How a $50,000 clone of CP/M rode the IBM PC deal into the most valuable monopoly in software history, fought the 640K barrier for a decade, papered DOS over with a graphical shell, unified consumers and engineers on Windows 95, ran two completely different operating systems in parallel for years, and finally collapsed them into a single NT kernel whose Win32 ABI Microsoft has refused to break for thirty years.
Operating-Systems
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The Story of MS-DOS and Windows -
The Story of Unix How a discarded operating system, salvaged from the wreckage of Multics on a spare PDP-7 at Bell Labs in 1969, became the common ancestor of nearly every computer that matters today — through a fateful rewrite in C, an antitrust decree that gave it away cheap, two decades of lawsuits and fragmentation, and a free kernel that arrived just in time to inherit the world.
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The Story of Mac OS: From Cooperative Multitasking to Apple Silicon Forty years of the Macintosh operating system, from the memory-protection-free original of 1984, through the Copland death march and the NeXT acquisition that brought Steve Jobs back, to the BSD-and-Mach foundation of Mac OS X and the three processor transitions that ended with Apple Silicon.