This is every engineer's bedtime story

Definition of Operating System: "Abstracting away the horrors of hardware"

In September 1968 I was sat at a Teletype terminal creating print and 8-hole tape copies of an Algol program for an Eliot something computer in the room next door. A year later I was using a 80 column card device to produce Fortran code to run on a Univac batch processing machine that was a 45 minute train ride away from the office. No mention of operating systems yet. My first OS encounter was on a Ferranti computer controlling a nuclear power station - an interrupt driven system using a physically huge (wardrobe size cabinet) drum for secondary memory. That was the foundation for working with desktop Personal Computers from 1977 and following all these names like CP/M, UCSD p-system, PCOS, MS-DOS, Windows, and UNIX (several flavours). This video seemed to map my leaning curve over almost 60 years in computing - as @KangJangkrik wrote 3 hours ago an engineer's bedtime story. Thank you for this rewind.

10 print "obscene word" 20 goto 10 run My first program for BASIC when I was 7. I was very impressed the first time I saw windows and a mouse as a kid. I tried to explain it to dad at supper; he didn't pay any attention.

Imagine few hundred years later, a museum will play these videos to tell the early days of computer history .

Never had I thought I'd hear about the human centipede on this channel, let alone using that as an analogy to Unix pipes. You've outdone yourself there, Jon.

"Its like the human centipede of computer processes" "... written in the high-level C language" "So there was Kildal, in his room, with just a naked floppy drive" Goddamn our boy comin in HOT

In an alternate universe, the asianometry dude is the Matrix's Architect.

That grass, those rolling hills, those clouds. A little bit of me was home and back in a more innocent time looking at that.

I am waiting on the Plan 9 from Bell Labs story.

Love your channel. When YT feels like it's getting dumber, I'm happy to find your insightful videos.

ima use "the sun doesn't shine on the same dog's butt everyday" phrase from now on.

Man….where in the world did that sunshine on a dog’s butt saying come from?

I think Tanenbaums definition is the best (he probably didn't come up with it, but it's what he states in one of his books.) He says that an operating system perfoms two functions. One is resource management and the other is to provide an abstraction layer. A sort of extended machine. If you use the definition most people use (erroneously in my opinion), then you'll end up having to argue that Edge is part of the Windows OS. Which is pretty ridiculous. It's just a program shipped with the OS.

Whenever I see the mighty VAX mentioned in a documentary I always smile.

You have taught me more IT stuff / history than I learned in my first year of Electrical Engineering. Thank you. I wish my Samsung phone had my old Palm's Graffiti.

Symbian OS was born from the PDA world, focused on optimising limited hardware resources. Programming on it had a very steep learning curve, due to this optimization and the absolute difference from typical PC programming. It was very hard for any programmer not experienced with Symbian to move to it and port any of the existing software. No matter what we did to improve the tools, it was hard to program. The other issue was that Symbian was owned by companies that were competitors with eachother: no one wanted to share tools for developers (e.g. no common ask ) and they didn't want a common user interface

Well done John in making the distinction between operating systems and IPLs, kernel-mode programs, and HALs. Many operating systems, antique and modern, don't fit directly into any of those boxes. Well done also for picking points that most people will connect with while still keeping it to 30 minutes, too. This could easily be a 20 part series if you wanted it to. I particularly like that you've addressed the economic impact of the "IBM PC" marketing. The rise of the PC in the face of cheaper and more powerful options has always puzzled me.

I'm sorry that the Commodore AmigaOS gets left out of these conversations. It's preemptive multitasking would have fit in to this video well. Excellent video, as usual!

I already want a video on the SAGE system.

Imo the OS is a HAL and IO/resource management. Everything else are tools or UI.

I was Superman when writing a big, functional MS-DOS batch file in early 90's. I know this may be silly, but to me personally, that was the joy of computing. Thanks for this amazing video, mister.

Just wanna say your content is amazing. The topics and the execution are top class. Appreciate the work you do.

