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The history of operating systems is closely related to the development of computer technology. Current monster OSes like Windows Server 2003, Solaris 10, AIX 6 and Linux 2.6 like (Suse 10, RHEL 5,etc) would be impossible without tremendous increase in the capabilities of the computers for the last 50 years.
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1950s:
1954. IBM 650 -- one of the first commercial vacuum-tubes based programmable computers that was used in pseudo time-sharing mode. On IBM650, users were actually given a block of time and could run their programs, see what went wrong, fix it and try again. It was really fascinating... See Knuth Biographic Notes
Late 50th. First semiconductor-based computers.
Early 1960s:
Late 1960s:
1970s:
Late 70th.
Early 1980's: .
Mid to Late 1980's:
Early 1990's:
Mid to Late 1990's:
2000:
Operating systems history reveals that the role of Microsoft as an innovator in OS design was/is minimal, but does exist. Of course Microsoft proved to be mostly great player in popularizing of somebody else (ripe for commercialization) concepts, but still it has several contributions of its own. Moreover few people now know that Microsoft developed one of the influential Unix early Unix flavors (Xenix) and in late 80th and early 90th greatly contributed to the diversity and low prices of the software on Unix as well as the creation of such projects as FreeBSD and, especially, Linux. Xenix was the most democratic Unix of the time and the only decent Unix implementation that run even on PC 286 reasonably well. Paradoxically when Linux for ideological reasons became a flagship of the anti-Microsoft movement it was IBM (previous incarnation of the computer Satan ;-) who served as Linux main backer.
From the links below one it's also quite clear that Linux is not an innovative OS as many proponents of open source claim, but can be considered as a rather conservative reimplementation on traditional System V Unix.
I would also like to pay attention to VM/CMS and other VM based OSes -- a branch of OS development with great and unrealized potential. VMware are probably the latest and greatest in this line of OSes and it's definitely distinct from the plain vanilla Unix reimplementation like Linux.
Dr. Nikolai Bezroukov
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Slashdot
I remember.... (Score:4, Interesting)
by jolyonr :I remember going to a big computer show in early 1990 up in Birmingham. This was just before the Windows 3.0 announcement, so the Microsoft booth had a secret area inside it where they were showing the product to invited guests. As a dedicated Amiga fanatic at the time, I wasn't entirely impressed with it - however I did go back and recommend to my employer at the time (BP - no I don't work for them any more) that they should start looking into Windows again (we'd discounted Windows 2.x for widespread deployment).
Commodore used the same show to preview the Amiga 3000 computer, which was far more exciting to me, and I put my order in a couple of days after!
Reading comprehension FAIL! (Score:2)
by the_humeister (922869)
AmigaOS was the first truly successful multi-windows system.Before that there was the Apple Lisa.
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In this present age, the Internet is considered the most important means of global communications, and it has truly created a platform for a borderless world. People from all walks of life are making use of the Internet to perform a wide variety of activities, both work-related and recreational. The Internet has become so accessible and efficient today because of a lot of developments that took place in the past. Here is a timeline to give you a better understanding of the history of the Internet.
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Hobbes' Internet Timeline Copyright (c)1993-2006 by Robert H Zakon. Permission is granted for use of this document in whole or in part for non-commercial purposes as long as this Copyright notice and a link to this document, at the archive listed at the end, is included. A copy of the material the Timeline appears in is requested. For commercial uses, please contact the author first. Links to this document are welcome after e-mailing the author with the document URL where the link will appear. As the Timeline is frequently updated, copies to other locations on the Internet are not permitted.
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November 10, 2007 | Jos Kirps's Popular Science and Technology Blog
This is extraordinary news for all nerds, computer scientists and the Open Source community: the source code of the MULTICS operating system (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service), the father of UNIX and all modern OSes, has finally been opened.
Multics was an extremely influential early time-sharing operating system started in 1964 and introduced a large number of new concepts, including dynamic linking and a hierarchical file system. It was extremely powerful, and UNIX can in fact be considered to be a "simplified" successor to MULTICS (the name "Unix" is itself a hack on "Multics"). The last running Multics installation was shut down on October 31, 2000.
From now on, MULTICS can be downloaded from the following page (it's the complete MR12.5 source dumped at CGI in Calgary in 2000, including the PL/1 compiler):
http://web.mit.edu/multics-history
Unfortunately you can't install this on any PC, as MULTICS requires dedicated hardware, and there's no operational computer system today that could run this OS. Nevertheless the software should be considered to be an outstanding source for computer research and scientists. It is not yet know if it will be possible to emulate the required hardware to run the OS.
Special thanks to Tom Van Vleck for his continuous work on www.multicians.org, to the Group BULL including BULL HN Information Systems Inc. for opening the sources and making all this possible, to the folks at MIT for releasing it and to all of those who helped to convince BULL to open this great piece of computer history.
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By the early 1950s, businesses using computers were looking for ways to solve that problem. In 1955, programmers at the General Motors Research Center came up with a solution for their IBM 701 computer: a batch-processing monitor program that let operators put a series of jobs on a single input tape. It was the first step toward a full-scale operating system.
Computer vendors soon offered their own batch monitors. In the early 1960s, they began to add what would become critical operating system features. The Burroughs 5000 Master Control Program offered virtual memory and the ability to run several processes at once. Univac's EXEC I allocated memory, scheduled CPU time and handled I/O requests. IBM's OS/360 allowed the same software to run on a variety of machines.
In 1963, a team at MIT led by Fernando Corbato developed the Compatible Time Sharing System (CTSS), the first practical OS that let several users at once run programs from terminals. Much of that team soon went to work on a far more ambitious OS: Multics, a joint project with General Electric Co. and AT&T Bell Laboratories that would offer a tree-structured file system, a layered structure and many other modern OS features.
AT&T pulled out of the Multics project in 1969. But AT&T programmers Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie began to develop their own scaled-down version of Multics, which they punningly called Unix. Unix was easy to port to new computer architectures and grew popular at universities because AT&T made the Unix source code available for students to study. By the 1980s, Unix had spawned a generation of workstations-and displaced many existing operating systems.
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ZDNet.com
The word "mainframe" originally referred to the physical layout of the IBM System 360 series because the primary CPU was mounted in a separate wiring cabinet or "main frame." Today's mainframe, although a direct descendant of that 360 in terms of software, differs dramatically from it in internal architecture.
That divergence started in the late nineties when IBM decided to standardize its AIX, OS/400, and zOS hardware on the same basic components and same basic plug together design. Thus today's z9 "enterprise" and "business" class servers look a lot like older iSeries and pSeries machines internally and are really distinguished from those at the hardware level only in terms of packaging and accommodations made to legacy mainframe software and related ideas.
The latest z9 series CPU board, called an MCM in IBMese, is embedded in what IBM calls "a book" and comes with up to 16 enabled CPU cores (aka processing units) and up to 128GB of enabled memory. Single z9 machines now max out at four books, or 64 CPU cores. Of these, however, at least two cores per board have to be dedicated to "storage assist processing" (i.e. I/O support), and at least two per machine have to be set aside as spares -i.e. the machine offers a maximum of 54 processing units, and 512GB of accessible memory.
The CPU used is the 1.65Ghz dual core Power5+ with some changes in the enabling firmware and socket wiring to support traditional mainframe features like CPU sparing and up to 40MB of shared cache per MCM. Interconnects across the MCM have relatively low latency, enabling dual, eight-way, SMP blocks in the pSeries and allowing zOS to co-ordinate up to four, eight way, blocks to form a 32 processor virtual machine - the largest logical partition yet supported on the IBM mainframe.
The z9 supports up to 32 way clustering via processor dedication. It also offers a very wide range of external I/O capabilities built around a maximum of 64 standardized ("self timing") interface boards each capable of handling up to 2.7GB/Sec in flows from plug in Ethernet, disk, or other controllers.
All of this comes in a nicely packaged "mainframe" drawing from 6 to 19 KVA and typically taking up about a square meter of floor space.
In many ways this is an entirely admirable machine: physically small, relatively power efficient, reasonably fast for many small tasks done in parallel; capable of connecting to a lot of legacy storage; and, capable of supporting hot plug replacement for almost everything from I/O devices to processor books.
