For some reason a few people have been reading an ancient blog post I wrote about programming languages (similarly titled “Pointless list of programming languages I know better than I should”). It inspired me to trawl the darker corners of my brain, and try to recall the various operating systems I have fought with over the years. TOS/GEM Amiga OS CPM MS-DOS (various versions, from 3.3 onwards) DR-DOS (early and superior competitor to MS-DOS) Microsoft Windows 3, 3.1 and 3.11 Microsoft Windows 95, 98, Me Microsoft Windows NT, 2000 Microsoft Windows XP Microsoft Windows 7 Apple OSX 10.4 onwards Redhat Linux Madrake/Mandriva Linux Fedora Linux Ubuntu Linux Puppy Linux CentOS Linux SuSE Linux Google Chromium Apple iOS Blackberry OS 5 and 6 Android 2.2It’s pretty scary, isn’t it. Perhaps the most interesting thing (for a given value of interesting) might be the story of the major operating systems, and the people behind them; The night Jobs and Wozniak were questioned by the police while selling “Blue Box” phone hacking gadgets from the back of their van. If the policeman had known what he was looking at, history would have changed significantly. The developer of QDOS who sold out to Microsoft without realising they had just signed a deal to supply IBM with an operating system for the first PC, but didn’t actually have anything to sell them The arrival of Apple, building their empire on the idiocy of Xerox who had the world in their hands in the 1970s, and let it all fall through their fingers. They invented the mouse, windows, scaleable type, and laser printers The rise to power of Microsoft, who stole from everybody else, built inferior software to everybody else, but marketed better than anybody else (there’s also a pretty funny story about Bill Gates running amok with construction machinery in the dead of night back in the early days). The open source movement, which grew out of the commercialisation of Unix, and the anger of a small band of dedicated, talented and very determined software developers. A student from Finland called Linus Torvalds who wrote an experimental operating system kernel, and laid the seeds for Linux, Android, and almost every embedded device created over the last 15 years.
In reality there are too many stories to begin listing. The story of how we ended up here is long, unexpected at times, and unbelievable at others. There are also a number of great books charting the storyhere’s a few; Accidental Empires by Robert X Cringely Hackers by Stephen Levy iWoz by Steve Wozniak What Just Happened by James Gleick Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner