and JCL is simply a Job Control Language, that's right, it's a language.
The earliest s/360 operating system I'm aware of is MVT (open source, IIRC), the job entry system was called HASP.
Finkployd
MFT, yeah I DID know that was before MVT, I just forgot. Oh well, hey, It was all before I was born, I'm still trying to learn the history :)
I didn't know DOS was first though, interesting.
Finkployd
The answer to that question may change a lot to what was the 1st OS.
- may it be the hardware and hardcoded software used to boot from a punch card/band ? I admit this is more the definition of the BIOS.. But, as far as the entry/launchin of programs was done with these cards, it was also the part that allowed to run programs
- May a simple hex monitor be called OS ? It allows to enter programs and to run them...
- Must there be the complex structure of task handling (even if only 1 task is supported, like in DOS), memory management,... ?
- what about computers like the ZX80 ? There was only the BASIC interpreter. May we speak of OS when speaking of these machines ?
Anyway, CP/M was before QDOS which was before MS DOS... for the rest, I can't tell.
What's interesting is, by this standard, microsoft has yet to make an operating system.
;-)
*snort* I'd say, by any standard, Microsoft has yet to make an operating system.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Hey! I just saw something I've been looking for (well, kinda) for some time now.
This screenshot includes an image (opened in a bitmap editor) of a chess board being tilted and a few chess pieces flying off of it.
I used to have this graphic as my background in PC/GEOS (AKA GeoWorks). In fact, I still have a copy of it, but it is in some propriatary image format that only PC/GEOS knows about.
Does anyone know where this image came from? Did it come with Windows, originally? And where can I get a copy of it in GIF or JPEG format?
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Well, UNIX is older than that (1969) and we should all know that it was based on the MULTICS project from before that. My money's on an earlier IBM OS. By your admission though, RSX-11M proceeds VMS (which was later renamed OpenVMS). You know, the chief architects of the WinNT kernel were big VMS designers, so you could argue using that logic that WinNT is the first OS too.
I wish I had my OS class's textbook handy.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Is anyone else reminded of the Apple IIGS's GUI system? Man, at least that one has seperate windows. I can't see Apple making its case about UI theft until at least Windows 2.0. I had no idea that it was so pathetic.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Anybody know who invented the wheel? Me neither. My guess is that every manufacturer of hardware came up with the concept more or less at the same time, out of need, and independently. We'll never really be able to pin it down.
OTOH, who commercialized the first OS is a different question, and my money would be on IBM.
---
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Actually Colossus was not created to break Engima, Enigma was broken using the Bombes, which were machines based on a Polish design.
Colossus tacked the much more difficult Lorenz Cipher (aka the Fish cipher) used starting in 1941 for the most important communications between Hitler and his generals.
Really the most amazing thing about Colossus was not that it was a programmable computer (sure that's cool) but that it could read paper teleprinter tape at 30 miles per hour (5k characters per second!). It could operate on 5 tapes in parallel, processing 25k of data per second - about the speed of a broadband connection today!
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I am reminded of Mel, a Real Programmer
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Here's a relevant quote from Dietel's OS book:
"The General Motors Research Laboratories are credited with implementing the first operating system in the early 1950s for their IBM 701. In 1955, GM and North American Aviation cooperated on an operating system for the IBM 704. The IBM user organization, SHARE, fostered discussion on operating systems, and by 1957 many home-grown operating systems for the 704 had been developed."
"Home-grown" OSes were popular at the beginning and now are popular again (would you call Linux "home-grown"?) -- I guess history does repeat itself!
I agree. As far as I can tell, CTSS was probably the first "real" OS, in the sense of a software system allowing multiple programmers to use the machine without loading up the hardware from scratch for each new program run.
I would have voted for JOSS, Rand Corporation's Johnniac Open Shop System, except that a posting from Willis Ware some time back pretty firmly gave his opinion that JOSS was not a true OS. Could have fooled me, but Willis is one of the very few people I'll defer to in such matters.