IBM stresses both reliability and virtualization in its sales presentations on this product line. Of these two, the reliability claims are mostly a case of saying what the customers want to hear - because, in reality, things like having spare CPUs on line are just costly hangovers from the System 360 and there's nothing otherwise significant in the architecture that isn't matched in IBM's other high end Power products.
Notice that this doesn't mean that Z9 machines aren't highly reliable, they are; but the reliability gains over the comparable AIX and OS/400 machines are due to the management methods and software that go with the box, not the hardware.
The heart of the system lies in its virtualization capabilities. The maxed out z9 can be broken up into 60 logical partitions each of which looks like an entire machine to its operating systems code. Load VM on one of these and it, in turn, can host a significant number of concurrent guest operating systems like Linux or one of the older 360 OS variants.
This structure reflects the machine's data processing heritage in which it assumed that all jobs are batch (even the on-line ones), all batches are computationally small and severable, and real work consists of sequential read, manipulate, and write operations on each of many very small data sets. Thus most jobs need fractional CPU shares, eight way SMP more than suffices for the largest jobs, and the use of logical partitioning and guest operating systems offers a proven way to both enforce job severability for scheduling and to protect one job from another during run-time.
This role conceptualization also has many consequences for hardware and software licensing. In particular software is usually licensed by the processor count and relative performance - meaning that limiting licensed code to a particular logical partition size or resource constrained guest operating system reduces costs significantly. Since it's difficult to apply this logic to software IBM wants to promote or stuff that can use the whole machine, IBM has developed licenses based on specified uses for processors. Thus the IFL (integrated facility for Linux) is an ordinary CPU licensed only to run Linux, while the zAAP (zSeries Application Assist Processor) is one licensed only to run JAVA, and SAPs (CPUs used as storage assist processors) don't usually count for licensing.
An ultra-low end machine, with a fractional single CPU license, starts at about $100,000 before storage and application licensing.
A maxed out, 54 processor, 1.65Ghz, 2094-754 z9 "enterprise" machine with 5124GB of accessible memory is thought to cost about $22.5 million at list plus about $92,700 per month in maintenance before software and storage.
According to an IBM TPC filing, an IBM p5-595 with AIX, 2048GB of accessible RAM, and 64 cores at 1.9Ghz lists at about $12.4 million -or about 48% ($10 million) less than the mainframe.
Similarly, list price on an IBM 9133-1EB 550Q rackmount P550 with eight cores and 16GB of memory is about $37,100. In other words, four racks filled with a total of 64 of these machines would provide about twice the total memory offered by the z9, about eight times the total CPU resource, about eight times the total I/O bandwidth, four more "hard wired" logical partitions, and just over $20 million (90%) in change.
Tomorrow I'm going to talk about running Linux on the z9, but the conundrum to ponder here is a simple one: if the value of the mainframe lies in its virtualization capabilities, why doesn't the 64 way rackmount offer a better solution?
Virtualization exists in the AIX line as well
Re: your last paragraph "...the value of the mainframe lies in its virtualization capabilities", I have to point out that fractional cpu virtualization exists in the AIX line as well (probably an inheritance from the z series).
I'm not an AIX pro - my experience is dated, but I did get a chance to evaluate a "Regatta" 690 high end server for a few months. One of the truly interesting abilities was its use of HACMP with virtual machines. You could create a "stub" environment with a fraction of a CPU -- just enough to keep the OS running -- and then on failover, it (as the failover target) would be dynamically expanded to a pre-defined amount of cpu, memory, interfaces, etc. Think of the expense of a typical active-passive cluster and you'll see the appeal. This was very efficient, very slick, and IBM got there first.
It's not advocacy of IBM, just acknowledgement of a nice feature set. But I also think it runs against your comment the other day about virtualization as "a palliatve for shoddy systems design and sloppy thinking." Too broad a characterization, I think.
(Ok, now that I'm contrarian, does this make me "hugely valuable" in the "loyal opposition" ? : )
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Plan 9 is a UNIX clone. But it presents a consistent interface which is easy to use. I am not going to go into it at any length. But, it was the successor to UNIX, which, Rob Pike said, was dead: "It's been dead for so long it doesn't even stink any more." 1
Rob delivered the keynote address at the UKUUG: "Plan 9 from Bell Labs." He's now at Google.
