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Unix Operating Systems Software

Books on Operating Systems History? 19

Posted by Cliff from the knowing-where-we've-been dept.
An introspective member of Clan Anonymous Coward asks: "Having moved to Linux only recently from Microsoft I have become interested in the history of computer systems and how they evolved. Does anyone know of a really geat book that would go through this history, ideally centred around Unix (and all of its variants) but including other systems like IBM, Next, Apple, Microsoft, Sun and everyone else in a way that would show how we got to where we are today? Webpages would be nice suggestions, too, but it's really a good read I'm after."
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Books on Operating Systems History? More

Books on Operating Systems History?

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  • Find Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution [vnunet.com]. It will inspire you (good read). It stops soon after the Apple II, so you'll need something else for more recent history.

  • "Where Wizards Stay Up Late : The Origins of the Internet" is a good read.

    It begins in the lat 50's of all places and trackes the internet upto the 90's.

    What I found most interesting was the pushing all the early geeks did for the connection of thier Machines and when it finally happened they did not know what to do with it....

  • A Quarter Century of Unix (Score:3)

    by dnxthx ( 22324 ) <rmicheals&lehigh,edu> on Tuesday May 30, 2000 @05:04PM (#1037257) Homepage
    It's not about all operating systems, but A Quarter Century of Unix is all about, well, a quater centruy of Unix. ;) (ISBN: 0201547775)

  • here are some links (Score:3)

    by dutky ( 20510 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2000 @05:38PM (#1037258) Homepage Journal
    Just one further note, I got these links by using a new-fangled invention called a search engine on another moder dohicky called the world-wide-web. You aught to give it a try sometime, rather than having other folks do all the work for you.
  • I hear Accidental Empires is a good book on the subject. You might also check out the PBS production of "Triumph of the Nerds." It comes in three parts and I believe you can get it on one of the many video retailers on the net.
  • I managed to steal a copy of Operating system design and implementation rom some crappy tech school [wit.edu] with the original minix source code in the back - totally sweet
  • I can recommend Accidental Empires, by Robert X. Cringely. His writing style is a little, er, idiosyncratic, but I personally find it most entertaining.

    Check out his own website:

    http://www.pbs.org/cringely/

    to get a taste.

    The book doesn't really document OS history as much as that of the computer industry, but IMHO it's essential reading for anyone who sees themselves as a pundit on such matters.

    "Triumph of the Nerds", is worth a look in the same vein. From memory, Cringley did an earlier program as well, to do with computers rather than the Internet, which is primarily what "Nerds" is about.

    Neal Stephenson's essay "In the beginning was the Command Line" is not really historical, but is worth reading to appreciate some of the differences between modern OS's, if you haven't seen it before:

    http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html

  • Unix Family Tree (Score:3)

    by SEWilco ( 27983 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2000 @07:08PM (#1037262) Journal
    Here's the Unix Family Tree [unix-wizards.com]. Predates Linux...although I've seen versions with Linux included, I seem to have neglected to bookmark one.
  • Not only does it miss out Linux (which strictly speaking isn't unix, but is related to *bsd), it also manages to ignore the whole SVR5 family, ie Solaris, HPUX etc...

    Basically quite a sucky family tree
  • Not only does it miss out Linux (which strictly speaking isn't unix, but is related to *bsd), it also manages to ignore the whole SVR5 family, ie Solaris, HPUX etc...

    Basically quite a sucky family tree
  • http://www.ehlis.com/adam/solaris/hi story.html [ehlis.com] - covers Linux & SVR5 type Unices too

  • Be nice. From the article:

    Does anyone know of a really geat book that would go through this history?

    And again:

    but it's really a good read I'm after

    It apears he asking for books, not just websites. So ripping on him for not using a search engine is a moot point.

    Nate Custer
  • Lots of people seem to be recommending the last book they read, whether it was about the Internet or Unix...

    Harvey Deitel's "Introduction to Operating Systems" is used for many college courses (including the one I took). It may be a bit out of date now, and of course it's more about the design than the history, but you can piece together the history from the content. It is fairly agnostic and covers everything from MacOS to MVS.

    Tannenbaum's "Modern Operating Systems" is also quite readable from what I recall.

    Books describing general OS history are harder to find. ESR's jargon file (aka "The New Hacker's Dictionary") has some interesting nuggets though.

