History of Operating Systems

hello everyone I'm Jason Bitner from triple helix Corporation and Welcome to our Helix Insider podcast I'm joined in studio today from two of my teammates senior developers Sam Sheldon and my systems engineer Sean coover welcome to the studio guys today we're going to talk about the history of operating systems we all know we have one and we all either love or hate them but for good right wrong or indifferent they are a very integral part of our lives in terms of our computers and our operating systems and what we do every day so we wanted to kind of go back in time and talk about you know the evolutions of where these operating systems came from and more importantly you know what they're good for what they're not good for and maybe consider using a different one if you've never tried one so we'll Dive Right In um talk first about everyone's favorite at least everyone's favorite that they know of is Windows Sam why don't you start us off and talk about the evolution of Windows and and

strengths and weaknesses of that particular system era of Dos and the operating system that we know the you know Windows part of Windows came about as a user interface built on top of Dos it wasn't actually originally Microsoft specific but it evolved to be so over time and a lot of the things that we see in Windows today are actually holdouts from long long ago when everything was built on dos you can you can find interesting tidbits in your operating system that Trace all the way back to how printers worked in the days of Dos and things like that so Sam what is Dodge benefit of our users uh listeners what what is dot it stands for Disk Operating System and as I recall Windows actually started as a program that you ran from dos from the command line is that right yeah that's right it was a separate program that you could use to set up a user interface to interact with DOs in a way that was a lot easier than what we would know today is the command prompt I want to talk about everyone's

other favorite or at least the two big uh competitors that kind of finding each other all the time let's talk about the Mac or more specifically the Mac OS Sean why don't you tell us a little bit about that and where that came from Mac OS originally developed out of next OS Unix based platform Unix was one of the first operating systems that was released in 1971 for reference MS-DOS was released in 1985 but Mac OS evolved from Unix as what was previously known as next OS and and next OS was built on Unix much like Linux is and is a Unix based system now its strengths and weaknesses tend to lean into more audio and visual recordings and software editing tools such as like video editing audio editing things of that nature but it it evolved from a version of Unix obviously we all know and love the Mac OS as it runs on all the Apple computers and whatnot I understand that it's considered to be much more user friendly than Windows necessarily so if you're not a really highly sophisticated technical

user not to say that it can't do technical things it tends to be more friendly for someone who's not as technically Savvy is that right that's how it's marketed yes correct it's marketed as something that's easier to use than than even windows but I mean Microsoft's work really hard on making windows easy to use as well though that's true that's true all right let's talk about everyone's favorite then and and the one that we here prefer triple helix is Linux um very powerful operating system Sam why don't we uh kick off with your thoughts and uh about Linux yeah so Linux is definitely a much more flexible operating system than either Windows or Mac and part of that is because Linux in and of itself doesn't really describe the operating systems that use Linux because there are many different flavors they call them of Linux there are ones like Ubuntu that have and almost Mac OS like look and feel very you know Graphics oriented very user-friendly and then there's other versions of Linux

that are designed for things like servers and the like that don't have a graphical user interface at all they're just a terminal and you do everything the old-fashioned way there's a lot of variety if you're if you're willing to put in a little bit of leg work you can probably find exactly the right flavor of Linux for you that's been my experience as well as Linux is very very plentiful and and very flexible and customizable almost to a fault in that if you're not technically Savvy it can be very overwhelming but um Sean talk to us a little bit about where Linux came from I think you were talking earlier about you know where it started in the 70s I think yes Unix the original Unix platform in which both Mac OS and Linux is built on was released uh November 3rd 1971.

Linux didn't debut until I believe it was September of 1990 about 20 years later Linux the market one thing that I like the most about Linux is that the entire the the product itself the core of the operating system the kernel is is an open source kernel every bit of code that you see that goes into it you can see if it's if it's the base Linux kernel now obviously there's companies who have taken the base Linux system and started developing it as their own such as red hat canonical with Ubuntu the basis of Linux is that it's open source and open source is uh really I like to say a fancy way of saying free right I mean we don't pay for this operating system unlike Windows and Mac where you have to pay for their licensing right correct correct Now red hat does offer a paid service for their Linux configuration but that is for putting the actual Red Hat logo on your server and for their support you're paying for the support really not the license itself yeah you know with with the three

operating systems we've just gone over we're talking about Windows and Mac and Linux Sam why don't we talk to our listeners about how someone can find out what's the right operating system for them out of that mix so obviously the first consideration is if you're in a work environment what are the requirements for your work environment if you're in an office where everything is run through Windows Active Directory and all the back end stuff is running on Windows your workstation is probably going to be windows and there's not going to be a ton you can do to change that that said outside of requirements for work the thing that I would recommend is looking at what you want to be doing with it do you want to do a lot of audio and video editing if so Mac is probably going to be what has the best you know proprietary software do you just do you want to do gaming like a lot of us do in our free time in that case Windows is probably your best bet because most games are configured to run on Windows

and a lot of them don't have Linux and Mac ports if you're wanting to do software development I know that Mac is popular for that Linux has a lot of flexibility and as I said before different Linux flavors all are aimed at doing different things I know that at least at one point there was an Ubuntu version called Ubuntu Studio that was built around audio editing video editing kind of like Max there's versions of Linux that are specifically set up to emulate Windows games yeah a lot of it comes down to what kind of software you need where it's available and what kind of support you want to be able to get for your operating system because if you go with something a little bit less popular in say the Linux sphere you're going to have to you're gonna have to use some Google Foo to solve obscure problems whereas if you're using Windows or Mac you can probably just do a quick search on whatever your problem is and dozens of other people will have encountered it right I mean here triple helix

I mean we almost exclusively use Linux I mean in the business applications where I work it's more likely to be windows but all our development work all our programming we we use Linux for exactly the reasons that you stated it's free to use very extensible and customizable not necessarily easy to use but then again you know we're experts in the operating system and getting it to do what we want um it kind of brings me to my next point is like you know when you talk about any of these operating systems and when you have to upgrade them obviously uh Windows is pretty aggressive about its updates and if have you ever been the misfortunate uh bystander of a forced Windows update and it prevents you from doing what you need to do it's very frustrating but Windows does that on purpose particularly for security updates which are pretty frequent so this brings up an interesting point is like you know we talk about our operating systems and you know how frequently uh they need to be upgraded and

that's very very true of the Linux operating system um they do go end of life and they need to be updated Sean once you talk to our listeners about the importance of upgrading the operating systems particularly Linux because it happens I think much more frequently than Windows or Mac okay yeah uh it's uh very important to keep all of your systems up to date and um stay ahead of the curve when it comes to your your end of life cycles because packages and software goes end of life and the developers who created those packages uh move on to different versions of those packages or different versions of the entire course operating system itself like recently Linux 5 was really released it's been a while thanks for itself to Linux 5.11 but um for example canonical was Ubuntu they're on a uh a five-year long-term support life cycle for the their LTS versions they will release a new version and support it for five years but once that five-year threshold hits and they go past it uh they they no

longer provide package support they no longer provide new packages or package patches which will leave your system very vulnerable to vulnerabilities that are being discovered daily technically so it's very important to keep your your packages and your system up to date I know it's kind of frustrating to say hey I want to see a uh you know a Microsoft update when you didn't want to see it but you have no idea what could be in the back end of that what kind of security update what kind of vulnerabilities being passed that could expose you and your personal information so it's always important to keep your systems up to date even if it's a little frustrating you know you mentioned how Ubuntu has the ruling five years for their long-term support it's interesting I've noticed that different versions they overlap by a few years so you have time to get to the next version and your current version when it does expire in year five there was already another release that you could have moved to

and you could have upgraded into very important to note that these updates are being provided very frequently and usually with a lot of important updates and patches and things like that so that's a really good point Sam why don't you talk to or listeners about you know knowing when to upgrade especially if you have the option as far as operating systems go because we because it is going to be when the new version that you're looking to upgrade to once it's had a chance to settle so basically you don't necessarily want to be on The Cutting Edge unless you're specifically wanting to help filter out bugs and see the ins and outs of the system before it before all those things get hammered out you you don't want to be the one who's finding all of the workflow breaking bugs in an operating system for the most part so give it a little bit of time maybe you know six months let it settle out and that's usually a good time to upgrade but yeah you usually want to do it before it's dire for your

current version but after the next version has had a chance to shake out and settle in that's an excellent point because I think a lot of our listeners here right now will notice that if they're running on Windows Windows 10 specifically Microsoft's have been pushing uh the Microsoft Windows 11 upgrade pretty heavily and it you know occasionally you'll bring your computer online and it'll pop up and say hey Windows 11 free upgrade you want to upgrade now and they're kind of pushy about it and um I made the mistake of upgrading one of my machines to Windows 11. I think a little too early because when I got into it it is not completely different than 10 but it's it is a little bit different the UI is noticeably different and I ran into an issue that had not been solved yet so I was stuck with that machine and that Hardware issue for probably about six months it did get patched eventually so I can absolutely uh concur what you're saying about you know don't want to be on the bleeding edge

of the software it's good to have the new and updated software but you know you don't want to be on that Leading Edge like you said and Windows 10 is still actually being patched and updated so if you're intending or considering a 11 you know and you know you don't necessarily want to deal with a lot of changes you know I recommend staying with 10 for the time being the other Factor that's important to consider mind is the further is the older your version gets the less support you're going to be able to get there are because Technologies you know phase in and out things improve and as Sean mentioned developers move on to newer versions if you're still running on say Windows 7 the only support you're going to get from Microsoft is telling you to move up to Windows 10.

that's the only thing you're going to get from them and this is true for software too and I know that Jason we do a lot of new Erp analysis tasks for clients and old systems are often a problem it's if you let it go for too long it's it gets harder and harder to upgrade because you're having to go through all of those upgrades all at once that can be a challenge and if you have old technology that you're still using you might run into cases where it's not compatible with new technology we've had that happen actually we've had to we've had to find workarounds for systems that are too old to connect with newer technology which is always it's always awkward and difficult and can be avoided if you upgrade regularly and keep your operating systems and software up to date that's an excellent point especially with browser standards we've run into issues where an older server older software just wouldn't run on a modern browser and it caused pretty significant issues I remember that's a very good

point um all right well this has been the history of operating systems and I want to just get some final feedback from my two guests here Sean before we wrap up any final thoughts on the note of when to upgrade I definitely concur with with both of you I definitely want to wait six months to a year after a new operating system been released before you upgrade to it that'll let all the the bugs settle out unless you're willing to commit to helping the company with that because there's always bug reports free beta testing right same question any final thoughts for our listeners I think my final thought would be that there is no one-size-fits-all correct operating system for anyone there's pros and cons to all of them and the best thing you can do is pick the one that's right for you and that might be two operating systems you might need two computers you might need to run two operating systems on the same computer there's no one size fits all so always good to look around do your research

that's an excellent point I think many of us do run two operating systems for two different reasons and various things that we need the computers to do that's a really excellent point well hey I think I want to thank my two special guests today Sean coover my Senior Systems engineer and Sam Sheldon my senior developer here at triple helix and uh this has been uh the history of operating systems until next time thanks everybody bye foreign foreign