Comment Re:The earliest OS I know of is Unix. (Score 5) 247
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
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
