Submitted by fz21 on December 1, 2007

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History Of The Operating System

Background
Early computers lacked any form of operating system. The user had sole use of the machine and would arrive armed with program and data, often on punched paper and tape. The program would be loaded into the machine, and the machine would be set to work until the program completed or crashed. Programs could generally be debugged via a front panel using switches and lights. It is said that Alan Turing was a master of this on the early Manchester Mark I machine, and he was already deriving the primitive conception of an operating system from the principles of the Universal Turing Machine.
Later machines came with libraries of support code, which would be linked to the...

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