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It is safe to say that there was no one person who invented the first operating system.


Initially operating systems were just automatic program loaders that provided minimal support functions. Back in the late 50's and early 60's the concept of patenting software had not been dreamed of - so everyone who was building computers was figuring out similar ways of creating support environments for their programs.


I first used something called the X-program loader on a Burroughs Datatron 220 computer but there were similar control programs being developed for IBM, UNIVAC, GE, HONEYWELL, and the others. These were a major improvement over having to enter a boot strap routine using BCD data switches on the console.


By the mid 60's operating systems had become very sophisticated and the concept of a single button bootstrap loader was universal. This is hard to say precisely. The earliest ancestors of operating systems were developed in the early 1950s and were called "batch monitors". They were programs designed (often by the computer operators themselves) as labor saving devices. Without a batch monitor the operator had to load and run each program one at a time manually, resulting in lots of operator work and lots of wasted idle computer time while the operator did that work. With a batch monitor the operator could combine several programs (in a large deck of cards or on a magnetic tape) and have the batch monitor automatically load and run each in sequence one after another without further operator attention until the entire batch completed. When needed by a given program the batch monitor could tell the operator to remove or mount data tapes, etc. This resulted in much reduced operator workloads and highly efficient use of the computer time.

Probably the first thing that could be considered an actual operating system was an improvement on the batch monitor that implemented a limited form of multitasking, so that when the computer CPU was otherwise idle during input/output operations for the current program, it could switch to running a different program until it also went idle during input/output operations. This improved the efficient use of the computer time too. But these still were not interactive operating systems, they only ran batches of jobs loaded by the operator.

Timesharing operating systems were the first that permitted interactive operation with the user. These were largely planned as "computing utilities" that users would pay for by the minute of use (like you did on telephone calls) and connect to remotely using a terminal and telephone MODEM.

Exactly who developed the "first" of each is not always easy to determine as many took the earlier works of others and improved and expanded on them for their site and then passed their work onto others who made further changes and improvements. Also there is the issue of exactly where you want to place the boundary in this history between operating systems and something that you don't consider an actual operating system.

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