From 1982 to 1984 my employer had me run an EPA simulation model for chemical partitioning in defined environments. We contracted with a company that provided timeshare on a mainframe and I learned how to use job control language. Because I could set up multiple jobs and they would run overnight, I wouldn’t know the output until the next day. It was a lot of trial and error. And because billing was once a month, it turned out, I had blown the budget. I went back to gradual school, “where you gradually learn you don’t want to go to school anymore” (John Irving). There the computer facilities included a UNIX main frame, UNIX workstations, and some Apple IIs. What a change from JCL, punch cards, and tape. Needless to say, I have a long history using computers and operating systems. Many have gone by the wayside, though one is arguably my favorite as I still use a Palm today.

When I began to study computers, in 1995, I wish ~ I SO wish, I had this video. They started to teach us about operating systems, but it was SO damn confusing. And in the middle of my course, the SCO-Linux legal debacle was playing out, being expensive, carrying the strong possibility that one party may control the rights to every working operating system, or at least, to everything that had UNIX in its parentage. Like Linux for example. Like (less directly, less obviously) the Apple desktop OS. Trying to get your head around the big picture, understand how all the parts of it fit together, and the fact they were all moving, like the logs prior to the log-jam, they're all moving downstream, bobbing around independently, bumping into each other, but could jam up at any moment ... I know I was told that DOS was basically a device driver for a floppy disk and a hard drive, and that everything else it did was just tacked on as an afterthought. When Win-95 came along, it added quite a respectable user interface, but it was still slapped over the top of DOS, which wasn't an operating system's arm-pit. I quite liked Win2k. I had been using NT4 as my daily, so ... I liked XP. In '97 or so, I discovered I could download a shareware version of VMware, and do guest operating systems. Hello RedHat. That was LONG before they floated as a company .... Linux disros became like one of those desktop toys for me, with the swinging balls. Something you poke & prod and play with. You could pass networking through, you could (the default) have the whole network stack inside the VM talk to the ISP and the Internet as an independent client ... there was a lot to play with and figure out. And IP6 is coming, which, means this IP4 and address translation and DHCP and all that shit ~ that complexity is going away. Right? That was bloody nearly 30 years ago! Did I mention log jams? Today? Linux Mint + Mate ~ very happy with my choice. If you listen to the Artificial Intelligence crowd (they’re hard to get away from) then the next development of everything, from the screensaver to the whole internet and computational landscape, is about to change. I’m pretty sure I don’t WANT a computer that has AI as any part of its operating system ~ let along the whole damn thing. I don’t know that I need a Trusted Computing Module (I don’t trust it) and I don’t know that I need a neural processing unit. That seems a bit like building a new church, by starting with a big hole, where you assemble and then cover a black mass altar, inverted cross, and then roof it over and build the nice koom-bar-ya church on top of it.

Then the Gods (Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson) gave us Unix and C, and it was good. Nothing better has ever been made

The amount of knowledge this channel provides for free is insane. I'm definitely subscribing next month for patreon. Thank you for hard amount of research and effort into these videos

What a great channel this is. Such interesting work, buzzing in the background, as the world tuned into circuses. There are some very, very, very smart people out there. I am not one of them, but I was in IT for 30 years and as I did my work just observed it all grow. The mental grunt involved in all this stuff is quite astonishing.

Great video, great topic! Man I miss Windows 7 so much!! I love all your stuff but is there anyway you could please increase the volume of your voiceover just a little? Please? I have to turn your videos up so loud and when the KZfaq ads cut in they are blaringly loud! Please and thank you?!? Keep up the great work, you have the best topics presented in the best videos, thank you for all this information!

I’ve been part of several of these stories. I started work in timesharing support on Honeywell GCOS, worked on Apple IIs, coded in PL/1 on Multics, wrote C code for MSDOs, then C++ for Windows, was present at the Symbian launch and wrote the text layout and font systems for Symbian, then later on wrote parts of the Blackberry OS. In my current project I code for Windows, Linux, Android and IOS. So I’ve had an interesting career so far.

As an graduated electrical engineer with specialization in computers and vlsi your videos topics are so fascinating can't wait for new video releases

Publishing the source code of the BIOS was the best thing they did. It meant you could learn everything about the hardware by reading one book (and maybe a few chip datasheets)

Fortunately most filesystems, like ext4 and xfs, don't store files as fragmented as ntfs. Of course it still can end up somewhat fragmented if you don't have sufficiently large enough blocks of free space on your sotrage-device and you store large files.