OK, here is some stuff I know about the DOS you mentioned. The DOS (disk operating system) came after TOS (tape operating system). It was out there before OS/360 etc. and instead of dying, continued on. DOS/VSE became VSE/ESA (eventually), and, believe it or not, VSE/ESA 2.4 was released last year!
AFAIK, IBM wanted VSE to die, so as to allow the OS/390 juggernaut to take up these users - but people a) seem to like the primitive VSE (yeah, the cylinder/track thing is f%$^&ing annoying), and b) if someone is going to switch from VSE - they might not go to another mainframe OS.
The VSE development is now done in Germany(?) if I recall correctly - some IBM politics is involved here as well..
Apparently people don't know the true value of Ask Slashdot.
It is *not* so the guy who asks the question gets the answer. It is so that guys like me, who idly wonder about things like "who made the first OS" or "so who do I buy music from now that I'm boycotting the RIAA" or "what did CmdrTaco eat for breakfast this morning? Cold Pizza?" can get the answer.
To repeat, the average
To quote somebody's sig, this is a lot like science, which is a lot like sex: something useful might come out of it (in this case, the comments from Ask Slashdot), but that's not why we do it.
</rant>
Is this post not nifty? Sluggy Freelance. Worshi
I know the UK was suffering greatly from wartime shortages just then, but couldn't they have found a more sanitary material to make the registers out of?
And the brethren went away edified.
I think this is an applicable parameter when judging weather an operating system is really matured enough to become an OS.
What's interesting is, by this standard, microsoft has yet to make an operating system.
We just haven't reverse-engineered it enough to understand it.
{nitpik} Ok, we're probably on version 1.18E29 of our operating system. There seems to be quite a bit of legacy code still there though.
--
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Didn't you hear? Al Gore announced yesterday that he invented the first OS, Gorux. Like its precursor, ClintONIAC, it ran with periods of brilliance but got bogged down when the software was tinkered with.
Was that out loud?
FORTRAN interpreters
Can't recall ever meeting an interpreter for Fortran. Were there such beasties ?
Just to do some flag-waving for the Brits, I'd say that LEO was the first machine with a recognisable OS.
But Windows 1.0 looks like it was made in Stondeage. =) I liked the sentence which I've read in some PC Mag. Windows 1.1 German is out. Now European users can do nothing usefull with it as well!
Before you email me, remember: "There is no god!"
Well, interesting what you can find on Google. From http://www.cs.wvu.edu/~jdm/ classes/cs258/OScat/batch.html
;)
OS/360
Generic name for operating systems for the IBM S/360, and later S/370. First version released 1966 [Mealy et al 1966]. See also OS/PCP, OS/MFT, OS/MVT, OS/VS1, OS/SVS, and OS/MVS.
So, thats 1966 for version 1 of OS/360.
OS/MFT, OS/MFT-II
Multiprogramming with a Fixed number of Tasks. Simple version of OS/MVT suitable for processors with limited memory. First release 1967, substantial revision 1968. [Mealy et al 1966, Auslander et al 1981].
Thats 1967 for OS/MFT. Which means OS/360 is the earliest IBM version (That i can find). There are also some others such as SUE and POS, but they only give dates of "late 1960's", so i can't tell if these are earlier than 1966 or not. But hey, i think we're getting close
Syllable : It's an Operating System
The UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer) may have had an operating system, and its first deliveries were in 1951. (EDVAC didn't come up until 1952.) The UNIVAC I was the first computer that was a real product - a number were made and sold commercially. Everything earlier was either a one-off or a special-purpose machine. The UNIVAC I looked like a computer - lots of tape drives, a big console with a typewriter and controls, and a CPU so big it had a door in the side so maintenance people could go in. The tube CPU was completely duplicated for self-checking, so the results were reliable. UNIVAC I machines processed the 1950 census, were used by Met Life, and did heavy data processing for big institutions of the 1950s.
Eventually there was an OS of sorts for the UNIVAC 1, but I don't know when the OS shipped. It may not have been available with first shipments.
flip a switch (aka, the input portion of the first UI) and a light (output part of the first UI) came on.
still miles ahead of messy-dos and its ilk.
and upgrade fees are less than a dollar.
