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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?"
Certainly Unix WASN'T the FIRST OS. It came along later than IBMs 709/7090 and OS/360 systems but who could afford the 709/7090. Even Honeywell had an operating system before Unix came along.
So the question could well be, who had the first affordable operating system? Then Unix would qualify because AT&T was giving it away to the academic community. Sorta like a popular OS is today. I WONDER where these youngsters got the idea from?
When I started working in Toronto in 1967 for Honeywell Information Systems (HIS), the main storage medium was punched card, paper tape or magnetic tape. Honeywell's innovation in the field was a pnuematically operated tape drive that handled tape with kid gloves compared to the pinch rollers used in all other tape drives of the day.
Honeywell salesmen at computer shows would take their prospects over to the IBM display, ask the IBM rep to run the tape to the end of the reel, ask them to hit "rewind", then in the middle ask the IBM rep to hit the power OFF switch, simulating a power failure situation. A rookie rep would do it, but JUST once. It initiated a procedure that came to be known as "pull and stretch tape". The two sets of pinch rollers would BOTH clamp down on the tape, pulling in opposite directions and you effectively had to discard the tape and go get the backup and hope you didn't have a power failure until you'd recreated the one you just destroyed.
Then they'd go back to the Honeywell display, repeat the process and all that would happen is the compressors used to create the vacuum and pressure to move the tape would power DOWN and the tape was left fluttering in the tape loop chambers.
All companies used much the same technology to move the tape reels themselves. It was how the tape was moved past the magnetic read/write heads that was Honeywells ace in the hole. Once the Honeywell patents expired in the 1970-80s, the enire industry moved to the pnuematic system.
Certainly the Honeywell units were noisier because the compressors they used were large, loud units. The tape safety factor made it a no brainer, though.
One company, Gulf Canada, had a magnetic drum but I don't recall that they used any kind of operating system. Many of the other hundred or so users were even largely card based. Try doing an OS with punched cards? Or paper tape?
You booted up the system with a control panel (keyboard input came along a couple of years later; keyboard input was done at an IBM keypunch machine) and ran a compiler program to create a user written program, then you ran the user written programs.
No resident BASIC compiler like the VIC-20 had later, which sort of looked like an operating system.
Us techies would punch code into the control panel just as easily as I now do here at the keyboard. Even could program code to punch on cards and BOOT from the card reader!!!
Once you'd written a bunch of programs, the operators would "batch" them together and usually reading in punch cards, run them until the programmers needed to compile another program.
A couple of years later, 1969/70, Honeywell introduced the OS/200 operating system for the Series 200 computers they'd been selling since before 1967 to replace IBM 1401s and that was followed a couple of years later by OS/2000.
Then Honeywell bought the GE computing division and inherited a REAL operating system: Multics, developed jointly by MIT, GE and until they pulled out, Bell Labs. Of course, that team went on to create Unix, based on some of the ideas that were developed for Multics.
Of course the widely used OS for the GE machines was GECOS, or GE comprehensive operating system, which Honeywell changed to GCOS, I believe leaving the meaning of the "G" as general.
That's by brief account of the HIS progression towards an operating system.
Cheers,
Ray
Toronto, Ontario
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
whoring for karma... ;-)
here are some screenshots of win 1.0
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