Detailed · 16 events
A History of Operating Systems
1960s
01 events
Unknown (via Jargon File, Wikimedia Commons) · Public Domain · Commons ↗ Having left the Multics project, Ken Thompson at AT&T Bell Labs began writing a small timesharing system on an idle PDP-7. Initially an experiment for one user, it gained a second when Dennis Ritchie joined; in 1970 it was named UNICS (later UNIX). Its rewrite in the C language (1972) gave it portability, and the operating-system lineage that followed has dominated the next half-century. Linux, macOS, Android, and iOS all descend from it.
- Related people
- Ken Thompson · Dennis Ritchie
- Related organizations
- Bell Labs
- Appears in
- A General History of Information Technology · A History of Open Source and Free Software
1970s
01 eventsGary Kildall's disk operating system for the Intel 8080. Commercialised through Digital Research in the late 1970s, CP/M became the de facto standard OS of the 8-bit microcomputer market. When IBM went to pick an OS for the IBM PC in 1981, CP/M was its first stop; the talks failed, and the alternative—Microsoft's MS-DOS—became the standard of the PC-clone world. CP/M is therefore one of the great branch points in computing history.
1980s
03 eventsMicrosoft adapted 86-DOS (formerly QDOS), which it had bought from Seattle Computer Products, and shipped it as PC DOS 1.0 with the IBM PC. Crucially, Microsoft retained the right to sell the same software, as MS-DOS, to any other compatible-machine manufacturer. Bill Gates' licensing strategy here produced the next fifteen years of PC OS dominance.
- Related people
- Bill Gates
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation · International Business Machines (IBM)
- Appears in
- A General History of Information Technology · A History of Microsoft
Apple introduced the Macintosh, bringing the graphical user interface invented at Xerox PARC—windows, icons, mouse—to a US$2,495 mass-market price. After the commercial failure of the more expensive Lisa the year before, Apple deliberately moved the balance of simplicity versus extensibility hard toward the former. The Ridley Scott Super Bowl ad introducing it has its own place in television history.
- Related people
- Steve Jobs
- Related organizations
- Apple Inc.
- Appears in
- A General History of Information Technology
Microsoft's first graphical environment, running on top of MS-DOS. Tiled (not overlapping) windows, limited colour, and a thin application library—the reviews were unkind, but it was the start of Microsoft's decade of sustained GUI investment that led to Windows 95. It lagged the Macintosh by one year and ten months.
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation
- Appears in
- A History of Microsoft
1990s
03 eventsOverlapping windows, the Program Manager, virtual-memory management, full VGA colour. Diverging from the OS/2 line being co-developed with IBM, Windows 3.0 went to market as an independent DOS-hosted GUI and sold two million copies in six months. It was the turning point at which Microsoft broke from the IBM joint venture and set out on its own.
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation
- Appears in
- A History of Microsoft
Lukas Schulze / SPORTSFILE (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 2.0 · Commons ↗ Linus Torvalds, then a student at the University of Helsinki, posted to comp.os.minix: "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)." The first sources ran to about 10,000 lines, indebted to Minix but written as an independent kernel. Released under the GPL in 1992, it grew through contributions from developers worldwide; by 2026, Linux is the kernel at the core of most of the world's servers, smartphones, and supercomputers.
- Related people
- Linus Torvalds
- Appears in
- A General History of Information Technology · A History of Open Source and Free Software
Microsoft (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (logo, below threshold of originality) · Commons ↗ 32-bit preemptive multitasking, long file names, plug-and-play, and—most lastingly—the Start menu and taskbar. For many people the image of 'what a PC is' was set by this product. The campaign built around the Rolling Stones' 'Start Me Up' and the midnight launches drew lines around the block; the PC had become a household appliance. Seven million copies were sold in the first week.
- Related people
- Bill Gates
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation
- Appears in
- A General History of Information Technology · A History of Microsoft
2000s
03 eventsThe release that replaced Apple's Classic Mac OS with the descendant of NeXTSTEP—the Mach-microkernel-plus-BSD UNIX environment Steve Jobs had developed at NeXT after leaving Apple in 1985, and brought back through Apple's 1996 acquisition of NeXT. It gave the Mac UNIX-derived robustness and process separation, and laid the foundation for the Aqua UI, iOS, and modern macOS.
- Related people
- Steve Jobs
- Related organizations
- Apple Inc.