--
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Something I found... A Brief History of Computer Operating Systems The Bare Machine Stacked Job Batch Systems (mid 1950s - mid 1960s) A batch system is one in which jobs are bundled together with the instructions necessary to allow them to be processed without intervention. Often jobs of a similar nature can be bundled together to further increase economy The basic physical layout of the memory of a batch job computer is shown below: -------------------------------------- | | | Monitor (permanently resident) | | | -------------------------------------- | | | User Space | | (compilers, programs, data, etc.) | | | -------------------------------------- The monitor is system software that is responsible for interpreting and carrying out the instructions in the batch jobs. When the monitor started a job, it handed over control of the entire computer to the job, which then controlled the computer until it finished. A sample of several batch jobs might look like: $JOB user_spec ; identify the user for accounting purposes $FORTRAN ; load the FORTRAN compiler source program cards $LOAD ; load the compiled program $RUN ; run the program data cards $EOJ ; end of job $JOB user_spec ; identify a new user $LOAD application $RUN data $EOJ Often magnetic tapes and drums were used to store intermediate data and compiled programs. Advantages of batch systems move much of the work of the operator to the computer increased performance since it was possible for job to start as soon as the previous job finished Disadvantages turn-around time can be large from user standpoint more difficult to debug program due to lack of protection scheme, one batch job can affect pending jobs (read too many cards, etc) a job could corrupt the monitor, thus affecting pending jobs a job could enter an infinite loop As mentioned above, one of the major shortcomings of early batch systems was that there was no protection scheme to prevent one job from adversely affecting other jobs. The solution to this was a simple protection scheme, where certain memory (e.g. where the monitor resides) were made off-limits to user programs. This prevented user programs from corrupting the monitor. To keep user programs from reading too many (or not enough) cards, the hardware was changed to allow the computer to operate in one of two modes: one for the monitor and one for the user programs. IO could only be performed in monitor mode, so that IO requests from the user programs were passed to the monitor. In this way, the monitor could keep a job from reading past it's on $EOJ card. To prevent an infinite loop, a timer was added to the system and the $JOB card was modified so that a maximum execution time for the job was passed to the monitor. The computer would interrupt the job and return control to the monitor when this time was exceeded. Spooling Batch Systems (mid 1960s - late 1970s) One difficulty with simple batch systems is that the computer still needs to read the the deck of cards before it can begin to execute the job. This means that the CPU is idle (or nearly so) during these relatively slow operations. Since it is faster to read from a magnetic tape than from a deck of cards, it became common for computer centers to have one or more less powerful computers in addition to there main computer. The smaller computers were used to read a decks of cards onto a tape, so that the tape would contain many batch jobs. This tape was then loaded on the main computer and the jobs on the tape were executed. The output from the jobs would be written to another tape which would then be removed and loaded on a less powerful computer to produce any hardcopy or other desired output. It was a logical extension of the timer idea described above to have a timer that would only let jobs execute for a short time before interrupting them so that the monitor could start an IO operation. Since the IO operation could proceed while the CPU was crunching on a user program, little degradation in performance was noticed. Since the computer can now perform IO in parallel with computation, it became possible to have the computer read a deck of cards to a tape, drum or disk and to write out to a tape printer while it was computing. This process is called SPOOLing: Simultaneous Peripheral Operation OnLine. Spooling batch systems were the first and are the simplest of the multiprogramming systems. One advantage of spooling batch systems was that the output from jobs was available as soon as the job completed, rather than only after all jobs in the current cycle were finished. Multiprogramming Systems (1960s - present) As machines with more and more memory became available, it was possible to extend the idea of multiprogramming (or multiprocessing) as used in spooling batch systems to create systems that would load several jobs into memory at once and cycle through them in some order, working on each one for a specified period of time. -------------------------------------- | Monitor | | (more like a operating system) | -------------------------------------- | User program 1 | -------------------------------------- | User program 2 | -------------------------------------- | User program 3 | -------------------------------------- | User program 4 | -------------------------------------- At this point the monitor is growing to the point where it begins to resemble a modern operating system. It is responsible for: starting user jobs spooling operations IO for user jobs switching between user jobs