History of Operating Systems, A

Operating systems have been evolving through the years. In this excerpt from his book, Modern Operating Systems, Andrew Tanenbaum briefly looks at a few of the highlights. Since operating systems have historically been closely tied to the architecture of the computers on which they run, Dr. Tanenbaum looks at successive generations of computers to see what their operating systems were like. This mapping of operating system generations to computer generations is crude, but it does provide some structure where there would otherwise be none.