The Evolution of Operating Systems

Abstract

The author looks back on the first half century of operating systems and selects his favorite papers on classic operating systems. These papers span the entire history of the field from the batch processing systems of the 1950s to the distributed systems of the 1990s. Each paper describes an operating system that combines significant ideas in an elegant way. Most of them were written by the pioneers who had the visions and the drive to make them work. The author summarizes each paper and concludes that operating systems are based on a surprisingly small number of ideas of permanent interest.