ensuring proper protection while doing the above As a simple, yet common example, consider a machine that can run two jobs at once. Further, suppose that one job is IO intensive and that the other is CPU intensive. One way for the monitor to allocate CPU time between these jobs would be to divide time equally between them. However, the CPU would be idle much of the time the IO bound process was executing. A good solution in this case is to allow the CPU bound process (the background job) to execute until the IO bound process (the foreground job) needs some CPU time, at which point the monitor permits it to run. Presumably it will soon need to do some IO and the monitor can return the CPU to the background job. Timesharing Systems (1970s - present) Back in the days of the "bare" computers without any operating system to speak of, the programmer had complete access to the machine. As hardware and software was developed to create monitors, simple and spooling batch systems and finally multiprogrammed systems, the separation between the user and the computer became more and more pronounced. Users, and programmers in particular, longed to be able to "get to the machine" without having to go through the batch process. In the 1970s and especially in the 1980s this became possible two different ways. The first involved timesharing or timeslicing. The idea of multiprogramming was extended to allow for multiple terminals to be connected to the computer, with each in-use terminal being associated with one or more jobs on the computer. The operating system is responsible for switching between the jobs, now often called processes, in such a way that favored user interaction. If the context-switches occurred quickly enough, the user had the impression that he or she had direct access to the computer. Interactive processes are given a higher priority so that when IO is requested (e.g. a key is pressed), the associated process is quickly given control of the CPU so that it can process it. This is usually done through the use of an interrupt that causes the computer to realize that an IO event has occurred. It should be mentioned that there are several different types of time sharing systems. One type is represented by computers like our VAX/VMS computers and UNIX workstations. In these computers entire processes are in memory (albeit virtual memory) and the computer switches between executing code in each of them. In other types of systems, such as airline reservation systems, a single application may actually do much of the timesharing between terminals. This way there does not need to be a different running program associated with each terminal. Personal Computers The second way that programmers and users got back at the machine was the advent of personal computers around 1980. Finally computers became small enough and inexpensive enough that an individual could own one, and hence have complete access to it. Real-Time, Multiprocessor, and Distributed/Networked Systems A real-time computer is one that execute programs that are guaranteed to have an upper bound on tasks that they carry out. Usually it is desired that the upper bound be very small. Examples included guided missile systems and medical monitoring equipment. The operating system on real-time computers is severely constrained by the timing requirements. Dedicated computers are special purpose computers that are used to perform only one or more tasks. Often these are real-time computers and include applications such as the guided missile mentioned above and the computer in modern cars that controls the fuel injection system. A multiprocessor computer is one with more than one CPU. The category of multiprocessor computers can be divided into the following sub-categories: shared memory multiprocessors have multiple CPUs, all with access to the same memory. Communication between the the processors is easy to implement, but care must be taken so that memory accesses are synchronized. distributed memory multiprocessors also have multiple CPUs, but each CPU has it's own associated memory. Here, memory access synchronization is not a problem, but communication between the processors is often slow and complicated. Related to multiprocessors are the following: networked systems consist of multiple computers that are networked together, usually with a common operating system and shared resources. Users, however, are aware of the different computers that make up the system. distributed systems also consist of multiple computers but differ from networked systems in that the multiple computers are transparent to the user. Often there are redundant resources and a sharing of the workload among the different computers, but this is all transparent to the user.
If we refuse to be flexible, we are in effect opting out of the game of life. The world moves on without us.
Actually, if by "drums," you mean 20+ foot long concrete pipes coated in metal, there are interesting facts about them (of course):
Apparently on ships in the US navy, they would cause the ship to turn to one side due to gyroscopic forces when they had several aboard. I think they got nicknamed "rotation storage batteries" or something like that. That was until they had equal numbers turning the opposite direction.
Also, there was a window all the way up the side so you could see a head crash (many heads, you're not going to take it apart and check each one!)
You'd just look for the band of sparks around the pipe at one point as the head drags on the (not perfectly smooth,) pipe.
