3 -- A brief history of operating systems

CS:3620 Notes, Spring 2018

Part of the CS:3620, Operating Systems Notes
by Douglas W. Jones
THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA Department of Computer Science

The 1940s

Computers were a new idea, although Charles Babbage's idea of an analytical engine was almost a century old. Hardly any of those involved in the development of computers had heard of Babbage. Typical general purpose computer designs in this era were closely modeled on the paper design presented at the Princeton summer school in 1946. That means a single-accumulator machine with 40 bits per word, with two 20 bit instructions packed into each word. Memory addresses were typically 12 bits, allowing addressing of 4k words of 40 bits each. Half word addressing was supported in only the most minimal way by having two distinct jump instructions, jump to high halfword and jump to low halfword.

See Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing Instrument, Arthur Burks, Herman Goldstine and John von Neumann, Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, June 28, 1946.

Subroutine call instructions had not yet been invented. To call a subroutine took, in the typical case, 3 instructions.

  1. Load constant (the return jump) into accumulator.
  2. Store accumultor (the return jump) into the subroutine's return location.
  3. Jump to the entry point of the subroutine.

The return location of the subroutine was typically the last instruction of the subroutine, and the constant loaded, for each call, was not the return address, but rather, a fully formed jump instruction to transfer control to the return address.

With machines like this, it was hard to imagine any kind of operating system, and in fact, even the use of subroutines was considered an advanced topic. Furthermore, from the time of Babbage well into the 1950s, many system designers considered software and programming to be, at heart, clerical work. Mathematicians designed algorithms, but all of the practical work of coding was a job for clerks, graduate research assistants, and the like. Some hardware designers did not understand how wrong they were about this until the late 1970s.

The 1950s

The decade of the 1950 saw a number of innovations in computer architecture. These included the invention of index registers and subroutine call instructions, both crucial to the development of modern ideas of programming. This was also the decade when the first compilers were developed, most notably, FORTRAN (it was always capitalized back then).

In the 1950s, magnetic tape drives became commonplace. Typical tape drives for computers stored data as a sequence of records. Each record was typically 80 characters (based on the record format of punched cards) or 120 characters (the number of characters per line on many early line printers), although the hardware did not limit the record format.

Computers of the 1950s rapidly standardized on 6 bits per character, after the IBM 701 computer introduced this standard. The 701 also set the word-size to 36 bits, and many others used this size, while 48-bit words were also used on some computers. The standard magnetic tape format that emerged in this era, also introduced by IBM, stored 7 data tracks on 1/2 inch wide tape. 7-tracks were used so that 6 bits of data (one character) could be stored in parallel along with a parity bit (typically the exclusive-or of the 6 data bits).

Data was typically stored at just 100 characters per inch (but higher density tapes came out, first 200 characters per inch, and then 400), and tape reels typically held 1200 feet of tape.

The tape drive could not read or write fractional records, and the drive hardware automatically computed (on output) or checked (on input) the parity of each character. The drive also computed or checked the checksum of the entire block, which was stored at the end of the block.

Typical tape drive commands were:

By mid decade, computers with whole banks of tape drives became common. In such a mix, one tape drive was frequently designated the system drive, and the tape on that drive contained system programs. Main memories were still small, but it was common for a small loader to be permanently resident in main memory, able to load and run the n'th file from tape drive d (you'd jump to the loader with parameters n and d loaded in agreed upon memory locations or registers).

This system is a sufficient foundation to make something that users would begin to call a tape operating system. At the end of execution, typical programs would exit by jumping to the loader, asking it to load and run the command language interpreter from the system tape. The command language interpreter would remember (in just a few words of dedicated memory) the drive number from which it was reading a command file. Commands in the command file would set up parameters to programs and then launch them.

These systems were very fragile. Any program that accidentally damaged the loader would force a complete system restart. Any program that accidentally damaged the memory location used to remember the current input file could lead to wild and unpredictable system actions.

Nonetheless, these systems were flexible enough to support assemblers and compilers, linkers and subroutine libraries. FORTRAN grew in such an environment, and the developers thinking about the new languages of 1960, COBOL and Algol, had extensive experience with such systems.

Rotating magnetic memory was also important in this era. Not disk drives, but rather, drums where the data tracks were on the outside surface of a rotating cylinder. Typically, drum main memory stored data in word parallel form, so a computer with a 40 bit word would have a 40 track drum, or perhaps 44 tracks, so it could include a parity bit and some tracks for addressing (typically, one track for counting words, and a track holding a start mark so it could tell where on each revolution the word count should be reset to zero).