The first shipping device—HTC Dream, sold in the US as the T-Mobile G1—running the OS Google had acquired with the 2005 purchase of Android Inc. A Linux kernel, a Java VM (later replaced by the Android Runtime), and a custom UI stack: Google's strategy of supplying an open-source smartphone OS was the inverse of Apple's, and over the next decade and a half grew into an ecosystem accounting for more than 70% of the world's smartphones.
- Related organizations
- Appears in
- A General History of Information Technology · A History of Mobile Phones and Smartphones
Rafael Fernandez / TheGoldenBox (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons ↗ Unveiled by Steve Jobs at Macworld in January 2007, the iPhone went on sale in the United States on June 29 of the same year. By dropping the physical keyboard in favour of capacitive multi-touch and putting an OS X-derived operating system on a phone, the device rewrote the grammar of the product category that would later be called the smartphone.
- Related people
- Steve Jobs
- Related organizations
- Apple Inc.
- Related products
- iPhone
- Related terms
- Multi-touch
- Appears in
- A General History of Information Technology · A History of the iPhone · A History of Mobile Phones and Smartphones
2020s
05 events
Microsoft (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (below threshold of originality; trademark applies) · Commons ↗ Despite Microsoft's 2015 statement that Windows 10 would be 'the last Windows', the company released a major successor after a six-year gap. The UI was refreshed: a centred Start menu, rounded windows, Snap Layouts, Android app support. As a hard requirement, Windows 11 required TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot, putting hundreds of millions of older PCs outside official support and on a path toward Windows 10's October 2025 end of life. The use of hardware requirements to force users to upgrade has been controversial.
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation
Dbeef / 0xDeadbeef (Wikimedia Commons) · CC0 1.0 (Public domain dedication) · Commons ↗ Linus Torvalds merged initial Rust support into the Linux 6.1 release. Since 1973, the Linux kernel had effectively been C-only; this was the historic moment at which Rust—with its memory-safety guarantees—was formally admitted into kernel development. Expansion began with device drivers and, from 2024, accelerated into Apple Silicon GPU drivers, NVMe, and filesystem layers. The transition was not smooth: in 2024 the so-called 'Rust for Linux' conflict pitted some conservative C maintainers against Rust advocates—a symbol of a generational shift in the software culture around language choice.
- Related people
- Linus Torvalds
- Appears in
- A History of Programming Languages · A History of Open Source and Free Software
Apple Inc. (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (below threshold of originality; trademark applies) · Commons ↗ Apple released macOS 15 'Sequoia' alongside iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, all carrying 'Apple Intelligence'. Summarisation, rewriting, image generation, and a strengthened Siri ran on-device on A17 Pro / M-series silicon and beyond, with selected workloads handled by dedicated Apple servers (Private Cloud Compute). Integration with ChatGPT was bundled. The release marked the moment the centre of OS work shifted from 'add features' to 'embed AI in every context of the OS'. In the EU, tensions with the Digital Markets Act delayed parts of Apple Intelligence.
- Related organizations
- Apple Inc.
Microsoft (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (below threshold of originality; trademark applies) · Commons ↗ Microsoft introduced Copilot+ PC—a new PC category requiring an NPU of at least 40 TOPS—alongside on-device AI features. More than twenty devices from Surface, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, ASUS, and Samsung launched together on 18 June, starting with the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite (45 TOPS). The headline feature, Recall, captured a screenshot of the user's screen every five seconds, OCR'd and embedded it, and stored it in a local SQLite database for natural-language search. Ten days after the launch, former Microsoft threat-intelligence analyst Kevin Beaumont disassembled the preview and showed the database was a plaintext SQLite file readable in two lines of code—and that passwords were among the captured content. Recall slipped the June launch, was reworked behind a VBS enclave with mandatory Windows Hello authentication and opt-in default, and re-released to Windows Insiders on 22 November 2024. The opening of the AI-PC era—and a demonstration of how difficult on-device-AI privacy design is.
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation
- Appears in
- A History of Microsoft
Microsoft (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (below threshold of originality; trademark applies) · Commons ↗ Microsoft formally ended free support for Windows 10, ten years and three months after its July 2015 release. Security updates ended; consumers could pay US$30 per year for Extended Security Updates, or use a free path through 2027 conditional on a Microsoft account and OneDrive sync. At end of support, an estimated 30–40% of the Windows install base was still on Windows 10. Debate intensified over the environmental cost of hundreds of millions of PCs that could not be upgraded to Windows 11 because of hardware requirements. The transition exposed that an OS major-version change is not a UI cosmetic but a generator of large-scale electronic waste.
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation
- Appears in
- A General History of Information Technology