Technology has, somehow, changed the way we "define" things. According to the latest cultural trend, an operating system is: "the program that, after being initially loaded into the computer by a boot program, manages all the other programs in a computer. (editor's comment: wtf is that redundancy about?!) The other programs are called applications. The applications make use of the operating system by making requests for services through a defined application program interface (application program interface). In addition, users can interact directly with the operating system through an interface such as a command language. (according to whatis.com).
Now, an operating system, traditionally speaking, is a piece of "code" (to put it somehow), that allows a user to perform operations (thus, the OPERATING system). The evolution of semiotics in the last 15 or 20 years has made it possible that we only associate "operating system" with "software". (Sign and significant associations mostly related to social influences).
I will indulge myself with a digression: what if we divert our attention from the actual social influence of Operating system and take it one step further? What would be the first Operating system then? I mean, as in a "code that allows a user to perform operations through hardware".
Maybe I am wrong, but I found Blas Pascal's calculator from 1,642 as the first machine that fits that definition.
IBM DOS/VS on the Series 3 mainframe. It provided a software Kernel and a shell, albiet using core memory and punch cards for I/O. Support for tape was added in release 2.4 and finally removable disks in the next release. This OS was replaced by DOS/VSE on the 370 and 43XX series mainframes. Finally DOS/VSE was superceded by VM and MVS. The current incarnation is OS/390 which has a Unix Kernel.:)
ENIAC ripped off many of its innovations from the ABC, the Atanasff Berry Computer at Iowa State. The page for the machine is currently down, but a pair of replicas were recently built. You can find an article at http://www.alumni.iastate.edu/events/abcreplica.ht m. If you search for "Atanasoff Berry Computer" at the http://www.iastate.edu homepage, you'll find plenty of information.
:)
In a nutsheell, Atanasoff and hs graduate student Berry built the machine in the thirties to solve 17 simultaneous equations in 17 variables. ISU claims it as the first electronic digital computer. It used vacuum tube logic (small interchangable sub-chassis with a handfull of tubes), was apparently the first to use base 2 rather than 10, the first to have regenerative memory (rotating drums of capacitors), and something else important that I forget
Atanasoff was called off to the Manhattan project, and the machine was taken apart for parts.
The machine came to light during litigation over ENIAC's patents. Not only was the ABC prior art, but it's builders went to ISU and were shown the details of the ABC--which they then used and patented.
WHen the replica project started, they found no schematics for large portions, and had to use photographs. Finding parts wasn't as bad as might be suspected, though--when they dug out ancient purchase orders to find out what parts were used, it turned out that some of the same warehouses still stocked the same parts--including the weird paper that they used for output by electrically charring it, iirc .
Two replicas were built, one to reside permanently at the Smithsonian, and the other to tour. One (I'm not sure which) was actually fired up to solve a problem--once.
hawk
Look at the history at http://home.san.rr.com/deans/lisagui.html
It includes screen mockups from *before* the PARC vist. PARC certainly influencd the Lisa, but it wasn't the origin.
hawk
I'm pretty sure the IBM/360 was the first system to use a layer of abstraction to separate the programmers from the hardware, so that they could write programs that would run on a wide variety of computers. One result of that was that you had a few operating systems that ran on these machines.
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The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
DOS -- This was a quick and dirty operating system that was created only because the "real" operating system was way behind schedule and they need something for their new hardware. It was expected to disappear soon after OS/MFT was released, but survived at least into the 80's, 20 years longer than expected. Even in the 80's, you had to figure out where to place your files by hand, by specifying the cylinder/track/block address and length in your job specification. The IBM "DOS" was much more primative than the MS "DOS" available at the same time.
MFT - Multiple Fixed Tasks. This was a multi-tasking operating system, although each program was assigned a block of memory that was a fixed size. No virtual memory, but it had most everything else that people think of an OS having.
MVT - Multiple Virtual Tasks. This allowed each program to use up variable amounts of memory, although they got a default region of a certain sized based on the "class" of the job that was submitted. If a program need more memory, but there was already a program running at the end of the current programs region, the first program would have to wait until the other program finished before it would continue.