Low-end computers in the 1950s frequently used drum memory as their main memory. By modern standards, these were very strange computers and contributed little to the main line of development that led to modern computers, but because they were inexpensive, these machines were frequently the first computer to be used at many universities, and thus, many first-generation programmers learned to program on them. At the University of Iowa, for example, the first two computers on campus appear to have been LGP-30 computers purchased by the Chemistry department in 1958 for $25,000 each.

File systems on drum computers had yet to be developed, but subroutine libraries typically included routines to read in a block n words of data in from drum address d to main memory address m, or to write a block of data back out to the drum. Clever programmers could use these to move subroutines or data structures out of main memory when they were not needed, reading them back in only when needed. This was called overlay management, and it was very difficult to get it right.

The 1960s

During the 1960s, the major developments in computer architecture were condition codes, byte addressing, memory management units, and various forms of parallel processing. Parallel processing ranged from attaching multiple co-equal CPUs to a single memory to the use of dedicated small general purpose processors for input-output to the use of special purpose coprocessors. The first graphics coprocessors emerged in this era, but the most common use of coprocessors was to speed input-output to the newly developed high performance moving-head disk drives.

The first real operating systems emerged in the 1960s. Some of these were very crude. The acronym DOS, standing for disk operating system, first emerged in this era.

A typical DOS involved just one change to the tape operating system described above. The system subroutine library included a file system, so that programs could use a disk drive as if it were multiple tape drives, where disk files each had textual names. The command language interpreter could read commands from a disk file, launch programs from disk files, and for each program launched, tell it what files to use.

In the DOS era, tapes were used for backups and for files that were too large to fit on the relatively small disk drives of the era.

The first networking efforts emerged in this era, and the dial-up modem came into being -- typically, dial-up access was at 110 baud for electromechanical Teletype terminals, but the first generation of modems were designed to work at up to 300 baud. The Bell System (the near-monopoly national telephone company) developed the 1.544 megabit/second T1 data link starting in 1957; T1 links were deeply connected with the development of a transcontinental television network in the United States, and a single television channel could be carried on a T1 link. By the end of the 1960s, T1 links came into use for the first computer networks.

Memory Management Units

Memory management units were introduced very early in the 1960s by Feranti corporation of England on their Atlas computer. The Atlas system had paged virtual memory, and the Atlas operating system used it for both memory protection and to create the illusion of a large address space implemented using a relatively small main memory and what was, at the time, a large magnetic drum.

In 1966, IBM announced a computer, the IBM System 360 model 67, that supported this technology, but they had serious difficulty developing an operating system for this machine. As a result, several manufacturers came to market first, including Scientific Data Systems (the SDS 940), General Electric (the GE 600) and Digital Equipment Corporation (the PDP-10). All of the latter virtual memory systems were built by customers (the University of California at Berkeley, MIT and Bolt, Beraneck and Newman), but were then sold commercially by these companies.

Memory management units required real operating systems. The University of California at Berkeley developed the Berkeley Timesharing System for the SDS 940. General Electric, in conjunction with Bell Labs and MIT developed Multics for the GE 600, and BB&N developed TENEX for the PDP-10. IBMs first attempt at an operating system for the 360/67, TSS 360, was a failure. They never got it working (Carnegie-Mellon University, which had purchased a 360/67 on order, took delivery on the broken TSS/360 software and eventually got it to work). IBM's followup, the System 370 with the VM operating system, however, was very successful in the 1970s and is still being sold as the primary operating system for IBM's enterprise-server class of machines.

Multics

Multics was, undoubtedly, the single most important operating system developed in the 1960s. The name Multics stood for MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service. After Honeywell bought GE's computer division, it became the flagship operating system of the H 6000 series of mainframes, the successor to the GE 600. Multics introduced the following ideas:

  1. A hierarchic file system. Each user had a home directory, with their own subdirectories hanging from that home directory.
  2. Access control lists for files.
  3. The idea of a computer utility, where anyone could subscribe. Today, we call these ISPs and cloud computing services.
  4. Multiple levels of protection, so that lower level parts of the operating system were protected from upper level parts, which were protected from user programs.
  5. Opening a file being the same as loading the contents of that file as a memory segment.

