The It Evolution of Information Systems

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The 10th of October 2011

HEC-ULg – INFO2039-2 – A. Dubois, W. Niessen

MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Team work

Assignment : The IT evolution of operating systems

GROUP 30

HENER, Patricia Ioana - s114590

RĂDULESCU, Bogdan Eugen – s114588

KURZYNSKA, Agnieszka - s

The IT evolution of operating systems

About 3 decades ago Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of Apple, came up with the very strange idea of selling information processing machines for use in the home. The business was a total success, and its founders made a lot of money and received the credit they deserved for being daring visionaries. But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling computer operating systems. A computer had at least some sort of physical reality (it came in a box, you could open it up and plug it in and watch lights blink), while an operating system had no tangible incarnation at all. It arrived on a disk, of course, but the disk was, in effect, nothing more than the box that the OS came in.

Yet now, operating systems are sold worldwide. New releases of operating systems are launched as if they were Hollywood blockbusters, with celebrity endorsements, talk show appearances, and world tours.

What is an operating system in fact? An operating system (OS) is a program that, after being loaded into a computer by a boot program, manages all the other programs in the computer and comunicates with hardware. Users can also directly interact with the OS through an interface such as a command language or a graphical user interface (GUI).

Operating systems are commonly grouped in 5 main categories, depending on the machine type they were installed on:

1. First generation (1940-1956) – Vacuum tubes

2. Second generation (1956-1963) – Transistors

3. Third generation (1964-1971) – Integrated circuits

4. Fourth generation (1971-present) – Microprocessors...