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Early operating systems were very diverse, with each vendor or customer producing one or more operating systems specific to their particular mainframe computer. Every operating system, even from the same vendor, could have radically different models of commands, operating procedures, and such facilities as debugging aids.
This article presents a timeline of events in the history of computer operating systems from 1951 to the current day. For a narrative explaining the overall developments, see the History of operating systems .
The operating system provides an interface between an application program and the computer hardware, so that an application program can interact with the hardware only by obeying rules and procedures programmed into the operating system. The operating system is also a set of services which simplify development and execution of application programs.
Unix was an early operating system which became popular and very influential, and still exists today. The most popular variant of Unix today is macOS (previously called OS X and Mac OS X), while Linux is closely related to Unix.
POSIX became the unifying standard for Unix systems (and some other operating systems). [46] Meanwhile, the BSD world saw its own developments. The group at Berkeley moved its operating system toward POSIX compliance and released a stripped-down version of its networking code, supposedly without any code that was the property of AT&T.
MS-DOS (acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft.Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and some operating systems attempting to be compatible with MS-DOS, are sometimes referred to as "DOS" (which is also the generic acronym for disk operating system).
Microsoft Windows is a computer operating system developed by Microsoft. It was first launched in 1985 as a graphical operating system built on MS-DOS. The initial version was followed by several subsequent releases, and by the early 1990s, the Windows line had split into two separate lines of releases: Windows 9x for consumers and Windows NT ...
Also presented is a timeline of events in the history of the 8-bit 8080-based and 16-bit x86-based CP/M operating systems from 1974 to 2014, as well as the hardware and software developments from 1973 to 1995 which formed the foundation for the initial version and subsequent enhanced versions of these operating systems.