history

[kerome]

history of operating systerms

 

[user24]

what about the history of operating systems?

*sigh*

IBM used to produce computers with PC-DOS built-in, it was a simple 'disk operating system' that was text based. they hired a small company called microsoft to develop DOS further. microsoft sucked ibm's cash away and developed their own operating system; windows. the partnership broke up, but windows was getting more and more popular. IBM were ****** off

windows 1 and 2 were really poor looking - see http://home.pmt.org/~drose/aw-win3x-42.html for further info.

windows 3.11 marked a big change for MS; it offered network support, and with it came market share.

windows 98 sucked ass but looked pretty, 98se fixed many of the bugs in win98.

up until this point, every one of microsoft's operating systems still relied on MS-DOS, in fact, they were really just a pretty front end for it.

windows NT was different; it re-worked a lot of the core arcitecture of ms-dos, and was the closest thing MS had to a 'real' operating system. it reckoned it was secure (but wasn't) has good network support (kind of) and was ideal for servers (no) in short, NT had a great underlying technology - the NT operating system, but the usability and implementation was really poor.

enter windows 2000. 'built on NT technology' - it used the same basic code as NT, but fixed most of the problems NT had. also introduced were NTFS - a secure filesystem, and EFS - on the fly encryption. win2k adds so much to the windows family, I think it's the best they've done yet.

further versions of windows, I know next to nothing about.

Also, remember that MS were nowhere near the first to use graphical user interfaces; apple had a more advanced GUI way before windows 1. and don't forget unix...