I gotta hand it to you, you've been on a roll recently. Every topic you've chosen for the past 2-3 months has intrigued me enough to click, despite knowing I don't necessarily love your content (respectfully) While seemingly a backhanded compliment - at its core it's a testament to the superb quality of topics you've selected.

my favorite video yet! keep up the good work, yo!

Thank you for the great video. KZfaq is finally putting your video drops front and center! Keep up that amazing work and thank you again.

2:04 ish where you file is really depends on your memory manager and your storage device(s). If your system is old enough, the bookcase analogy is pretty good (or maybe a pez dispenser for sequential storage, like tape drives). Of course this isn't the Usagi Electric channel so I guess most users will be using modern computers where everything is random access. So yeah, it's all over the place.

The last Multics site to shut down was at a Canadian Forces base here in Halifax.

You do produce some very good and well varied content .. thanks ! :-)

10:10 Thanks for that imagery, I'll never think of process pipes the same way again.

Fabulous job! This video is like a journey through my entire career.

Retired electronics eng here. There was a story that at one point when MS was trying to kill Lotus 1-2-3 that the OS team had a saying for the next version of DOS - "DOS aint done til Lotus wont run". But that was by far not the worst thing that MS did. Often they would come to companies that had software like a TCPIP stack (I worked for a company with the first commercial stack for the PC) and say we want to license it for 20 cents a copy (we got $200). They would say either accept it or we develop it and include it in the OS. This was how much of windows utilities originated - disk utilities, FAX software, TCPIP stack etc. One by one they got put under by the juggernaut of MS. It meant more for less for consumers but often it also meant an inferior product. I can remember a large airline begging with us to not stop supporting our windows TCPIP stack because the MS stack just didnt work in their environment. BTW we also had the first browser for a PC called Emissary and its logo was a blue e - sound familiar?

Perhaps others can jog my memory about an strange OS I worked on in the late 1960s. In 1969 the IT Manager of a large UK bank who has bought lots of IBM mainframes gave me a special assignment. The bank for some reason had bought another mainframe - maybe Univac or Boroughs. They were having implementation problems. I had to go and work at a new data centre still being constructed where the machine was installed. My job was to analyse the many memory dumps when the OS aborted and liaise with the developers in the States. What was unusual was the OS and compilers etc were all written in Algo (I think). So for example, the Algo compiler was used to compile the Algo compiler! And I think the machine used a reverse polish notation. I've never came across such a machine architecture since but thought it was innovative though it did mean there were Algo extensions to work at bit and channel level. It was challenging as I was only a COBOL programmer at the bank, though I had taught myself Fortran before I started there and had experimented with logic circuits. And quite lonely work - just me and the fax machine to the States. Plus it was located in a rough suburb of London, so quite a trek to get to. I soon left and went to work for IBM! But IBM would only confirm my appointment if the bank gave permission for me to leave! Which they did :)

Excellent as usual. Love your channel.

I'd define OS as a foundational system that serves as a platform for (multiple) software applications. The concept of resource management in itself doesn't seem to contain the important function of an abstraction layer / common compatibility layer for developers. For example even things like Docker arguably does hardware resource management (but it wouldn't work without OSs). Hypervisors also do hardware resource management, but from what I understand we still require an OS to run applications on. Though, it sounds like early "operating systems" were more akin to virtualization layers.

We typed text prompts to tell the computer what to do, then we stopped doing it because we got GUIs to help us do it easier, and now, we're back to typing text prompts to tell a computer what to do.

thorough as always, thank you

2:39 is a good quote

I'm impressed, very concisely delivered. Bravo!

In my opinion one of your best videos - great story :-)

cool video . lots to explore in future videos on this topic

The "Human Centipede" mention immediately brought "garbage in, garbage out" to mind! 😞

To add a bit more detail to the early OSs, originally computers would run a single program out of cards. You would book say, an hour and show up with your cards. Say your program ran flawlessly in 25 minutes, you pack your things and leave. The computer time is wasted sitting idle for the the next 35 minutes. Or, if your program crashed, you would try to fix it and hope to run it in whatever time you had left. To address this, a batch system was implemented. You'd leave your cards with the technician and he would run load and run your program in turn along with all the other ones and print your results for you to collect. Then somebody figured they could load all the jobs at once with control cards between them to describe each one. Now there's a program reading these control cards and launching the other programs. Presto, the first OS.

