Breaking the Window

Third Party Operating Systems & their Impact - Rough

By Kevin Feldhaus

Thesis• Since 1989, Microsoft has held a monopoly in the

operating system market. The only competitor anyone knows at all is Apple, who even then holds a small share in the market. In this market, third party competitors are beaten to the ground and forgotten. Because of this, my project is intended to cover the "little guys," the people who tried to break in to the market but couldn't (and in rare cases, could). I shall provide info on the third party competitors in this market, such as companies like Be Inc., IBM and even small-time hobbyists like Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux.

Mac OS/OS X• Released in 1984, it predates Windows 1.0 by 1 year (1985). Mac OS was created

to be the operating system of the Macintosh, successor to the failed Lisa. An emulated version, MacWorks, was sold with the Lisa 2, later renamed the Macintosh XL. The OS went through multiple revisions, and those revisions had different versions (Finder, MultiFinder, etc.) until System 7, when the versions were unified into one kernel. Before OS 8, all versions of the operating system were simply given the “System” prefix, followed by the version number. The first major operating system, Mac OS was discontinued after 1999 and was replaced with Mac OS X (10). Mac OS X itself has gone through many versions, named after big cats (the current version, 10.5, is Lion). Mac OS X is currently the only truly major competitor against Windows.

OS/2

• Microsoft worked with IBM to create OS/2, but abandoned it after version 1, making OS/2 the next major third party OS: OS/2 was widely used by banks worldwide. As said by Bill Gates himself: "Let's be serious.... Name a bank that didn't use OS/2." OS/2 was discontinued in 2001 after the release of version 4.52 and lives on in the OS eComStation. OS/2, while powerful, was not supported by many companies and software was scarce. Most software people know was released by a company called Stardock, who continued to release software for a short time after the death of OS/2.

BeOS• In 1990, Jean Louis Gassée and Steve Sakoman

left Apple to create their own computer. With others who left Apple, they founded Be Inc. in 1991 and began work on BeOS. The first versions ran on AT&T’s failed Hobbit processor, but later versions ran on PowerPC. In 1996, it saw its first release on a computer called the BeBox, which was discontinued the next year. After the failure of the BeBox it was redesigned to work with other architectures and lived until 2001, when Be Inc. was liquidated after a decade in business. It lives on in the open source OS Haiku.

BeOS 2• BeOS had massive strength in multimedia, supporting many audio and video

codecs as well as file formats. BeOS was based pre-emptive multitasking, which immediately stops a program when it is not using resources, compared to co-operative multitasking, where each and every program must be coded to stop when it is not using resources: if it is not coded for that, then it will continue to use resources until the system is unable to continue running and hangs. At the end of 1996, Gassée attempted to sell Be to Apple, first wanting over $500 million dollars, but was brought down to $200 million, despite Apple offering $175 million; the total investment in Be at the time was $20 million. Gassée was willing to accept this offer, but instead offered a final price of $275 million, at which point Apple refused and gave up. Had they accepted the offer, BeOS would have essentially become the eventual base for Mac OS X. Instead, the honor went to a version of NeXTSTEP called OPENSTEP, developed by Steve Jobs’ NeXT Coporation. BeOS was essentially shunned as “unfinished” and rejected.

Linux• Linux began development in 1991 as a personal project of Linus

Torvalds. Linus, at the time, told people about its development via the newsgroup “comp.os.minix.” Linus was in the University of Helsinki while creating Linux, Version 0.01 was released to the Internet in September 1991, followed by 0.02 on October 5th. Linux slowly gained a group of dedicated followers who were willing to defend the project, even against Andrew Tanenbaum, creator of MINIX (Linus's inspiration). Eventually, version 1.0 was released in 1994, and due to its nature (free software), users began to modify it, creating multiple types of "distributions," most importantly Red Hat Linux and Debian, the two major distributions in the world of Linux. These have been modified as well, from the ever famous Ubuntu distribution to strange distributions like Hannah Montana Linux (yes, I'm serious!). Linux is the best known free and 3rd party OS, and its recognition is well deserved. Linux currently holds 1% of the desktop market, and will slowly gain its own share once people realize its value.

