Before Linux, Windows, and macOS became the desktop map, the operating system was a technician flipping switches on a mainframe. From 1969 to 2026 the story is a tree: Unix, DOS, Xerox GUIs, Linus's kernel, the pocket with iOS and Android. The text from 2013 stopped at Firefox OS. Below, the same line — with what survived, what died, and what the UNIX® label still covers.
Mainframes: the OS was still a person
In the 1950 decade, the computer occupied the room and the operator occupied the system. Flipping switches on and off, changing panels, waiting for the light. GM-NAA I/O (1956) and IBM's IBSYS already automated batch processing; OS/360 (1966) tried to be the system for the System/360 family. CTSS at MIT and Multics (MIT, GE, Bell Labs) invented timesharing. In March 1969 AT&T left Multics. What remained was a PDP-7 and three weeks of vacation.
Unix, BSD, and System V
Ken Thompson wrote an assembler, editor, and kernel on the PDP-7 in August 1969. The name — Unics, later Unix — is Brian Kernighan's pun on Multics. The first manual dates to November 3, 1971. In 1973 the system gained pipes and was rewritten in C; in July 1974 Thompson and Dennis Ritchie published in Communications of the ACM. AT&T did not sell software (a decree from 1956), so universities copied it. It was not “closed source” in the sense of 2026: it was research traveling on tape.
The first Berkeley Software Distribution came out in March 1978 (Bill Joy), not in 1977. 4.2BSD (1983) added the TCP/IP the internet still speaks. On the other side, AT&T commercialized System V (1983); SVR4 (1988) tried to unify the two lineages. POSIX (1988) and The Open Group's Single UNIX Specification (1996) are the UNIX® brand's contract. The full story, with the USL vs. BSDi lawsuit and the register for 2026: UNIX — The Origin of Systems.
XENIX is not a Unix “that Microsoft did not develop.” In 1980 Microsoft licensed Unix from AT&T and sold one of the most widely installed Unix systems of the PC era; in the 1990 decade the product went to SCO. UnixWare/OpenServer now belong to Xinuos.
Micros: DOS, Apple, Atari, Amiga
On the Apple II, the disk gained Apple DOS (1978), written by third parties: catalog, open, delete, boot. Atari DOS (1979) and Apple SOS (1980, Apple III) are from the same floppy-disk generation. Microsoft bought and renamed Tim Paterson's 86-DOS (QDOS) from Seattle Computer Products: MS-DOS / IBM PC DOS in 1981, the IBM PC's OS.
AmigaOS (1985) arrived with true preemption and Carl Sassenrath's Exec — the Commodore desktop that contemporary PCs did not have. GEOS (1986) put windows on the C64 and Apple II. None of this descended from Unix; the home PC spoke DOS until Windows 95 pretended otherwise.
The interface: Xerox, Lisa, Mac, Windows
The GUI did not originate at Apple. Xerox PARC's Alto and Star, with the system Pilot (1981), already had a mouse, icons, and windows. Lisa (1983) and Macintosh (1984, System 1) brought that to stores. Windows 1.0 (20 November 1985) was a graphical shell over MS-DOS, not a kernel — tiles, without true overlapping windows. 2.0 (1987) overlapped them; 3.0 (1990) and 3.1 (1992), sold in the millions, became Brazil's desktop of the decade.
NeXTSTEP (1989) is Steve Jobs's Unix after Apple: Mach + BSD + Display PostScript. Apple bought NeXT in 1996, killed Copland, and built Mac OS X on top of it.
The Windows lineage
Windows 95 (August 1995) established the Start Menu, taskbar, and Explorer — the desktop that 8 tried to erase and 10 brought back. 98 and 98 SE; ME (2000) was the last of the 9x line and the most hated. Windows 2000 (NT 5.0) was the serious branch; XP (2001) mixed the two and remained supported until 2014. Vista (2006) paid for Aero; 7 (2009) recouped the loss. 8 (2012) bet on tiles and tablets; 10 (2015) retreated. The Windows 11 release came on 5 October 2021; Windows 10 lost support on 14 October 2025. On gaming desktops 11 is the majority; on servers, NT continues. WSL 2 embeds a real Linux kernel — there is no “WSL 3”; what Microsoft announced at Build 2026 was WSL containers.
Windows Phone (2010) and 10 Mobile died: Microsoft shelved the project in 2017 and support ended in 2019. OS/2 (1987, IBM + Microsoft, later just IBM) lost the desktop and became a footnote. Workplace OS, IBM's “runs everything” on PowerPC, never really left the lab.