Love these deep dives into the 1980s Halt and Catch Fire era that I remember as a child. Wondering if youve read the books Chip War and Route 128 that chronicle that era and if you plan on making more videos about this pivotal and poorly understood time in the history of computing? Thanks again for these delightful videos

A prompt grants you access to a peripheral sensor (the keyboard, usually) and gives you the opportunity to enter a command, hence the term "command prompt."

As a computer museum volunteer, I deeply appreciate your videos. The educational and historical value is excellent. Thanks so much!

I love this! Great story telling!

Well researched and well written this video/documentary.

Good topic. Please do another focused on the advancements in clock or OSC devices.

thanks for posting, great topic.

great video - i look forward to first light on the new os

This vid brings back memories of the start of my tech career back in the late 90s. Having practically no real security made tech support much easier back then, lol. And other things as well.

excellent video. I've always wondered what happened to Gary Kildall after missing the fabled opportunity.

Awesome Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) shoutout! Richard Hamming also worked there.

A small correction. The batch commuting you discuss around 3:30 was for the IBM 704, not the 701.

I'm here after one minute, and I'm still disappointed I wasn't sooner.

There was a whole universe of home DOSes by Microsoft before "DOS" - they had stitched up the home computer industry using their BASIC as an interface to hook into the many many DOS variants like Commodore, Tandy and others.

"Fraud" is a bit of a strong word. 🤣

10:09 oh no, please dont go there

I was always very into computers. From my earliest memories they fascinated me. One of the coolest things my dad would regale to me was his struggles of having to book time with a supercomputer at the lab to work on his PhD or how he spent thousands just to get a PC with kilobytes of RAM and it didn't even come up with a hard drive. It made me really appreciate the wild west of early computing and how lucky we are today.

Mechanical operating systems need to look out for the child stuck/woven into the punch card loom. Now electric operating systems are physically child safe. How are the children ever going to learn if a few don't get stretched out into blankets. 😉 early punch card usages were weird and mostly 1800s textiles.

So much love for the tech expressed in the video ♥

Very good job relaying a long and complicated story.

Yep, been wondering about exactly that for quite some time now...

According to Gary Killdal, he did meet ibm, but there were some complications. There was an issue with the nda, and a modified version was signed.

Digital Equipment Corporation's Virtual Memory System (VMS) was and still is the finest operating system ever created and is still used in mission critical environments.

I remember having a Symbian Nokia phone. For it's time, just as Android and iPhone were taking off, it was pretty advanced. It had a non capacative touch screen, bluetooth, wifi, and had some advanced apps like audiobook readers.

Great content, great insight, great video!! Had *NO* idea Bill and MS bought DOS and it's developer...I thought they made it in house... *plus* the IBM-Gates connection being his MOTHER?! Man everything makes soooo000ooo much more sense now 🤦‍♂️🤣

I've been married to a software engineer since 1970. This video taught me so much I never understood about his work. Thank you!

The Palm Pilot was a genius device - no handrwitten recognition and all the rest. I miss an app for smartphones that do all those things the Newton promissed. Note: The Apple IIgs ran the first full color windows GUI and Gary Kildall's GEM was an excellent GUI for PC and other machines. I have GEM installed on Virtualbox to play around with it.

This topic has really fascinated me lately. As well as the thought of how advanced our hardware is getting and I hope we soon see a ton of improvement in the software department. Especially in video game development. Right now game development is so insanely tedious and I hope one day we will find ways to stream line things and or make them much more intuitive.

Excellent breakdown! How do you think future advancements in GUI interfaces will impact user interaction?

You said the reasons Kildall didn't close the deal with IBM are unknown. This is not proven, but I've read at some sources that he was in a fight with his wife and, to cool off, he just got into his own plane and flew away. When he realised, he had almost got into Mexico, he immediately turned around, but it was too late for the meeting

Love the history lesson 👍 I was introduced to micros in the MS BASIC days which I would have thought would be the stepping stone to MS-DOS. Similarly I then came across AmigaOS and Acorn’s RISC OS through home and school which were far ahead of Microsoft until W95 came along 😮

I think, one big step after time sharing in the OS's history is the virtualization (of memory and even OSes).

