Other Operating Systems

CS 321 2007 Lecture, Dr. Lawlor

Many, many operating systems have arisen, flourished, and died out in the 57 years computers have existed on the earth.

"Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" -- Ozymandias

The 1964 OS/360 was an IBM OS that still lives on in places. IBM's AS/400 is something of a successor to it.

VAX/VMS was the operating system of choice in the mid-1970's. A common phrase at the time was "All the world's a VAX!".

Mac Family

MacOS 1.0 was introduced in 1984 along with the original Mac 128K, with the a black-and-white 512x384 pixel graphical display. Macs got color with the Mac II, in 1987. The Mac II had a separate MMU socket on the motherboard, if you wanted virtual memory, which wasn't suppored by the OS until MacOS System 7 in 1991. System 7 also added multiprocessing, athough no protected memory.

Macs sold as recently as 2003 had no protected memory! Only MacOS X has protected memory.

UNIX Successors

BeOS is a media OS from a now-defunct company "Be, Inc.". Its main claims to fame were that the entire OS is written in C++, totally multithreaded (every window has a separate thread), and designed with 3D hardware in mind. BeOS got a lot of buzz during the mid-1990's, and then vanished in the dotcom crash.