when the 1st operating system developed and by whom?

Define 'operating system'. A big room full of on and off switches could be an operating system, even though it's not very user friendly. Then again, you could only be refereng to the later ones, such as DOS and so on.

The first was probably whatever ENIAC had...

I don't know... What OS did that mechanic calculator Pascal (the math-person) created use? What do you mean by "computer"? There were mechanic calculators in the 19th century. Or the first electric computers build from relais', lightbulbs and switches. Or the ones using silicon transistors?
I had a list of all the computers, but it's lost in the chaos of my harddisk.
And there were a lot of those computers, that have cost more than a house, but couldn't run Doom. (Unless you got some guns and some friends and played a deathmatch inside one of those, they were big enough). Conclusion: I don't think the first OS had a name. It was probably a collection of switches, and lightbulbs.

RedX

If you define "OS" as a programmer's toolkit for interfacing with the hardware and doing mundande things for the programmer like managing filesystems and memory, then I don't know. I know that UNIX was originally written by this guy at MIT who wanted to write a better version of a game, but the OS he had was too restrictive. It would be interesting to see what the first OS was.

What was the Mainframe version of CP/M? I think it was quite early.

I believe that UNIX was the first OS made. In fact, it IS the oldest OS known to the world today. It's still an OS that uses console, instead of GUI, very much unlike Windows. UNIX went all the way back to the 50's, and survived the second half of the 20th Century... :)

I was going to say that but I wasnt sure. I thought it was the UNIX made by Bell Labs.

The answer is probably lost in the mist of time. It would actually be pretty difficult to answer this question, because it depends on what your idea of an OS is. I agree with crazyphil when he says that UNIX was probably the first. It was probably the first REAL OS.

UNIX WAS NOT THE FIRST OS!!!!! Unix is relatively recent (by computer standards at least, it was developed in the mid 1960's) I think that there was a whole flurry of OS's that were pretty much just bare bones interpreters for ASM and machine language. The kernel type architechture didn't come in till much lat er.

try researching the IBM 709/7090 os
ATLAS
SABRE
SAGE
operating systems
these are the earlest command driven os i can find

Random Unix info:
Unix was developed at Bell Labs (when it was own by AT&T), having its first official release in 1971 (compare that to ITS, developed at MIT, in 1961), by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and their collegues. So far as I know, it was created simply out of need for a solid time share system that was portable to the various systems within AT&T.
Currently, like DOS, there are a handful of GUIs to go ontop of it (X, Motif, blah).

faboo

I believe that CP/M was the first operating system for "smaller" computers (PDP-8 etc). I did some research and that was the earliest I could find. It was developed by Gary Kidall in the early 1960's.

Faboo: No offence, but from my approximation, ~70% of TPU use unix/linux, such basic info can be found in taubz's "what is linux?" quick start guide.

Heh... Yay, someone read it.

- taubz

yes, ti was quite well done taubz, bravo. Enjoy your 15 minutes of fame!

Crap. Psion... I'm getting that caching thinbg in ie again.

Thanks.

IE chache settings are very different to the caching behaviour of web pages, because this is quite different, and thank you for referring to me as one of "the greatest programming minds of our time", this shall be my official title from now on, because CHollman82 said it was so!

I've never tried to deliberately misrepresent my skills as a programmer, and if you got some mixed messages, I'm sorry 'bout that. I do quite a bit of programming, and I have been doing it for quite a while, but I still have lots to learn, as do all of us.

I'm pretty sure that PARC was the first os with windows. I know it came out b4 macintosh.

PARC was the xerox experiment steve copied, yeah...no clue how much functionality it had though, whether it was useable or just "ooo, pretty windows"

It had quite a bit... Original Macintosh OS = Direct ripoff.

Xerox dumped it though, bet they were kicking themselves when it took off like it did. S'funny though, "rip-off" is usually Apple's main beef with Micor$oft :)

Yes... there was a rather ironic lawsuit a few years back... Apple tried to sue Microsoft for copying their OS, then Xerox tried to sue Apple and Microsoft for stealing _their_ OS.

Well, the first operating systems were timesharing systems. (ITS, RSTS, CTS). Before then, many machines didn't use an operating system (Think Apple ][ ) Remember, computers evolved. They didn't just pop out of the womb fully formed.
-Kp2

The Apple ][ had an operating system... And besides, timesharing systems were around long before the Apple 1 or 2.

Apple 1, I drool at the thought.

Gian: I'm well aware of the fact (/me owns a PDP-8) that timesharing preceded the Apple ][. The original AppleDos was not what I would consider an true Operating System. It did contain user callable subroutines and disk access methods, but there was no process or memory management routines available.
-Kp2

Okay, so we have to define operating system.

I think he may have meant processes in the sense of programs, not 'methods of doing things'.

No, I think you are right CHollman....

Well, I have heard of "Oracle Bones" used a long time ago that had I/O, in the form of writing something on a bone, then dropping some bones to red the result or something, I'm no expert. If you look at it as writing the question permanently (recording to a hard disk), and having the answer displayed (I/O) This could qualify as an OS in some books.

Hmm, wasn't Unix originally developed as a response to Multics [sic]?

As for a definition of OS, I'd say anything which provides an abstract layer between software and hardware.

[Don't anyone respond to this and revive an old thread. Thanks. --taubz]

.. yeah, it'd be travesty for a produtive discussion to occur in such an old thread! I say respond, if you have something Good to say!