I also reflected upon Karpathys idea of LLM:s as operating systems in his video - it really stands out - but I can’t really see the direct parallel. What I can see is the part of systems that communicate between man and machine, the interface. That is perfectly a fit for LLM:s. Not the part that functions as glue between the machine and peripherals, not for printing stuff, or even low level tasks being performed in parallel e.g. So it is more of a potential GUI replacement or, maybe, keyboard and mouse in a current OS than a substitute. It maybe will as it have had, a close relationship with GPU. Or probably as it will be in the future: an addition to the user interface?

very interesting video 10/10, although I already knew most of these things. kinda weird considering im from 05. btw did you know that before Windows Mobile 5, the os stored programs and other data in ram? flash was too expensive which makes it a pain when the battery runs out because all your data is gone then unless you have a backup to restore from lol

No, an LLM is not an operating system. If it does manage to do what it promises, it is a programming / run-time environment that you are most likely going to run on some sort of Unix or Unix-like operating system.

Asianometry on a Sunday night 😎 at 10pm? I'm down. 👍🏾

This is like reminiscing about my technological childhood. I love it.

Great video. Don't neglect that Fairchild Semiconductor's pioneering work on semiconductors was first funded by a military contract - the Autonetics guidance system for Boeing's Minuteman ICBM.

I suppose the future of the OS will be to have a personalized OS for every human that interfaces with the singularity through their brain implants, allowing the OS to use the individuals personality and understand and even anticipate what the user wants. That way, it will know I want to watch Asianometry between the hours of noon and 5pm daily, and when a new video drops, to cancel less important tasks(like working on my imaginary Phd) and streaming it to my eager brain stem, releasing serotonin in waves of euphoric joy. Or something like that, lol.

Excellent topic!!

It's important to remember that the BIOS (or the idea that the hardware would give information to the OS so it could load whatever pieces of software were needed) was invented by Digital Research's Gary Kildall who received an in memorian recognition for that achievment from the IEEE. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/frVmfLOhsZbdaJs.html The IEEE is the entity that sets up all the main standards in the Electric and Electronics industry. Firewire is the IEEE 1394; Wi-Fi AC is the IEEE 802.11ac-2013 and so forth.

😅 I tried learning Python but barely went beyond Dictionaries, I just couldn't figure it out, so yeah, if there is one group of professionals I do respect its Programmers

7:30 I mean we still, at times, call certain OS' "time sharing operating system", although it is rare, most modern OS are in fact time sharing. This is often the case for use cases where thin clients are involved, those connect to either one common server, or to a Windows or Linux instance, or VM, on said server. While the latter is not what we would traditionally consider time-sharing, it definitely is sharing time.

An LLM OS is basically a computer with Real People Personality :) Instead of a keyboard, screen and mouse you talk to it, it talks back, you show it pictures, and it can create images and other audio, video, media. A room with screens on all sides and voice interface is sort of a 2d holodeck :)

This puts Karpathy's statement in context of history, food for thought.

Awesome as always.

Describes time-sharing and Unix, but seems blissfully unaware that Windows went from having crude "cooperative multitasking" in its early versions, to full time-sharing in Windows 95, marketed as "preemptive multitasking." And they also developed a separate operating system for servers, Windows NT, which had UNIX-style process isolation, and users with permissions. That code was merged into the consumer version of Windows as Windows XP, and the server version continued separate development as Windows Server. The difference is that the developers for the consumer version are much more lax when it comes to things like not introducing bugs or requiring the system to be rebooted weekly, while Windows Server is just way more expensive. Early versions of Windows were also extremely unreliable. Windows 3.11 for Workgroups crashed every single time I used it. And I don't mean the blue screen of death of NT-based Windows systems. Windows 3.11 didn't have hardware isolation, so it was possible for a bug in a program to result in the entire system freezing up and having to be powered off to reboot, and it was possible for a bug in one program to crash an entirely different program.