SVS -- Single Virtual System. Virtual Memory was introduced in this release. All virtual memory was created in a single large address space (16MB virtual on a 1-4MB of physical), and then an MVT type operating system was run in that virtual memory. The advantage was that the initial default memory regions could be "huge", so the chances of a program running out of space was greatly reduced.
MVS -- Multiple Virtual System. Each program was allocated its own address space.
Many of the systems writen for these early (pre-1980) mainframes were incredibly efficient. At the University of Nebraska, we had one of the earliest timeshare systems created called the "Nebraska University Remote Operating System" or NUROS. In 256KB of program storage, it supported around 240 users, each was able to edit files, submit jobs, view the output of the jobs, create/delete files, etc. Yes, that's right, about 1KB of memory per person. Well, sort of, as the 2260 and 3270 terminals contained another 2KB of memory that people edit most of their actual editing on. (24 lines by 80 characters = 1960 bytes)
Oh, it was a state of the art system ca 1970 when it was created, but there is a reason why Unix survived and it didn't. :->
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
In a few year time the average member of the public will be convinced that Windows was the first OS, DOS didn't exist and Microsoft invented the Internet in association with Al Gore.
:)
I've seen a serious answer to the question somewhere but can't remember what it was. I'll have a dig about and if I find something I'll let you know
I'm not sure if you could call it a true interpreter, but WATFOR (Waterloo FORTRAN) was a "load-and-go" FORTRAN compiler that compiled directly into core from the user's source code. A history of Waterloo FORTRAN can be read here. From the user's point of view, it behaved like a FORTRAN interpreter.
In later years, I used DEC FORTRAN on RT-11. This compiled into threaded code with a large run-time package. I'm not sure how to classify it.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The Compatible Time Sharing System (CTSS) would qualify as the earliest thing I can think of that we'd recognize as a modern OS.
There probably is not a sharp dividing line between simple batch job management systems and a real operating system, but CTSS managed multiple processes by giving them timeslices so each process (user)would think it had its own computer -- in other words it abstracted the underlying computer and the fact that multiple processes were accessing the hardware.
There's an interesting parallel to programming languages. Algol was clean and elegant and lead to the recherche PL/1. C, in part, was designed by negating the basic premise of PL/1 -- that a language should be rich in features. Instead of cosseting the programmer with a huge array of facilities, C seeks to get out of the programmer's way by providing just the essentials.
Likewise CTSS was a great technical success and directly lead to the brilliant but overblown Multics. And of course, Multics begat Unix, or at least strongly influenced its designers to avoid what we would now call "bloat".
I think there's a kind of object lesson here which applies to some of the news we've discussing recently. Back in the day, computers were godawful expensive. This means there were unthinkable quantities of resources thrown into Multics, which while it pioneered many important concepts we now take for granted, was almost undoubtedly too big and complex. It certainly can't be considered a totally unqualified success -- for one thing its complexity required special hardware support which ruled out porting to other hardware. Unix again was developed originally on a shoestring which dictated a minimalist approach which fostered greater flexibility.
So -- resources are nice to have, if you have the acuity to use them wisely. But in the end simplicity and adaptability count for more.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It was Maurice Wilkes, 1949:
As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.
http://www.abandonkeep.com/
Hercules is a System/370 and ESA/390 emulator which can IPL and execute S/370 and ESA/390 instructions. It can also emulate CKD and FBA DASD, printer, card reader, tape, channel-to-channel adapter, and local non-SNA 3270 devices
So, for some REAL nostalgia, install this on your box, get OS/360 (freeware!), and before you know it you'll be running TSO with 5 users, each pecking away at their 3270 block-mode terminals. Oh, and it can also run Linux/390, so if you've got way too much time on your hand you can run Linux->Hercules->Linux/390->Hercules->OS/360 or something horrible like that.
--frank[at]unternet.org
The 4th floor of Soda Hall, UCB's CS building, has mounted on the wall what I think constitutes my Alma Mater's answer to this question: a giant abacus with a sign that reads, "In case of System failure, shake to reboot."
If you're not wasted, the day is.
In operating system, there is the world system and, IMHO, a system is supposed to be extendable.
