eXpert Zone Founder, Andrew Youll (youlle) has posted about a document he has found on the net detailing the history of “non-UNIX” oses in a timeline it also shows relationships between oses and shows which projects have borrowed from where or which oses have “compatibility” with other projects.
The History of Non-UNIX Oses
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
… where is the old beloved Amiga ?
… and it almost looks as messy as the condensed Unix family tree.
…the Amiga, one of the most revolutionary OSes of its time, does not get a mention AGAIN.
Maybe it deserves a history graph of its own?
>..the Amiga, one of the most revolutionary OSes of its time,
Why do you say that ? I used it for years, and loved it, but these days I realize it is/wasn’t anything special. There were macs, unixes(also with other graphic systems than X) and others from the time just as great..
because it was a full blown multitasking OS that was *fast* and ran on computers home users could afford. Plus it has a lot of neat little things built into it. which you probably know about since you used it for years. Sure there was mac.. single tasking or task switching later on.. the Amiga OS did real multitasking and it had a nice color GUI.. You could have gotten all that on a nice unix workstation but for thousands more..
Just took a lot at it. Not the best timeline but its OK. Needs some work
like beos max v3 should have been branching off beos r5 not r3…
openbeos connecting to skyos???
If the creator of this chart is listening. I for one would like to say “fine job.” Yes, there are some flaws. There are items missing, but if there weren’t some of you wags would complain that the chart was “messy” or “complicated.” I can hear your winey voices now.
I can certainly say that this supercedes the non-unix OS chart that I had yesterday. I would think this community for one, would have an understanding that material isn’t created en-toto, in bite-size, easy to swallow chunks for your instant gratification. I’m sure there is some due criticism, but who among you is going to modify this PDF, and repost with corrections tomorrow?
SkyFS is a modified version from Haikus/OpenBeOSs FS.
Don’t forget draggable screens! Something that today’s OSes still don’t have (I find virtual desktops are the closest thing to this)
AmigaOS was written on a unix machine. maybe that was enough to keep it off the chart
Perhaps if you people could read, you’d have visited the creator’s homepage, instead of trouncing on a year+ old hotlinked pdf.
http://firedrake.org/paddy/
visit http://firedrake.org/paddy/images
for an open directory of pdf, png, svg, and a few more recent versions than are on his page.
Patrick cheers to you.
openbeos connecting to skyos???
OpenBFS, maybe?
http://www.oshistory.net/
I can’t get how you can mention SkyOS without mentionning AmigaOS… Not that I have anything against the first one, but the former played a “little more” in the OS history
Leo.
>Why do you say that ? I used it for years, and loved it, but >these days I realize it is/wasn’t anything special. There >were macs, unixes(also with other graphic systems than X) and >others from the time just as great..
let me remeber,..
The first Amiga was introduced in 1985.
The OS was adapted from a main frame OS.
Therefore it had features that no other OS of that time provided, except some unixes of course.
– long filenames
– preemptive multitasking (the first from apple was OS X, the first from MS Win95 – 10 years later!
– autoconfig (it was able to autodetect and install hardware extensions automatically. MS introduced “plug and play” 1995, once again 10 years later!
There some other things in that little OS, which where unique those days, like a sort of “text to speech”, support for 9 MB of RAM! – PC’s had 640KB at this time, home computers 65-128K and the first Amiga 256K.
of course it was lacking some features very well known from the unix world like memory protection, which makes the multitasking not very stable. But thats another story
It should be noted that Windows 1.0 – 3.11 is not an OS but an operating environment and ran on top of MS-DOS, PC-DOS, Novell-DOS, and within OS/2.
OK,
Thanks for the more up to date link.
Most of the left out OS’s like AmigaOS/Atari TOS etc… were added.
Almost the same could be said of Windows 4x and DOS 7x. Win4 was far more substantial than earlier Windows GUIs, but you could still rip it out and run plain DOS7.
Speaking of ‘operating environments’ that ran on top of DOS, where is GEOS?
Where are the GEOS based OS”s,and the Amiga? Zeta is an offshoot of BeOS Dan0 not R5 and BeOSMAX 3 is an offshoot of BeOS5 PE not R3,I’m sure there are others that weren’t covered as well.