Dave Presotto then spoke about "Multiprocessor Streams for Plan 9." He's at Google, too.
Tom Duff talked about "Rc -- A Shell for Plan 9 and UNIX Systems." Tom's now at Pixar, the proud owner of parts of several Oscars.
Fifteen years later, what had been the UNIX group (1127) has been dispersed. In addition to Rob, Dave and Tom,
- Ken Thompson retired to California;
- Brian Kernighan is a Professor at Princeton;
- Phil Winterbottom is CTO at Entrisphere;
- Gerard Holzmann is at NASA/JPL Laboratory for Reliable Software;
- Bob Flandrena is at Morgan Stanley;
- Sean Dorward is at Google;
Dennis Ritchie and Howard Trickey remain at Lucent/BTL.
But, before it disappeared, the "1127 group" made yet another contribution to OS development: Inferno.
Inferno is a compact OS designed for building "cross-platform distributed systems." It can run on top of an existing OS, or as a stand-alone. The nomenclature owes much to Dave Presotto, who founded it firmly in Dante. The company marketing Inferno is Vita Nuova; the communications protocol is Styx; applications are written in type-safe Limbo, which has C-like syntax.
The 4th edition of Inferno was released in 2005 as free software, but under a mixture of licenses.
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IBM User's Guide, Thirteenth Edition software on VM/CMS
Video Terminals--System Terminal Setup Operating Systems of Historical Interest
RC22534 Thirty Years Later: Lessons from the Multics Security Evaluation."
VM history Melinda Varian (Princeton University)(PDF or PostScript (615K) I strongly recommend to read at least the beginning of this 73 pages paper -- it provides new insights into how two most interesting operating system Unix and VM/CMS were influenced by Corbato's CTTS and MIT Multix project).
Netizens On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet by Michael Hauben and Ronda Hauben (chapter from the book. Another chapter is here ch106.x09
In 1961, MIT was to celebrate its centennial anniversary. Martin Greenberger, who had joined the MIT faculty in 1958, describes how a call went out for appropriate ways to celebrate:
I proposed a series of lectures on the computer and the future. We threw open the hatches and got together the best people we could assemble - whatever their fields. We asked these thinkers to project ahead and help us understand what was in store [1].
Charles Percy Snow, a British writer, was invited to be the keynote speaker, His talk, "Scientists and Decision Making," discussed the need for democratic and broad-based participation in the decisions of society "We happen to be living at a time of a major scientific revolution," he observed, "probably more important in its consequences, than the first Industrial Revolution, a revolution which we shall see in full force in the very near future" [2].
He and the other speakers expressed their concern that the challenges represented by the computer be understood and treated seriously. They felt that there would need to be government decisions regarding the development and application of the computer. They cautioned that these decisions be entrusted to people who understood the problems the computer posed for society. Also, they were concerned that the smaller the number of people involved in important social decisions, the more likely serious errors of judgment would be made. They urged that it was necessary to open up the decision-making process to as broad a set of people as possible.
Present at this gathering were several of the pioneers who had helped to set the foundation for the developing cybernetic revolution. What was the revolution they were describing? John Pierce, a pioneer in electronics research at Bell Labs, was one of the speakers at the MIT Centennial Conference. In an article published several years later in Scientific American, Pierce described the foundation of the cybernetic revolution that was then unfolding [3]. Pierce noted the intellectual ferment that accompanied two publications in 1948. One was "The Mathematical Theory of Communication" by Claude Shannon, published in July and October 1948 in the Bell Systems Technical Journal. The other was the publication of Norbert Wiener's book Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.
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May 22, 1990 saw the release of Microsoft Windows 3.0. In many ways it was the turning point for Windows, the version at which you could see Windows being generally useful. With Windows 3.0 the Windows "ecosystem," as Bill Gates termed it, was born, an ecosystem which caused the extinction of many other operating systems.
Not that Windows was really an operating system at this point. It was a graphical environment with many application services, but users started it by running the 'win' command from a DOS prompt. It relied on DOS not only for booting the computer, but for many basic services like file I/O.
