Chapter-9计算机科学技术史.ppt

Chapter 9 The Development of Computer Operating System 9.1 The Operating System An operating system is a program that runs on a computer to simplify the use of the computer for the user. The operating system manages the use of peripheral devices such as printers, monitors and keyboards. In addition the operating system will run other programs and display the results. In order to carry out these functions the operating system has to require a systematic structure for the inputs and outputs; there is a definite structure to files and there is a systematic way in which the files are stored on the data storage devices. Without an operating system a computer is largely an unresponsive hunk(无人性的大块) of metal and wires. Although now the concept of an operating system appears to be a natural and obvious one, operating systems evolved over a considerable period of time. The first electronic computers were “hardwired” to carryout systematic computations. Initially the computations were for ballistics table. The user would wire direct connections between the various components of the computer through a plug board. When the computations were finished the next user would have to pull out the wires and rewire for the next set of computations. This was monumentally cumbersome(非常麻烦) by today’s standard but a marvelous（不可思议的） advance in speed and accuracy over hand computations with pencil and paper. In the late 1960s MIT had a time sharing operating system called MULTICS, the name indicating it was a multiple user systems. Ken Thompson was working at Bell Labs in New Jersey and was given the use of a PDP-7 minicomputer. He decided to create an operating system for the minicomputer for the convenience it provided even though there would be only one user. Initially he called this operating system UNICS in analogy with MULTICS but later changed the spelling to UNIX. At the same time Dennis Ritchie was involved in the creation of the programming language C, so named becau