“Aldi rulez” wrote:
“- preemptive multitasking (the first from apple was OS X, the first from MS Win95 – 10 years later!”
Are you sure? As far as I know, AmigaOS didn’t have preemptivity at all and first OS from MS with preemptivity was Xenix (somewhere in the middle of 80s and later Windows NT 3.1 (1993)).
Anyway, in my opinion AmigaOS was the best OS for home computers those times.
Regards
Marko
> Are you sure? As far as I know, AmigaOS didn’t have preemptivity
Check about it on google and more about the specifications of Exec (the Amiga Kernel) and how it multitasks preemptively.
You could also try by yourself by using an emulator or better by buying an used A500…
You will be amazed…
Ciao,
Raffaele
“Are you sure? As far as I know, AmigaOS didn’t have preemptivity at all…”
Um, having (once upon a time) studied exec in detail, I’m pretty damn sure it was a fully pre-emptive, round-robin scheduling multi-tasking kernel. It had a pretty simple priority mechanism, but otherwise…
@ Aldi Rulez
By Aldi rulez (IP: —.superkabel.de) – Posted on 2005-05-02 23:06:09
>Why do you say that ? I used it for years, and loved it, but >these days I realize it is/wasn’t anything special. There >were macs, unixes(also with other graphic systems than X) and >others from the time just as great..
>let me remeber,..
>
>The first Amiga was introduced in 1985.
>The OS was adapted from a main frame OS.
>Therefore it had features that no other OS of that time >provided, except some unixes of course.
>
>- long filenames
This is not an Amiga innovation. C64 filesystem also allow filenames of 30 Characters, and Also Mac filesystem.
And remember… C64 too had long filenames while Ms-Dos in these days lacked of it. 😉
PC-DOS was a UNIX derived OS. Shell redirection, Pipes, Steam based I/O, Hierarchical Filesystem, Fork even.
The NT’s Time Shared Process Scheduling, Virtual Memory System and File Buffer caching, Streams based File/Device I/O, TCP/IP Networking (STREAMS Based originally), Hierarchical Filesystem, Pipes etc all come from UNIX.
BTW OS/2 is a very unsubtle rip-off of DG’s AOS/VS down to how the DOS (RDOS in the DG case) compatibility mode was implemented.
If OS/2 is descended from Windows by virtue of running the same superannuated file launcher as DOS then NT is derived from UNIX because it has a POSIX sub-system.
Windows and OS/2 are related because they were co-developed for quite a while. As far as I know, code went both ways, so that seems like a fairly solid link.
A focus on Windows/MS OSes : http://www.levenez.com/windows/
Sure OS/2 is related to windows. It’s just that it is clearly a clone of AOS/VS (Multithreading, Named Pipes, DOS Box etc. Complex used of Ring based privilege levels in MMU etc.)
DG even renamed AOS/VS to VS/2 in what I like to think was a poetically futile ironic gesture;)
>>- long filenames
>
>This is not an Amiga innovation. C64 filesystem also allow
>filenames of 30 Characters, and Also Mac filesystem.
>
>And remember… C64 too had long filenames while Ms-Dos in
>these days lacked of it. 😉
VIC-20, C64, C128, etcetera had 16 character filenames.
this is an old document – not very complete
For example, it shows EXEC 8 dying in the late 1960’s, but in reality that OS has continued to the present day in the form of OS 1100 and OS 2200 on the Sperry UNIVAC 1100-series and Unisys 2200-series and Clearpath IX mainframes respectively.
(I’d tossed the author of the document a note some months ago, but it seems he hasn’t applied any updated yet).
I also don’t see things like CTOS (from Convergent Technologies), NOS (the CDC successor to KRONOS), or more recent MCP variants (Unisys A-series mainframe OS) on the chart.
Does someone have current contact information for the author?
No riscos?
That seems a really big omission to me, while not popular outside the UK, it was both a revolutionary gui and operating system at the time, running on one of the first new processor designs for years (ARM).
It’s still going too.
Personally I think eric levenez has done a way better job of windows & UNIX OSes charts than this guy
Good start, but boy does it need work
RISC OS is on there – from Arthur up until RISC OS 4 & 5.
It appears the author is continually updating the tree, and the original link was out of date.