Today I'm going to explain the history and evolution of operating system. This definition is very easy and best on the whole internet. Firstly you understand what is operating system. A user of a computer system interacts directly with an application software program for his purposeful task. The task works over a platform, which is the operating system.

The operating system is system software that may be viewed as an organized collection of software consisting of procedures for operating a computer and providing an environment for execution of programs. The operating system may process its workload serially or concurrently i.e resources of the computer system may be dedicated to a single program until its completion it may be dynamically allocated among the number of active processes in the different stages of execution.

The operating system hides the hardware level activities and functionalities from the user and presents a simpler view of the user in the form of an interface. It also conceals a lot of internal activities from the user like as interrupts, timers, memory management and other low level features.

Some examples are

Windows Vista
Windows XP
MS-DOS
OS/2
Unix
Windows 98

History and Evolution of operating system

The history and evolution of operating system can be viewed in relation to the history of computer system over the time. The computer system evolution has been broadly classified into five generations, which also led to the development of operating systems as per need and demand of users.

There is divided into six parts -

Zero Generation
First Generation ( 1942-1955 ) - Vacuum Tubes
Second Generation ( 1955-1964 ) - Transistors and Batch Systems
Third Generation ( 1964-1975 ) - ICs and Multiprogramming
Fourth Generation (1975-1989) - very large scale integration and microprocessor
Fifth Generation (1989 - Present ) - Artificial Intelligence

Detail information about history and evolution are following :-

Zero Generation

Charles Babbage was English mathematician, designed the first digital computer using wheels, gear etc.
But the machine so developed was slow and unreliable and did not have an operating system.

First Generation ( 1942-1955 ) - Vacuum Tubes

The mechanical design of earlier generation changed to electronic design using the vacuum tubes.
The machines this formed were huge and generated lot of heat during running.
Till this time, switches were used to feed a calculation for each word, the counter was set to the first word and a start button was pressed to get the output in the form of lights and bulbs.

Neither any operating system not any programming language was used.

Second Generation ( 1955-1964 ) - Transistors and Batch Systems

In 1955, Transistors were introduced in the USA at AT & T.
The machines using these transistors used switches for feeding input and light and bulbs for output as before.
The operation of pressing several switches for each word was very time consuming. So, idea of batch processing was introduces.
Jobs were now supplied in the form of batches which improved the performance of the machines.

Third Generation ( 1964-1975 ) - ICs and Multiprogramming

IBM announced system/360 series of computers in 1964. The interrupts were developed. Single stream batch processing changed to Batch multiprogramming.
A series of jobs were loaded in one go, which were processed one by one by the processor. If the processor needed to wait for input -output device response for a mob it could in the meanwhile process another job.
This, the concepts of foreground and background processes were developed.
IBM also provided utilities such as simulators and emulators to enable old software to be run on IBM 360 family of computers.
But it was found that operating system of large machine created problems when run on small machines and also the operating system of small machine were ineffective on large machine.
So, IBM delivered four operating system within same range of computers. There were some examples are :

DOS / 360 for small 360 systems
OS / MFT for the medium 360 systems
OS / MVT for the bigger 360 systems
CP - 67 / CMS for the powerful 360/67, using virtual storage.

Thus the concept of family of computers and operating systems evolved .
The spooling concept was developed during this period
The concept of time sharing and multi -programming was enhanced giving rise to another popular operating system called MULTICS( multiplexing information and computing service).

Fourth Generation ( 1975-1989 ) - very large scale integration and microprocessor

With this technology thousands could be packaged modules like Adders, Multiplexers, Decoders and variety of other digital circuits.
Intel 8080, chip the first general purpose 8-bit CPU evolved and CP/M ( Control Program for Microcomputers ) the first disk based operating system was designed for systems using these chips.
Later when IBM PC was designed, MS - DOS ( Microsoft - Disk Operating System ) was added to these systems. In the late 1980's many GUI based operating systems evolved like MS - WINDOWS.

Fifth Generation ( 1989 - Present ) - Artificial Intelligence

This generation is still evolving and the computers in this generation use GUI operating systems.
The concept of AI ( Artificial Intelligence ) is being used. Embedded Operating System like: QNX and VxWorks have evolved.
They are used in network infrastructure hardware equipment.

Operating system divided into various parts like single user operating system, multi user operating system, single tasking operating system, multi tasking operating system, multi programming operating system, single processing operating system, multi processing operating system, multi threading operating system, time sharing operating system, online operating system and batch processing operating system.

Conclusion :- In this post I will try to cover complete information related history and evolution of operating system. In this we are discuss what is operating system and zero generation, first generation, second generation, third generation , fourth generation, fifth generation. I hope you have learned reading to this post. If you like this post then share with your friends and you can comment any of your doubts and i will replay then at the earliest.

Thanks.

Detail information about History and evolution of operating system | 6 generation