And while it could run multiple Windows programs simultaneously, this was a cooperative or "non-preemptive" multitasking, in which programs needed to call into the operating system in order for another program to get time to execute. If a Windows program didn't do this, it would get all Windows CPU time.
But Windows 3.0 could run multiple DOS sessions preemptively, an important feature at the time. The application market muscle at the time was held by DOS applications sold by vendors other than Microsoft: Word Perfect, Lotus, Borland, Ashton-Tate, and a host of smaller companies. Microsoft's application market share was not nothing, but it wasn't a leader in any core business applications. Windows 3.0 changed all that.
This was an era in which the basic architecture of the PC was still evolving and trends were highly controversial. Competitors were beginning to make x86-compatible processors; RISC processors were showing impressive performance potential; IBM was still pushing their MicroChannel Bus architecture to compete with the old AT or ISA bus, and newer EISA and VESA extensions were popular. The x86 architecture itself was only beginning to reach maturity as 386-based systems became popular. That 386 architecture was necessary for the pre-emptive DOS multitasking in Windows 3.0.
Even before the release the buzz was significant in and out of Microsoft. At the time Microsoft was doing contract testing of software for the industry and it was easy to see the excitement among many companies about Windows. Clearly Microsoft was moving all their applications to it; Excel began as a Windows app, replacing Microsoft's atrocious DOS-based Multiplan.
It was also obvious that the main application companies, named just above, weren't so anxious to play Microsoft's game plan. Just as the PC hardware architecture was in flux at this time, so was the software architecture. Microsoft was still working with IBM on OS/2, at this point still in its limited 1.x versions. In broad architectural terms, programming for Windows and for OS/2 had a lot in common, but the two differed in all the details.
Many users and developers weren't convinced that DOS was obsolete; perhaps DOS-extended programs could do anything users needed, and all these GUIs did was to slow the system down. Microsoft liked to claim in this period that Windows programming was somehow a step for application programmers on the road to OS/2 programs, but it was an empty claim. Developers basically had to choose one or the other.
Another reason for skepticism was that little in Windows 3.0 was, from a Windows programming perspective, new. Charles Petzold, author of the definitive Windows programming book and a PC Magazine Contributing Editor at the time, notes that the only big additions to the 3.0 edition of his popular Programming Windows were the chapters on DDE and MDI, relatively minor features. The newer memory management features of Windows were older than version 3: "Tucked between the releases Windows 2 and Windows 3 were Windows/286 and Windows/386, which did some of the same stuff." I had forgotten about these versions, even though I worked with them at the time. They didn't make much of a splash in the market.
The internals in Windows 3.0 weren't the big deal. A Microsoft developer I know who was there at the time says "Windows was a punch line before version 3. It [3.0] was a huge step forward in terms of aesthetics in computing - I remember being impressed by the color, fonts, icons, etc. The big irony of course is that it was the backup strategy to OS/2 and it isn't clear upper management knew the full extent of what was being developed (and if they had, whether they would have approved it)."
But once the Windows 3.0 juggernaut got moving it wouldn't stop. Not only were new application opportunities created, but the markets for certain hardware devices exploded: Suddenly the graphics card you ran was much more important. Suddenly everyone needed a mouse, not to mention a color monitor. And suddenly the OEM market became much more complex: it launched the era in which users bought a system preloaded with a lot of stuff, including Windows, from an intermediary like Dell.
With Windows going gangbusters the IBM relationship quickly got tired and uncomfortable. IBM was still a major PC company and saw OS/2 as a way to differentiate their hardware and, by the way, it was a much better product than Windows. They had a point.
Windows 3.0 may have been most users' introduction to graphical environments, but it was also their introduction to the Blue Screen of Death. Windows systems in those days, and pretty much all days until the NT kernel was mature, were commonly unstable. OS/2 at this point had a lot of problems, but stability wasn't one of them.
It was also easy to see future growth for the OS/2 kernel and services, but the Windows architecture, as it existed in the 3.0 era, was a major kludge. It wasn't scalable for very large applications, very large sets of applications or multiple processors. Only a fool would run a server on it.
Marginal, but noticeable improvements were made in Windows 3.1, which was released about the same time as OS/2 2.0. The Windows juggernaut didn't stop for a moment.
