A Brief History of Operating Systems

A Brief History of Operating Systems#

Learning Objectives#

After working through this topic, you should be able to:

  • describe the basic history of Unix, Linux, MacOS, and Windows

  • appreciate that this history leads to very different behaviour of the operating systems

Materials#

Here is screencast an. These are the slides.

Additional Materials#

  • Nice ars technica article on the history of Unix.

  • Wikipedia has some great resources on all of this, you know your way around that part of the internet. Just want to highlight the page on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). That one is very good and it might not be the first thing you may be looking up.

Optional video#

This video might help interested students to understad the beauty of the Unix operating system, file system and philosophy. Watching it is purely optional!

Quiz#