Electromechanical Computer

Let’s turn to history to discover the origins of operating systems. The first commercial OS was the GM-NAA I/O. It appeared for the IBM 704 computer in 1956. All computers before then worked without any OS because they didn’t have the high computational speed that requires an OS.

Tabulators

Let’s consider the first electromechanical computer. Herman Hollerith constructed it in 1890 and called it the tabulator. The tabulator does not require an OS and a program, in the modern sense. It only performs a limited set of arithmetic operations, and its hardware design defines them.

The tabulator loads input data for computation from punched cards. These cards look like sheets of thick paper with holes punched in them. It works in the following steps: