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Last month, we took you on a tour of computing's most venerated classic PCs. In our classic PC hardware retrospective, we highlighted the computers that deployed the innovations we take for granted today. But just as a car without gas is just roadblock, computer hardware without software is essentially paperweight. And while it’s true that the hardware is the visually sexier component of a system, the software is equally important and often more challenging to create. Today, we take a look at the history of early computer software, from the first character-based interfaces to the last pre-32-bit OSes (yes, Mac OS included). We also spotlight the notable programs that ran on these various platforms, including the first productivity and design applications. And because we're avid gamers, we couldn't neglect video gaming's contribution to the software world -- we included the firsts of each gaming genre.
The soul of any computer is its operating system. This software component is the basic interface between the hardware and/or hardware BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) and the rest of the software. It provides the basic capabilities such as user interaction, storage management, communications and so on.
Early Operating systems were fairly primitive with text-based interfaces, limited I/O, few storage options and marginal expandability. This was appropriate for the limited hardware of their day (who wants a 32K operating system on a 48K system?) but on today’s seemingly unlimited platforms we’re looking for more power. The evolution between there and here has been fast, furious and interesting.
Of course there were many, many other operating systems that we didn’t include, from AppleDOS to OS/2 to BeOS to GEM and tons of others in between. There were also a large number of machines that used BASIC (the programming language) for disk control effectively embedding the Operating System at that level. Our story focuses on the software that had the biggets impact on everyday consumers -- and the many feature milestones that give us the modern computing experience.
Photography by Karen Klein
Programming is really just about moving bits of data from place to place in an orderly fashion. The current state-of-the-art involves using microprocessors and related controller chips in concert with sophisticated software to force very small bursts of electrons to do interesting things.
Before processors and ICs these chores were often relegated to vacuum tubes and similar devices. Before programming languages, and even, at times, alongside of them, the current was manipulated by hard wiring or by routing wires with plug-boards that required rewiring as the programming requirements changed.
In the 1950s the infrastructure for video games just didn’t exist. There were no microprocessors, computers were multi-ton behemoths and personal computers were science fiction devices.
But, in 1958, William Higinbotham, a Manhattan Project veteran, developed an interactive demo called Tennis for Two that had people lining up at Brookhaven Labs open houses.
The game consisted of an oscilloscope screen and a pair of controllers wired into an analog computer. It wasn’t quite what we’d consider a computer game, per se, but it was a computer being used for entertainment as opposed to ballistics tables so it certainly qualifies as at least a precursor!
Back in the early 1960s Digital Equipment Corporation installed a few of their new PDP-1s at institutes of higher learning hoping that the brilliant students would come up with some unique use for them.
They probably didn’t plan on what would happen with the MIT machine. Steve Russell and several other students with an overdeveloped sense of sci-fi wrote a space war game, complete with projectiles and hyperspace. The game, a two player space battle around a star, was popular enough to prompt a commercial version, installed at the Stanford Student Union, in 1971.
Nolan Bushnell was so taken by the game that he went straight into the business and soon founded Atari. SpaceWar is considered by many to be the first video game.
With the introduction of the IBM System 360 the rules for software were changed. Earlier mainframe systems were re-architected with each new model and software written for one was almost never compatible with another. IBM decided on a new plan. The System 360 was actually a whole line of computers with performance at the high end being more than ten times the performance at the low end.
Throughout, however, the machines ran the same OS and other systems software and used the same development languages.
So as a business grew it could expand available computing power without rewriting their software.
Tucked away in a corner of Bell Labs there once sat a forlorn DEC PDP-7 in need of a purpose. Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and a bunch of other Bell Labs folks put the machine to work and, in the process, cobbled together an operating system to make the work easier.
Over time the core of the OS was expanded, rewritten (in C) and then unleashed upon the world as a free, open source project.
From that came Xenix, Linux and a host of UNIX variants that evolved, merged, forked and otherwise developed into the various Unix flavors we have today.
Comments are closed on this article
Wily_One
July 29, 2009 at 12:10am
Ultima but no Wizardry?
AmigaOS but no GS/OS?
Where's Oregon Trail?
kzaske
July 21, 2009 at 12:19am
There are a few minor omissions in the article. PC-DOS 4 was written, under license, by IBM. It was the ONLY version of DOS that IBM wrote. It was not the commercial success IBM had hoped due to pricing.Next, Internet Explorer was released several months after Windows 95, both of which are outside of the time frame discussed. At the time Internet Explorer was released, it was only as a component of Microsoft Plus for Windows95. Internet Explorer did not become popular until it was made a free download in late 1996. Internet Explorer was not intergraded into the operating system until version 3.0, about the same time as Windows98 hit the market.
To address OS2 and WindowsNT question posed above, both are outside of the time frame being discussed and are irrelevant to this article. However I do find it interesting that the original kernel for OS2 was written by Microsoft for IBM under a mutual marketing agreement. An agreement IBM terminated. Originally both WindowsNT and OS2 shared many features and were actually compatible with each others API.
VaMage
July 14, 2009 at 8:00pm
I have to second that question. Without OS/2 Microsoft would probably still be running around calling Windows 3.1 an operating system, and Windows 7 would likely have DOS 22.2 running underneath of it in MAYBE 16 bit mode.
Not that stabbing IBM in the back wasn't the smartest move MS ever made. But come on do you really think MS would have hired Dave Cutler, of DEC VAX/VMS fame which is also notably absent, to build NT if they didn't have pressure to build a modren O.S.?
If you disagree then why are we still in 32 bit computing, why is 64 bit a red headed step child, and why does Windows still have all the stability of an alchohoic at his first A.A. meeting?
VaMage
American by Birth, But Southern by the Grace of God.
jbwhite99
July 10, 2009 at 10:13pm
If you are going to put all of this "classic" software in there, where is OS/2?
And for that matter, perhaps I missed it, but Microsoft Basic should be in there, along with Turbo Pascal, and 123. 123 revolutionized business in the 80's, and how many people learned programming with Turbo Pascal?
Looking at people talking about their first computer - my personal first PC was the Radio Shack Color Computer (still have it in a box after 27 years). But the first system I used was a TRS-80 Model 2. Our school's PC had 4 500kb 8" floppy drives, and I used it to store our school's football stats on, back in 1981.
renodude18
July 10, 2009 at 1:50am
The first computer i got was packard bell that came bundled with windows 3.1 and later i upgraded it to windows 95 and then i upgraded to the Compaq presario in 1998, the packard bell although it was old was a great computer up until its death just after getting the compaq, to this day i still dont know why it stopped working, the compaq on the other hand was much faster and was bundled with windows 98, later upgraded to ME (that was a mistake and went back 98 with much relief!) the computer was much crappier when running games but surfing the internet and writing CD's and playing music was great on it, i later upgraded it to windows xp just to see how it would run, the computer had a pentium 3 and it ran xp well and i upgraded the video card and it was finnaly a great computer and with more ram with the maximum of 768MB SDRAM and a upgraded 40GB IDE HDD it was a badass of its day, but i had already upgraded to a DELL Dimension 2XXX something it had a pentium 4 and it was a great computer that ended up dying right after the warranty ended.. a quick buy after that was my first AMD Computer which was a HP Pavilion, i was going to go with a Compaq but found out they had become crappy and taken over by HP, the HP works today as a Media center pc with a 512mb AGP graphics, vista, 1gb ddr ram and a 500GB Hard drive and a wireless card, i then upgraded to my first APPLE, it was a macbook, intel, i had used at work an ibook g4 but it really wasnt mine, i loved using it but didnt think it would work with my gaming, video editing, drafting... the new macbook or was new macbook had proved me wrong by letting me run windows for my drafting and gaming... on the desktop end i have now a gateway DX4200-09 a second AMD computer with a quad-core processing power... my next upgrade will be to a mac pro in a year thats if thats its name a year from now, i'm moving to mac because its becoming easier to use and i dont like the way windows is moving and i wont dare to use linux again, my media center is due to change to a mac mini in a month or two... i like windows 7 and am using it now because i couldnt stand the vista it came with and dont really want to go back to xp....
n0ctis
July 08, 2009 at 7:53pm
My first box was an Acer 486SX running at 20MHz (33MHz if you pushed the "Turbo" button). I forget how much RAM I had but the HDD was 83.5MiB and had MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups 3.1 running on it (a configuration I emulate in VirtualPC for nostalgia).
.: vires et honos :.
arch-chancellor
July 08, 2009 at 5:56pm
How much did this hardware, software, and OSes originally cost?
pastorbob
July 08, 2009 at 10:25am
My first computer was a Heath H89 with a 2 Mhz Z80, 32k of RAM and a SSSD 5-1/4" Floppy disk drive that held 100K per disk. I built it from a kit that was much more complicated than the component level builds I do today. Soldering skills were an absolute necessity. I eventually upgraded it to a 4 Mhz Z-80, (again soldering skills required), 64K of RAM and a different floppy controller with external drives that allowed me to store 720K per disk. This upgrade allowed me to run CP/M 2.2 rather than the proprietary HDOS that came with the system. Heath eventually came out with a 10 meg. hard drive upgrade that cost $3000, which was way too pricey for me. I built the system in 1981 and used it until 1990 when I donated it to a church in Iowa. But before doing so I played the game Adventure through to the end several times. Not to mention Dungeons and Dragons.
One of the annoyances of CP/M was that any time you swapped disks, you had to do a Ctrl-C or you would get an error when you tried to read the new disk. But if you were interested in writing custom applications you had everything you needed to do so. It came with an assembler, Microsoft BASIC and there was also a Pascal compiler available for $$49.95 called Turbo Pascal. I did several programs in Turbo Pascal and wrote several articles for a magazine entitled Sextant Magazine sharing my software gems. Using Turbo Pascal I could include in line assemby code that would access directly video memory directly. This increased execuation speeds exponentially.
But alas I am rambling too far down memory lane. I find myself on a maze of twisty little passages all alike. Or is it a twisty little maze of passages all alike?
tony487
July 21, 2009 at 7:34am
Wow. In 1994, when I thought I wanted to be an engineer, I had a TurboPascal course. Fun times...
This is a hybrid. This is a cross, ah, of Bluegrass, Kentucky
Bluegrass, Featherbed Bent, and Northern California Sensemilia. The
amazing stuff about this is, that you can play 36 holes, take it home and just get stoned to the bejeezus belt
AZWizo
July 08, 2009 at 6:07am
Wow, I still have my original Windows 3.11 install floppies to this day. Gosh those were the days!
RT
DIV P {
MARGIN: 0px
}
www.be-anonymous.tk
AhsGrad1973
July 08, 2009 at 4:25am
When I was in the Air Force in the early years of the 80's, I worked with CP/M, using WordStar as a text editor to write programs using DBase II. Later, used Clipper to compile the code to create stand along executables. And when we received PC clones, using MS-DOS, we used the DBase III and ported our code over to run on those systems.
Elucidate
July 07, 2009 at 10:59pm
This may be too much information but when I see pictures of an IBM PC I have to reminisce back to my computer camp days in Modus Connecticut. I spent two sessions (i.e. 4 weeks) at a computer camp when I was early teens. That computer camp occupied a retreat for a few months that was patronized by dignitary's children from world wide countries. At that camp we learned to program IBM Basic and Apple Pascal on apple II, II+ and IIe. What was it...Zork the narrative game of choice back then? Our camp wrote a game for that as a project. Lightning did strike a tree right out side of my cabin. In any case, I may have the original IBM manuals shown in the article in addition to the Lotus manuals from back then. Ah, childhood days.
Yikes how lame...I even have a fully functional Summit K08 LED digital calculator from 1971 that my dad gave to me. You turn the dial to increase the significant digits. And it is rechargeable, even back then.
If you liked the Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, you'll love the Endless Universe- Beyond the big bang theory by Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok.
The Relic
July 07, 2009 at 9:57pm
A very good series of articles, but as for Wolfenstein 3D... Did ID popularize the FPS? Undoubtedly. Did they create it? Undoubtedly...not. Battlezone (for the arcades) predated Wolf 3D by 11 years in the arcades, and I don't think even that was the first (gaming from a first-person perspective has existed since at least Atari's Night Driver).
Asevening
July 13, 2009 at 9:51am
There is a difference, Battlezone was just some green lines and you were in a tank. It's still a first person shooter, but to me (and probably not to everyone) a First Person Shooter is spent more on foot. Like I said though, if it is a first person viewpoint AND you're shooting things or projecting something it's an FPS. I just never really think of Mechwarrior as an FPS is all. Wolf really brought the FPS into the limelight because it was done right. They used ray casting for developing the game that really changed the face of it all. If you're going to get all technical about it you could pick out Flight Simulator and even some earlier games that were FP viewpoints. Though Wolfenstein, by the way they had developed it, really did enhance and popularize the FPS.
nekollx
July 08, 2009 at 11:17am
so thisNight Driver was a First Person SHOOTER as well?
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Coming soon to Lulu.com --Tokusatsu Heroes--
Five teenagers, one alien ghost, a robot, and the fate of the world.
The Relic
July 08, 2009 at 11:35am
Didn't say it was...I just said it was gaming from the first person perspective. Battlezone WAS an FPS, however. But I recall hearing about an earlier FPS (I just don't remember the name of it, however).