GNU, Linux, and the distros
MINIX (Andrew Tanenbaum, 1987) is educational, not “cheap Unix for the home.” Linus Torvalds compiled the kernel on MINIX; he did not copy its code. The announcement on comp.os.minix dates to 25 August 1991. The userland is GNU. Linus's story on this blog: The history of Linus Torvalds. The 35 years: Linux at 35.
Debian (1993, Ian Murdock) and Slackware (Patrick Volkerding, the same year) came out of SLS. Red Hat (1995) became a company; SUSE (1994) did too. Fedora (2003) is Red Hat's community branch. Ubuntu (20 October 2004) made Debian approachable and still releases two versions a year — LTS is the one servers use. Linux Mint (2006) sat on top of Ubuntu. Gentoo (2002) compiled everything. openSUSE (2006) opened SUSE.
In Brazil, Kurumin (2003–2009) by Carlos E. Morimoto — Debian/Knoppix, later NG 8 on Ubuntu 8 — was the first Linux many people saw, with ClicaAki replacing the panel. The biography: The story of Carlos Morimoto and Kurumin Linux.
What the catalog from 2013 did not see: systemd (2010; Fedora 15, Debian 8) became almost everyone's init; containers (Docker, Kubernetes) became the way to package userland; the kernel accepted Rust starting with 6.1 (December 2022) — the language: The history of the Rust language. SteamOS 3 (Arch + Gamescope) moved beyond the Deck and, in 2026, reached other handhelds. Linux is not “the third desktop”: it is the OS of phones (Android), Chromebooks, supercomputers, and increasingly consoles.
Apple: from System to Darwin
System 6 (1988), System 7 (1991). Copland (the “System 8”) was aborted. Rhapsody was the NeXT → Mac bridge. Mac OS X 10.0 (2001) brought Darwin: kernel XNU (Mach + BSD, hybrid — not “two microkernels”), Dock, protected memory. Tiger (10.4, 2005) was the first OS X to run on Intel. The name became OS X, then macOS. It has been UNIX 03 certified since Leopard (2007). In 2026 The Open Group's register lists macOS 26 Tahoe (Apple silicon and Intel). iOS began as iPhone OS (2007) and got its name in 2010; iPadOS split off in 2019. watchOS and tvOS belong to the same Darwin family, with the closed store.
The pocket: Android and what did not last
Google bought Android Inc. (2003) in 2005. The Open Handset Alliance announced the system in 2007; 1.0 came out in September 2008. The kernel is Linux; the userland and drivers, in practice, are not. In June 2025 came Android 16; on 16 June 2026 Android 17 started on Pixel — the “latest” version in the old text was 4.3. Chrome OS (2011) is Google's Linux on laptops: the app is the browser; Chromium OS remains the open branch.
Symbian dominated phones before the iPhone and died at Nokia. webOS (Palm, 2009) lives on LG TVs. Bada (Samsung, 2010) gave way to Tizen, now watches and televisions, not smartphones. Mozilla killed Firefox OS in 2016. Canonical dropped Ubuntu Touch in 2017; UBports maintains it. Windows Phone has already been covered. KaiOS inherited some of Firefox OS on feature phones. Huawei's HarmonyOS is another branch — outside this map.
Consoles and the UNIX label in 2026
The Xbox OS from the text of 2013 shipped: Xbox One (2013) runs a lean Windows; Series X/S stay in the same house. Orbis OS on PS4 has FreeBSD underneath; PS5 did not change families. They were not “in development”: they shipped.
Oracle ended OpenSolaris; the open code that remains is illumos (OpenIndiana, OmniOS, SmartOS) — not “Oracle's OpenSolaris.” Solaris 11 still exists as a closed product. AIX 7 (IBM POWER) and HP-UX 11i V3 (HPE Integrity) remain in the UNIX register. Who can put UNIX® on the box, according to The Open Group's register in September 2026:
- Apple — macOS 26 Tahoe (Apple silicon and Intel), UNIX 03
- IBM — AIX 7 (POWER), UNIX 03 and UNIX V7; z/OS under an older certification
- HPE — HP-UX 11i V3 on Integrity (Itanium), UNIX 03
Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, illumos: Unix-like, without the label. The brand map: UNIX — The Origin of Systems.
Wrap-up
The technician at the switches became init. The PDP-7 became the kernel in your pocket. Xerox taught clicking; Microsoft taught the Start Menu; Apple taught certified Unix on the laptop; Linux taught the rest of the planet not to pay for the brand. Pipes, /usr, POSIX — those did not go away. The languages born on this ground: Go, Rust, The 7 main programming languages.
Ritchie: The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System · UNIX® register: The Open Group · Android 17: developer.android.com.