Solaris• Solaris began as SunOS in 1982. It was developed by

Sun Microsystems and intended for their servers and workstations, but in 1987, out of a partnership with AT&T, they began to develop what would become Solaris, which eventually replaced SunOS in 1991. Solaris was ahead of its time, creating and inventing new features with every new release. Solaris, however, was never free until 2005, when version 10 (actually 2.10) was released. The next year, Sun set up the OpenSolaris project, effectively making Solaris open source, but it was shut down along with Sun when Sun was purchased by Oracle in 2010. The OpenSolaris project continues as OpenIndiana.

AmigaOS• AmigaOS was originally created as a general purpose OS by

Amiga Corporation and was introduced in 1985. AmigaOS was introduced to the world by Commodore, who had purchased Amiga Corporation, and due to Commodore’s past computers being hailed for their quality games, the Amiga became equally as popular in the same fashion, losing its original roots and making the United Kingdom in particular an Amiga stronghold. When Commodore closed in 1994, the OS was developed by a company called Haage & Partner until version 3.9, when the license to the OS was turned over to Amiga Inc., who contracted development to Hyperion Entertainment, who then developed version 4. The OS only runs on PowerPC architectures. (There is a dedicated following to AmigaOS, with such a history it may take a few slides to even describe!)

Sources• Amiga, Inc. Amiga logo. 1996. Graphic. Amiga, Inc. Web. 2 Dec 2011. <http://www.amiga.com/grafx/03-2007/mAmigaLogo.jpg>.• Apple Inc. Mac OS 8/9 logo. 1997. Photograph. Wikipedia. Web. 2 Dec 2011.

<http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/81/Mac_OS_Logo_with_Text.svg/200px-Mac_OS_Logo_with_Text.svg.png>.• Apple Inc. Mac OS X logo. 2007. Graphic. Wikipedia. Web. 2 Dec 2011. <http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/db/OSXLeopard.svg/200px-

OSXLeopard.svg.png>.• Ewing, Larry. Tux. 1996. Graphic. Wikipedia. Web. 30 Nov 2011. <http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/35/Tux.svg/200px-

Tux.svg.png>.• Gassée, Jean Louis. Be Inc. logo. 1991. Graphic. Seeklogo. Web. 2 Dec 2011. <http://www.seeklogo.com/images/B/Be-logo-8B2EA60404-seeklogo.com.gif>• Hasan, Ragib. "History of Linux." University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. University of Illinois, 18 Oct 2005. Web. 16 Nov 2011.

<https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/rhasan/linux/>.• Knight, Gareth. "Amiga History Guide." Amiga history guide. N.p., 10 June 2007. Web. 16 Nov 2011. <http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/>.• Kranz, Tom. "The History of Solaris | Content for Reprint."Content for Reprint. Content for Reprint, 8 Dec 2008. Web. 5 Dec 2011.

<http://www.content4reprint.com/computers/operating-systems/the-history-of-solaris.htm>. • Lampert, Andrew. "The BeBox Zone - BeBox History." The BeBox Zone. The BeBox Zone, 2009. Web. 29 Nov 2011. <http://www.bebox.nu/history.php>.• Nadeau, Tom. "OS/2 Headquarters Home Page." OS/2 Headquarters. N.p., Jul 2003. Web. 16 Nov 2011. <http://www.os2hq.com/>.• Oracle Corporation. Solaris logo. 2009. Graphic. WikipediaWeb. 2 Dec 2011. <http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/3b/Solaris_OS_logo.svg/

200px-Solaris_OS_logo.svg.png>.• Singh, Amit. “A Brief History of Mac OS X." Mac OS X Internals. N.p., Dec 2003. Web. 16 Nov 2011.

<http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/ancient/whatismacosx/history.html>.• Singh, Amit. "Quest for /the/ Operating System." Kernelthread. N.p., Feb 2004. Web. 16 Nov 2011.

<http://kernelthread.com/publications/appleoshistory/6.html>.• Smith, Tony. "BeOS: the Mac OS X might-have-been." Reghardware. The Register, 30 Jan 2007. Web. 16 Nov 2011.

<http://www.reghardware.com/2007/01/30/forgotten_tech_beos/>.• Torvalds, Linus. "LINUX's History by Linus Torvalds." Carnegie Mellon . Carnegie Mellon, 31 Jul 1992. Web. 16 Nov 2011.

<http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/linux.history.html>.• Wardell, Brad. "Stardock's OS/2 history." Stardock Corporation. Stardock Corporation, n.d. Web. 29 Nov 2011.

<http://www.stardock.com/stardock/articles/article_sdos2.html>.