Now here is my first attempt to answer your question
From this site: Babbage's greatest achievement was his detailed plans for Calculating Engines, both the table-making Difference Engines and the far more ambitious Analytical Engines, which were flexible and powerful, punched-card controlled general purpose calculaters, embodying many features which later reappeared in the modern stored program computer. These features included: punched card control; separate store and mill; a set of internal registers (the table axes); fast multiplier/divider; a range of peripherals; even array processing.
Sounds like we got it.
Now, we could reformulate your question one of the following ways:
- By assuming you expected one that would be stored distinct from the main processing unit:
- By assuming you expected one that would be publicly available:
- By assuming you expected one that would fit both previous conditions:
Finally, I can't wait to imagine now somebody that might ask in some years about the first microprocessor ever, because as our vision of a microprocessor will have evolved (compare Transmeta's thing -or its equivalent, in ten years from now- to the i4004) thus making this question even more difficult to answer."What was the First Computer software Operating System ?"
"What was the First Computer commercial Operating System ?"
"What was the First Computer software commercial Operating System ?"
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Trolling using another account since 2005.
never had anything that resembled a monitor, let alone an OS.
:P
I'm tired of all of you guys whining about what is or is not an OS. To settle this issue once and for all, I hereby present to you the final definition of an Operating System from a company that knows this shit.
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MR. FARBER'S DEFINITION OF AN OPERATING SYSTEM ACTUALLY SUPPORTS THE HARD WORK AND INNOVATION BY THE SOFTWARE INDUSTRY OVER THE PAST 20 YEARS.
Mr. Farber ignores the realities of the marketplace when he tries to define an operating system as "software that controls the execution of programs on computers and may provide low-level ser-vices such as resource allocation, scheduling and input-output control in a form which is suffi-ciently simple and general so that these services are broadly useful to software developers."
In fact, at his deposition, Mr. Farber was unable to name a single commercially available operating sys-tem that fits his extremely narrow definition. Perhaps his definition made sense 25 years ago, but his testimony essentially ignores everything that has occurred in the field of operating system design over the past two decades. The Apple MacOS and Microsoft Windows and Sun Solaris all fall outside Mr. Farber's definition of an operating system, so it's hard to see what relevance his definition has in this case.
What Mr. Farber refuses to recognize is that the ongoing evolution of operating systems has delivered to consumers more powerful and full-featured products that are much easier to use. Such enhancements are often made possible by integrating new features and functionality into an operating system, making it a more capable platform for software developers and a giving it a better user interface for users. All types of Microsoft customers-including hardware manufac-turers, software devel-opers, content developers and users-have come to rely on the fact that Windows is a stable and consistent platform that will run large numbers of applications.
The popularity of Windows is strong evi-dence that nobody wants the sort of rudimentary operating systems Mr. Farber apparently prefers. Microsoft is very good listening to its customers and providing them with technology solutions that meet their needs. Mr. Farber might have preferred that Microsoft create a hobbled version of Windows that had only a small fraction of the useful features contained in Windows 98, but his opinion is not supported by Microsoft's millions of customers worldwide.
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Well, that has cleared everything. Now that everyone knows what an operating system is, go back and continue your discussion.
w/m
Of course not - "x" is just a windowing system!
Sausage King of Chicago
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Well...
My dad used to tell me how he (and a few of his friends) actually created a simple Disk Management system on an IBM mainframe. I can't remember which Big Blue machine they used, but programming was done with punch cards.
That was the time when, if you wanted your program to actually write something to the disk, you had to create your own routines to do this! Remember also that this was with "magnetic drums" -- to write any data to disk you had to know the hardware and the controller very well to optimize writing and reading (transfer rate were, of course abysmal).
So they just went ahead and created a clever little program to write and read data to these huge magnetic drums. From then on, all their progrmas would just call the disk management software instead of having to re-invent the wheel. Then they optimized it some more (32KB of RAM was huge in those times!) and simply used it all the time.
Soon after this, they received the visit of their in-house IBM engineer. Yes, in those days, they actually had an IBM engineer working full-time on the client site. Proudly, they showed him this clever little software. The guy asked for the source code, which they supplied, open source-like. The blue-suited engineer thanked them and walked away with the source. My dad and his colleagues just went back to work.
