Per hapse we should clarify what an operating system is
as I detect confusion afoot. Operating systems are nothing more
than rules for doing tasks. The terminology is modern, but
operating systems have been with us for centuries even though we
didn't use those words.
The early computers had operating systems dictated by
hardware. Some of the early programs were plugs in jacks that
rearranged the components of the system so that they multiplied
numbers together or maybe they did repeated subtractions which
is one way to simulate division.
Dartmouth College in Massachusetts had an
electromechanical computer around the year 1920. It was made of
telephone exchange components because the telephone switching
network which, of course was in its infancy during that time,
still did what today we call logical operations. Someone's phone
number is nothing more than a giant logical "and" operation that
ends up connecting your telephone to someone else's phone so
telephony and computing have long been joined at the hip and are
now more like clones of each other.
That computer at Dartmouth certainly had no operating
system as we know it today, but it had an operating system
dictated by what you had to do to get it to do arithmetic.
I don't really know much about that system, but I guess
lamps were probably used to tell which lines were binary 1's and
0's. Not only did you have to get right in to the hardware to
program it, but you had to know how to interpret the blinking
lamps which were the output devices. Knowing the rules for how
it worked is, in itself an operating system.
The term "DOS" just means disk operating system. It can
be anybody's. My first encounter with the term was in 1979 and
it covered Apple's disk drives, CPM which was used on
minicomputers, and then came the IBM P.C. and Microsoft DOS so
operating systems have been with us as long as technology has.
Sarah Alawami writes:
> lol. hey I learned something new as well. I did not know they were
> around since the 70s. Ok. I did not know operating system were around in
> the 70s. but yeah they work well and I have a few in my dropbox folders
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