Multics also built on some ideas that first came to market in the Berkeley Timesharing System, including

  1. Separate virtual address spaces for each user
  2. The ability to share memory segments between users

Multics was definitely not modern in some ways: The GE 600 and the H 6000 had 36-bit words, and the machine supported two character sets, GE's 6-bit code, packed 6 characters per word, and 7-bit ASCII. Five 7-bit characters could be packed into 35 bits (leaving the sign bit unused) or each 7-bit character could be padded out to 9 bits, packing 4 characters per word. The former made more efficient use of memory, while the latter was easier for programmers and led to people experimenting with the various extensions to the ASCII character set.

The 1970s

What most of the world saw in the 1970s computer market was a steep plunge in the price of computing. This actually began with the introduction of minicomputers in the 1960s, with the least expensive general purpose computer systems selling for under $10,000 by 1970, but the trend quickly accelerated, until by the mid 1970s, a fully functional microcomputer kit could be purchased for under $1000 in kit form (the Altair 8800).

When Bell Labs quit the Multics project, two of the programmers who'd worked on that project, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, decided to take some of the best ideas they'd encountered in Multics and scale them down, building a little operating system suitable for a departmental timesharing system running on a minicomputer. The result was Unix. Even the name is a pun on Multics.

It is fair to say that Unix had only one new idea -- the SUID and SGID bits on files. These bits were novel enough that they were patented, as US Patent 4,135,240. Everything else had been done before. What Unix did was do all of it better, integrating a number of really good ideas from multiple sources (mostly Multics and the Berkeley Timesharing System) into one system and doing it very well.

Another system from the 1970s is largely forgotten outside of corporate datacenters. That is VM-370. This is the system that IBM developed out of the ashes of the TSS 360 project on the IBM 360/67 -- specifically, the CP/CMS operating system developed in the very late 1960s by IBM. What VM did that had never been done before is virtualize everything, so that users could run any operating system they wanted as user programs under VM (originally called CP). The idea of being to run, say, the horrible old DOS 360 as a user program on a computer without threatening any other user of that computer was extraordinary. The IBM 360 was the first 32-bit computer of any consequence, and IBM's current 64-bit Enterprise Systems Architecture is compatible with 360 and its successor, the 370.

Networking, introduced in the mid 1960s, became commonplace in thew 1970s. Most of the larger computer science departments were linked by the ARPANET (an experimental defense department network linking research projects funded by ARPA, the defense advanced research projects agency). By the mid 1970s, most university computer centers were linked by BITNET, and as Unix emerged from Bell Labs, most Unix sites joined Usenet, an informal network of Unix sites, originally linked by dial-up lines. E-mail became the "killer app" on all of these early networks.

The 1980s

Personal computers such as the Apple II and the first IBM PCs came with systems that were typical of the early disk operating systems. IBM even called its system PCDOS, and many PC users just called it DOS, as if no other system had ever had this name. Eventually, it emerged that this was a Microsoft product, although IBM originally sold it without this identification. Today, if someone says DOS, people assume that this is a reference to MS-DOS, Microsoft DOS.

In the 1980s, Unix was pried free from Bell Labs and AT&T. The University of California developed BSD Unix, originally under AT&T license, but they reimplemented enough of it that, as time passed, BSD Unix was wrested free of the AT&T license. BSD Unix was the first Unix to make full use of a memory management unit to support virtual memory, and it was the first widely used 32-bit version of the system. (The first Unix system at the University of Iowa was BSD 4.2 running on the CS department's DEC VAX.) Linus Torvalds, a Finnish hacker, developed another Unix clone, Linux, and many manufacturers, under AT&T license, commercialized their own UNIX variants. IBM developed AIX. HP developed HP-UX. Sun developed Solaris.

Unix was adapted to run on multiprocessors by two competing vendors in this decade, Sequent and Encore. In general, Unix worked very well on machines with on the order of 16 CPUs. (The first multiprocessor at the University of Iowa was an Encore Multimax in the computer center.) Earlier operating systems from Burroughs Corporation, the University of Michigan and Carnegie Mellon Univeristy had demonstrated similar performance in earlier decades.

Independently of all this, Carnegie Mellon university developed a system called Mach that was supposed to be used as a replacement kernel for Unix, but was in fact far more. Mach would be seen as an academic curiosity for many years, but eventually, BSD was rebuilt around large parts of Mach, and eventually, Apple would chose Mach as the foundation for MacOS X.