Around this point Microsoft announced their Windows NT architecture, which would, around 2002, finally supplant the hack that was the old Windows kernel. It may be an ugly sight by modern standards, but Windows 3.0 was really something in its day, and it shaped the PC market we still live in.
Note:
Google matched content |
Hobbes' Internet Timeline - the definitive Internet history by Robert H'obbes' Zakon
Hobbes' Internet Timeline Copyright (c)1993-2006 by Robert H Zakon. Permission is granted for use of this document in whole or in part for non-commercial purposes as long as this Copyright notice and a link to this document, at the archive listed at the end, is included. A copy of the material the Timeline appears in is requested. For commercial uses, please contact the author first. Links to this document are welcome after e-mailing the author with the document URL where the link will appear. As the Timeline is frequently updated, copies to other locations on the Internet are not permitted.
In this present age, the Internet is considered the most important means of global communications, and it has truly created a platform for a borderless world. People from all walks of life are making use of the Internet to perform a wide variety of activities, both work-related and recreational. The Internet has become so accessible and efficient today because of a lot of developments that took place in the past. Here is a timeline to give you a better understanding of the history of the Internet.
Webopedia Brief Timeline of the Internet
General links
http://www.tuhs.org/ The Unix Heritage Society website
Open Directory - Computers History Operating Systems Unix
Yahoo! Computers and Internet Internet History
Yahoo! Computers and Internet Software Operating Systems UNIX History
Internet Modern History Sourcebook- Main Page
*** Computer Science A Brief History
History of Computing Information -- a lot of interesting links
Web Sites Related to the History of Information Processing -- useful collection of links
THE HISTORY OF COMPUTING - contains a lot of interesting links, including links to rare photographs of pioneers in computer science
Computers From Past to Present
VM/CMS is a great operating system -- is some ways as great as Unix. But IBM (almost) killed it but later revitalized as VM/Linux.
VM history Melinda Varian (Princeton University)(PDF or PostScript (615K) I strongly recommend to read at least the beginning of this 73 pages paper -- it provides new insights into how two most interesting operating system Unix and VM/CMS were influenced by Corbato's CTTS and MIT Multix project).
Among descendants I would like to note VMware:
Linux Today The Standard Why Choose [when VMWare Lets You Switch]
"Since it launched in May, VMware has signed nearly 200,000 customers, including Cessna Aircraft, Hewlett-Packard (HWP) and IBM (IBM). Cessna's marketing group needs to support remote sales managers running Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows NT. Making networking even more complicated, the company is upgrading some of its 5,000 desktops to Windows 2000, and is also trying out Linux. Maintaining such a varied network was an arduous task before the company installed VMware."
"VMware has also attracted a loyal following among Linux fans. 'A lot of Linux users are using VMware to run Microsoft (MSFT) productivity applications,' says VMware's [CEO, Diane] Greene. 'That's the largest single segment that we have today.'
She says VMware really boils down to choice. 'People don't want to be restricted in what they do on their computer; different operating systems have their own unique benefits and capabilities.' "
Related OSes: VMWare
PRNewswire:
VMware Is Analyst Pick for Info World 1999 Product of the Year (Jan
28, 2000)
LinuxTicker:
Emulating a complete PC with VMware (Jan 24, 2000)
LinuxPR:
Linuxcare And VMware Combine Forces (Jan 07, 2000)
Linux.com.sg
(Singapore): Review on VMware (Oct 02, 1999)
PC World:
Create Two Virtual PCs Out of One [with VMware] (Sep 10, 1999)
Sotpanorama Linus Torvalds page -- contains a lot of information about history of Linux
Society
Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers : Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy
Quotes
War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotes : Somerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose Bierce : Bernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes
Bulletin:
Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law
History:
Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds : Larry Wall : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS : Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development : Scripting Languages : Perl history : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history
Classic books:
The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month : How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater�s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite
Most popular humor pages:
Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor
The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D
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Last modified: March 12, 2019
Windows 3.1 was more significant (Score:3, Informative)
by ClosedSource (238333) writes: on Saturday May 22, @02:41PM (#32307308)because it had truetype fonts. The combination of Windows 3.1 and HP's deskjet printers made it possible to perform desktop publishing for hundreds of dollars less than using other alternatives.