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1st gen. Vacuum valves
Computers used to use vacuum valves to process information. -
MARK I
One of the first programs to run on the Mark I was initiated on 29 March 1944 by John von Neumann.
At that time, von Neumann was working on the Manhattan project, and needed to determine whether implosion was a viable choice to detonate the atomic bomb that would be used a year later. The Mark I also computed and printed mathematical tables, which had been the initial goal of British inventor Charles Babbage for his "analytical engine". -
ENIAC
ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was amongst the earliest electronic general-purpose computers made. It was Turing-complete, digital and able to solve "a large class of numerical problems" through reprogramming. Although ENIAC was designed and primarily used to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory, its first programs included a study of the feasibility of the thermonuclear weapon. -
UNIVAC I
The Universal Automatic Computer I was the first commercial computer produced in the United States. It was designed principally by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the inventors of the ENIAC.
The 5th machine was used by CBS to predict the result of the 1952 presidential election. With a sample of just 1% of the voting population it famously predicted an Eisenhower landslide. -
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2nd gen. Transistors
Transistors made computers smaller and faster. We can still find them in most electronic devices.
Two new programming languages: Fortran and Cobol.
OS become indispensable to manage the complexity of the new computers.
OS-360 was one of the most common OSs ever made. -
Fortran
Fortran (derived from Formula Translation) is a general-purpose, programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. Originally developed by IBM for scientific and engineering applications, it has been in continuous use for over half a century in computationally intensive areas such as numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, computational physics, crystallography and computational chemistry -
Cobol
COBOL is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. was designed in 1959 by CODASYL and was partly based on previous programming language design work by Grace Hopper, commonly referred to as "the (grand)mother of COBOL" (see picture).
COBOL has an English-like syntax, which was designed to be self-documenting and highly readable. -
OS-360
OS/360, officially known as IBM System/360 Operating System, is a discontinued batch processing operating system developed by IBM for their then-new System/360 mainframe computer, announced in 1964; it was heavily influenced by the earlier IBSYS/IBJOB and Input/Output Control System (IOCS) packages. It was one of the earliest operating systems to require the computer hardware to include at least one direct access storage device. -
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3rd gen. Integrated circuits
With integrated circuits computers became smaller and more powerful, allowing minicomputers, multiprogramming and multiprocessing to arise. -
Multiprocessing
The first computer using a multiprogramming system was the British Leo III owned by J. Lyons and Co. During batch processing, several different programs were loaded in the computer memory, and the first one began to run. When the first program reached an instruction waiting for a peripheral, the context of this program was stored away, and the second program in memory was given a chance to run. The process continued until all programs finished running. -
Minicomputers
A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a class of smaller computers that was developed in the mid-1960s and sold for much less than mainframe and mid-size computers from IBM and its direct competitors. In a 1970, the New York Times defined a minicomputer as a machine costing less than US$25,000, with an input-output device such as a teleprinter and at least four thousand words of memory, that is capable of running programs in a higher level language, such as Fortran or BASIC. -
UNIX
Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie created the Unix operating system in Bell labs. It is one of the most powerful systems and it has become the foundations for GNU/Linux and MacOS. -
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4th gen. Microprocessors
1st microprocessors, a big step forward in technology evolution. They are the central processing unit in current computers.
1st network and distributed operating were developed. -
CP / M
1st standarized OS: CP/M
CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created for Intel 8080/85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. Initially confined to single-tasking on 8-bit processors and no more than 64 kilobytes of memory, later versions of CP/M added multi-user variations and were migrated to 16-bit processors. -
Network and distributed operating systems
Early microcomputer operating systems such as CP/M, DOS and classic Mac OS were designed for one user on one computer. As local area network technology became available, two general approaches to handle sharing arose: peer-to-peer and client-server.
A distributed operating system is a software over a collection of independent, networked, communicating, and physically separate computational nodes. -
MS-DOS
MS-DOS (acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System) is a discontinued operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. MS-DOS was the main operating system for IBM PC compatible personal computers during the 1980s and the early 1990s, when it was gradually superseded by operating systems offering a graphical user interface (GUI), in various generations of the graphical Microsoft Windows operating system. -
GNU/Linux distros
Linux is the kernel which gives name to the OS, while the actual name of the OS is GNU (GNU's not UNIX), therefore this branch of OS should be known as GNU/Linux.
Several forks of them have arisen: Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, LinuxMint, etc. evolving ones from the others as forks. -
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5th gen. Microelectronics
The development of microelectronics allows the commercialization of personal computers. There is a new software industry and graphical operating systems are a must. -
Mac OS
The family of Macintosh operating systems developed by Apple Inc. includes the graphical user interface-based operating systems it has designed for use with its Macintosh series of personal computers, as well as the related system software it once created for compatible third-party systems.
Noted for its ease of use, it was also criticized for its lack of modern technologies compared to its competitors. -
MS Windows
Microsoft Windows, or simply Windows, is a group of several graphical operating system families, all of which are developed, marketed, and sold by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry.
Windows 1.0
Windows 3.x (picture)
Windows 9x
Windows (NT) XP
Windows (NT) Vista
Windows (NT) 7
Windows (NT) 8 and 8.1
Windows (NT) 10 -
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6th gen. Parallel architectures
Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or the execution of processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different forms of parallel computing: bit-level, instruction-level, data, and task parallelism. Parallelism has been employed for many years, mainly in high-performance computing. -
Mobile operating systems
A mobile operating system is an OS for phones, tablets, smartwatches, or other mobile devices. While computers such as typical laptops are 'mobile', the operating systems usually used on them are not considered mobile ones, as they were originally designed for desktop computers that historically did not have or need specific mobile features. This distinction is becoming blurred in some newer operating systems that are hybrids made for both uses.
In 2007 the world meets Android and iOS.