Next thing you know, IBM released, with its next-generation mainframe, a complete set of system utilities including a disk manager that looked suspiciously like the one they had created.
Why am I remembering this? Because my dad said many times that IBM (and, certainly, other computer makers) had used their ideas, as well as the ideas of many others, to create these "system utilities". He was not bitter or anything, he just mentioned that many other users probably had their own utilities for printing, batch execution, disk management, and others, and that IBM simply had used the best ones they could find... No one "invented" an "operating system": they just used more and more utilities and integrated them with one another.
Ah well. Just my US$ 0.02...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
This is difinatly a difficult question to pin down. What are you going to define as "an OS"? If you mean Kernel & Shell, with a set of standard device drivers, then i should imagine that something such as OS/390 & JCL would be one of the first (Though there may be earlier still).
How about the first FORTRAN interpreters for mainframes? These were originally bootstraped in front of the FORTRTAN data, and in effect, created an abstraction layer between the program and the hardware. I doubt you could say FORTRAN is an OS under the "modern" difinition though.
There has to be an earlier example of a "modern" OS than OS/390 though. I can't imagine the idea was thought up by IBM before it was done in the lab.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Well, seeing as everybody is having problems defining the first OS, perhaps we should look at the first stored-program computer and see what that was running. The first "programmable logic calculator" and there were 10 of them in operation at Bletchley Park during WWII working on breaking the German Enigma cipher.
The "OS" on Colussus as I understand it, was simply the function of a group of valves. There was hardware checking other hardware, but to my knowledge there was no software running on Colussus other than the algorithm used to break Enigma. Input was by way of punched paper tape containing cipher read a few thousand characters a second (I've seen the rebuild running, and yes it is scary watching paper tape at that speed), output was buffered onto relays which meant a typewrite was printing out onto paper roll. The "processor" was just 5 characters of 5 bits held in a shit register. I suspect the "OS" was hardware and people making sure that none of the 2,500 valves blew up. All programming was by way of hard wiring, so it's hard to determine what the OS was here. There is some really cool information about Colussus here if you're interested.
Next there was ENIAC, which due to the fact the British Government kept Colussus an Official Secret, was considered for a long time to be the first ever computer. ENIAC seemed suprisingly similar (when I read the specs anyway) in terms of internal function to Colussus - no OS there at all. So, we still haven't found anything...
Then there was the Baby built by Manchester University in the UK. The rebuild of the Baby now sits in the Manhester Science and Industry museum. It's a curious piece of kit to say the least. It's memory consisted of a radar screen showing an array of bits, and whether each bit was on or not was picked up by a piece of gauze in front od the screen. Because phosphor on the screen takes a while to fade, you could just fire it, and not worry for a few hundred milliseconds about refreshing it.
The baby didn't require anything to hard wired at all. There was a group of toggle switches on the front to program the machine, and there was a sense of "state" when no program was loaded or running. Therefore, I think whatever it was running on the Baby probably has claim to being the first ever OS. There is some nice stuff on the Baby (or officially the Manchester Mark 1) over here for you to peruse at your pleasure.
So, my vote is that whatever was running on the Baby was the first OS. But then, I don't know as much about ENIAC as I do about Colussus and the Mark 1. Please feel free to correct me if the ENIAC had code running before a program was loaded.
According this this abstract of a paper in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, EDVAC had a recognizable operating system in 1952/53. I suspect this would qualify as the first OS...
Sailing over the event horizon
Ultimately, this is a controversial topic. Perhaps the strongest contender would be Konrad Zuse , who developed a programmable computer in the 1940s. Interesting first person notes from an inventor in Nazi germany.
In the ACM archives , there is a paper on "Monitors, an operating system structuring concept" by C.A.R Hoare. Since this is from 1974, I guess it's not too old, but still an interesting paper.
Many have been posting about OS/360 (or 390) but while MVS was a major step in OS history, it wasn't the first. It was released in 1964, too late for the first OS.
Also interesting is a time article on the first computer
All the old stuff is fun to read.
w/m