Historical Note

Historically, system software has been viewed in a number of different ways since the invention of computers. The original computers were so expensive that their use for such clerical jobs as language translation was viewed as a dangerous waste of scarce resources. Early system developers seem to have consistently underestimated the difficulty of producing working programs, but it did not take long for them to realize that letting the computer spend a few minutes on the clerical job of assembling a user program was less expensive than having the programmer hand assemble it and then spend hours of computer time debugging it. As a result, by 1960, assembly language was widely accepted, the new high level language, FORTRAN, was attracting a growing user community, and there was widespread interest in the development of new languages such as Algol, COBOL, and LISP.
Early operating systems were viewed primarily as tools for efficiently allocating the scarce and expensive resources of large central computers among numerous competing users. Since compilers and other program preparation tools frequently consumed a large fraction of an early machine's resources, it was common to integrate these into the operating system. With the emergence of large scale general purpose operating systems in the mid 1960's, however, the resource management tools available became powerful enough that they could efficiently treat the resource demands of program preparation the same as any other application.
The separation of program preparation from program execution came to pervade the computer market by the early 1970's, when it became common for computer users to obtain editors, compilers, and operating systems from different vendors. By the mid 1970's, however, programming language research and operating system development had begun to converge. New operating systems began to incorporate programming language concepts such as data types, and new languages began to incorporate traditional operating system features such as concurrent processes. Thus, although a programming language must have a textual representation, and although an operating system must manage physical resources, both have, as their fundamental purpose, the support of user programs, and both must solve a number of the same problems.
The minicomputer and microcomputer revolutions of the mid 1960's and the mid 1970's involved, to a large extent, a repetition of the earlier history of mainframe based work. Thus, early programming environments for these new hardware generations were very primitive; these were followed by integrated systems supporting a single simple language (typically some variant of BASIC on each generation of minicomputer and microcomputer), followed by general purpose operating systems for which many language implementations and editors are available, from many different sources.
The world of system software has varied from the wildly competitive to domination by large monopolistic vendors and pervasive standards. In the 1950's and early 1960's, there was no clear leader and there were a huge number of wildly divergent experiments. In the late 1960's, however, IBM's mainframe family, the System 360, running IBM's operating system, OS/360, emerged as a monopolistic force that persists to the present in the corporate data processing world (the IBM 390 Enterprise Server is the current flagship of this line, running the VM operating system).
The influence of IBM's near monopoly of the mainframe marketplace cannot be underestimated, but it was not total, and in the emerging world of minicomputers, there was wild competition in the late 1960's and early 1970's. The Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11 was dominant in the 1970's, but never threatened to monopolize the market, and there were a variety of different operating systems for the 11. In the 1980's, however, variations on the Unix operating system originally developed at Bell Labs began to emerge as a standard development environment, running on a wide variety of computers ranging from minicomputers to supercomputers, and featuring the new programming language C and its descendant C++.
The microcomputer marketplace that emerged in the mid 1970's was quite diverse, but for a decade, most microcomputer operating systems were rudimentary, at best. Early versions of Mac OS and Microsoft Windows presented sophisticated user interfaces, but on versions prior to about 1995 these user interfaces were built on remarkably crude underpinnings.
The marketplace of the late 1990's, like the marketplace of the late 1960's, came to be dominated by a monopoly, this time in the form of Microsoft Windows. The chief rivals are MacOS and Linux, but there is yet another monopolistic force hidden behind all three operating systems, the pervasive influence of Unix and C. MacOS X is fully Unix compatable. Windows NT offers full compatability, and so, of course, does Linux. Much of the serious development work under all three systems is done in C++, and new languages such as Java seem to be simple variants on the theme of C++. It is interesting to ask, when we will we have a new creastive period when genuinely new programming environments will be developed the way they were on the mainframes of the early 1960's or the minicomputers of the mid 1970's?