    Ade_
    /
  • I would recommend the following (all of them great and most of them funny):

    Engines of the Mind: Evolution of the Computer from Mainframes to Microprocessors by Joel Shurkin. This is a great book! I found the first edition years ago on a library sponsored book swap shelf and have read it and successive editions so many times that they are dog eared and falling part. The subtitle is somewhat deceptive as it actually traces the computer to its beginnings BEFORE Babbage, with extensive sections on Hollerith (the first application of the computer to a large scaled task were Hollerith's machines used for the US Census). This book is so packed full of information and little tidbits (like the first love letter written by a computer) that you love every page. It includes the first OS's and the first programming interfaces for computers and gives ample space to explaining the breakthrough of the Von Neuman architecture. All this and the style is simultaneously informative and irreverent. This book is one of those overlooked gems in this field that should be read by everyone.

    It has already been mentioned before, but I will add my two cents about Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foriegn Competition and Still Can't Get a Date by Robert X Cringely picks up where Engines of the Mind leaves off and carries the ball into the endzone. This book is filled with so much insider information about the creation most of the software and hardware companies that made up the "PC Revolution" that you wonder if the author (writing under a psuedonym) worked for them all. If you want to know what happened behind the scenes, you have to read this book.

    A close contender (and probably my favorite) is Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer by Pal Freiberger and Michael Swaine. It originally came out in the Eighties but was recently updated and re-released. This book also picks up where Engines leaves off, but offers a different and more detailed slant (more characters involved) on the rise of the PC. This is an emminently readable book (with lots of priceless pictures in the new edition) and I also highly recommend it.

    Finally, it goes without saying the a person interested in Free Software/Open Source should read The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond. Though not entirely about the development of Linux, it does touch heavily on the culture and should be read by everyone. period.

    Just some suggestions.
  • Hackers is an excellent book, but of very limited scope: it deals only with the "original" hacker community at MIT (and later Stanford) in the 1960s, the hardware hackers at Northern California in the 1970s, and the game hackers up to 1984 (when the book was published). It makes very little mention of operating systems proper, discussing only MIT's ITS at length (it also mentions Lisp Machines in the epilogue, but doesn't talk about Symbolics' brilliant and innovative OS, Genera). More generally, it's a book written by a layman for laymen, and as such it doesn't get really deep about any of the technical topics which are of most interest to many of us.

    My own suggestion, although not wholly fitting the OP's desires either, is a technical book which does discuss some history of OSs from a technical perspective: Prof Andrew Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems (I'm too lazy to go look up an URL), a time-honoured college-level textbook which focuses mostly on Unix and traditional OS designs, although more than half of it is about distributed systems.
  • I have to agree, I read Accidental Empires and loved it. It was very entertaining and gave an interesting insight into large, powerful and... well... accidental empires. It does not really document the history of operating systems, but it is worth reading anyway.
  • Here's another vote for Cringely's Accidental Empires. I'ld also suggest Tracy Kidder's Soul Of A New Machine. Gotta say, though, as many posts have commented, if you want stuff on the history of OSes, then look online. The RTFM and FAQ archives at Stanford (forget not the ancient days of SAIL my son), MIT, and CMU have served me well. Remember that a lot of key work was done at corporations that are very happy to document their eminent histories. for Xerox PARC, check out www.parc.xerox.com/parc-go.html For Bell Labs check out www.bell-labs.com/ Also remember that the Patent Office http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html isn't a bad place to go for the paper trail (e-bay and suchlike notwithstanding). Go to http://164.195.100.11/netahtml/search-bool.html and type Tevanian in Inventor name and you'll never doubt the origins of microkernel OSes again. Last but not least, if you really want to understand where OSes came from then check out some of the failures. Find somebody who ran an academic system in the mid-eighties and ask them about VMS and the legendary dumping of the DEC Rainbow. You'll never really have a feel for why open standards are so important until you've felt the pain of, for example "85% DOS compatable" early PC clones. Check out the stuff the corporations aren't so proud of, like Exxon's attempt to become a computer company or the "Oh, it's be fine" compromises of the IBM Peanut and the Apple III (not II, III). And just in case you briefly forget that most pundits and in fact IT departments have consistently grossly misread the future of this business, think of this: it wasn't too many years ago that Richard Stallman and GNU could be seen at computer shows with a tiny little set of tables in the midst of vast wealth being blown off while "real" concerns, like "When will Chicago come out?" and "Isn't it wonderful that Unix is finally in safe hands at Novell" dominated the floor. Good luck and remember to always post your results somewhere just as public as where you posted the questions. -Rustin
  • This book has lots of info on the origins of unix. Alas it looks to be out of print but most technical libraries Ive been to have a copy.

    Especially interesting is the Unix development tree - showing how Version whatever relate to/became System V, BSD and all the other variants (and there was a *lot* of them :)


    --
    Lauren Child, lauren@laurenchild.net [mailto]

  • A great old book...

    OH! Unix!

    Nevermind.

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