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Operating systems almost forty years agoOperating systems almost forty years agoPosted Aug 11, 2007 17:28 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)Parent article: Quotes of the week
the reason operating systems still basically look 100% the same today as they did almost forty years ago, is that that is simply a very practical arrangement! He means operating systems that are ancestors of Linux. If you consider all operating systems, or the ones that were most visible then, operating systems almost forty years ago looked quite different. One popular operating system almost forty years ago was VM/370, which looked a lot more like the current virtualization efforts than like classic Linux. The most popular operating system almost forty years ago was MVS, which is closer than VM/370 to what Linux is, but still only barely capable of doing interactive work and designed to be managed by a human operator. Considering that even Linux's ancestors where doing a rather different job -- running on physical machines that could not be made smaller and supporting multiple shell-level users -- it's hard to see how what was a practical arrangement then could have any bearing on what makes sense now.
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