Window managers, first developed in the 1970s at SRI and Xerox PARC, came into maturity in the 1980s. Window managers don't need to rest on sophisticated operating system technology. Prior to Windows NT and 95 from Microsoft and MacOS X from Apple, the dominant commercial window managers sat on top of rather primitive disk operating systems. In contrast, however, X windows from MIT, developed under BSD Unix, took complete advantage of the available operating system technology. X remains the dominant window manager on Unix and related platforms to this day, with the exception of MacOS.

In the early 1980s, mail gateways were installed between the existing computer networks, creating serious headaches that were resolved later in the decade by the creation of the Internet, a generalization of the old ARPANET. By this time, operating systems such as Unix provided a good suite of network access primitives, and for most of the decade, the most common Internet servers were Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX computers running BSD Unix.

The 1980s may have been a low point in operating systems research. The traditional explanation of the purpose of an operating system was to multiplex scarce computing resources between multiple users. With the advent of personal computers, many people asked why we bother with operating systems. Many applications written for personal computers in the 1980s completely ignored the rudimentary operating systems of the era and directly operated on hardware resources. Security was widely seen as a non-issue with personal computers. If you can lock your computer in an office, that is enough security.

There was even a directive from the National Science Foundation stating that research leading to new and incompatible operating system architectures was discouraged. The rationalle was, apparently, that the market demanded compatibility and there was no longer any justification to explore alternatives because the market would never adopt them. Bob Pike at Bell Labs gave a good summary of this era in his polemic System Software Research is Irrelevant.

The 1990s

In the 1990s, the personal computing field finally rose above the level of DOS. Windows NT emerged when Microsoft bought the ashes of DEC's VAX VMS operating system development group. Windows 95 was a reaction to this, but both are real operating systems in the sense that emerged in the 1960s. MacOS X is another solid operating sysem to reach the desktop in this era. These systems were finally mature enough to incorporate decent support for virtual memory and network connectivity. All modern versions of Microsoft's operating systems trace their lineage from Windows NT.

By the end of the 1990s, the operating systems running on typical desktop computers were as complex as any mainframe operating system of the 1960s. Essentially all of the innovative ideas from systems such as Multics were to be found on desktop and laptop computers, complete with full support for networking and window management.

As Microsoft reached its 20th birthday, they finally began to realize that most users of their systems were using one or another network technolgy, and even floppy disks and other removable media poses serious security problems. In 1995, Microsoft officially "embraced" the Internet.

The 2000s

As with the minicomputer revolution and the microcomputer revolutions before, the mobile communications revolution created a wide open niche in which, at least initially, competition flourished. Initially, each cellphone and PDA vendor based their product on proprietary systems, but as the market grew and the function of PDAs and Cellphones began to merge, two systems emerged as the primary competitors in this new niche, Windows CE and Android.

Neither of these represents any kind of revolutionary new approach to operating systems. Windows CE is a direct descendant of Windows, freed from dependency on the Intel x86 family and stripped of the baggage of "integration" with a full suite of office productivity tools. Android, in turn, is based on Linux, stripped of the assumption that the shell or a window manager will be the primary application launchers.

A third thread has woven into both of these systems, and that is the desire of many major players to lock down the system, controlling what applications the user is permitted to launch, what files the user is permitted to store, and where control is not possible, allowing for pervasive monitoring of the actions taken by users of mobile platforms. This has led to innvations such as trusted platform monitors, but it also raises serious questions about the relationship between operating system developers and civil liberties. Is it ethical for programmers to write code that permits pervasive surveilance of cellphone users? Probably not.

As Internet connectivity improved, security became a growing problem. In 2002, Bill Gates said "When we face a choice between adding features and resolving security issues, we need to choose security." Prior to this, one of Microsoft's primary market strategies was to push new features into the market in order to shut out the competition. The security cost of this strategy was huge, and with such an embedded culture of pushing features into the world, this was not an easy transition.

The 2010s

Server farms at large corporations have existed since the 1990s, and in the 2000s, outsourcing of computing service became a significant business sector. In the 2010s, the term cloud computing came to be applied to outsourced computing services. Just as the developers of Multics had envisioned, sale of computing services has become one of the dominant models of computing, with everyone from large corporations to individuals buying cloud services.

Cloud computing puts a high premium on virtualization because the cloud service provider must be able to swap out hardware without the user noticing. This requires the ability to move a running application from one machine to another without the user noticing. While users of cloud services may see a Linux or Windows system, this system is almost always running on a virtual machine on top of a lower level and frequently proprietary cloud operating system. These systems are extremely important assets for the larger cloud providers such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft.