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Top 10 Operating Systems

8 March 2007

The most popular computer operating systems running on today’s enterprise business servers and personal computers:

1. Solaris - The free and open source Solaris Operating System by Sun Microsystems, available on hundreds of x64/x86 platforms and supported for thousands of open source and ISV applications—has the largest installed-base of any other commercial UNIX or Linux distribution on the planet.
2. Windows - Microsoft Windows, the successors to the very popular MS-DOS, was announced in 1983, and the first version, Windows 1.0, was finally released in 1985. The latest version, Windows Vista, was released in 2007.
3. Mac OS X - Made by Apple, the pioneering Mac OS was introduced with the first Macintosh computers in 1984, and it was the first commercial operating system to include a GUI. Mac OS X was developed as an entirely new, BSD-based operating system that runs on a more advanced processor (the PowerPC) but which maintains backward compatibility with the Mac OS (which runs on the Motorola m68k). The Mac OS X consists of Darwin and the Mach microkernel (an advanced kernel developed at Carnegie-Mellon University) together with Apple’s proprietary Aqua GUI (which is widely regarded as the best in the industry). Apple is currently completing a transition of its hardware and OS X from the PowerPC to x86 processors.
4. HP-UX - HP-UX is a proprietary flavor of UNIX developed by Hewlett-Packard for its HP 9000 series of business servers. HP-UX 1.0 was released in 1986.
5. AIX - IBM AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive) started as a proprietary flavor of UNIX launched by IBM in 1990 for use on its mainframe computers. Today AIX is an open, UNIX operating system that allows you to run applications on IBM UNIX servers. The latest version, AIX 5L, in combination with IBM’s Virtualization offerings, provides you with new levels of flexibility and performance. AIX 5L delivers high levels of security, integration, flexibility and reliability—essential for meeting the demands of today’s information technology environments.
6. BSD - BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) is a version of UNIX that was developed at the University of California at Berkeley (UCB) in the 1970s. It is the ancestor of the modern BSDs (i.e., FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Darwin) and its technology was also incorporated into the other Unix-like operating systems as well as into other operating systems, including Microsoft Windows. The final version was 4.4BSD. FreeBSD is the most popular of the BSD operating systems, accounting for approximately 80 percent of BSD installations (at least until Darwin came onto the scene). FreeBSD was begun in early 1993 based on 4.3BSD, and the first version, 1.0, was released in December of that year.
7. Red Hat Linux - Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the most popular open source Linux platform.
8. SUSE Linux - Owned by Novell, SUSE is best-engineered, high performance Linux running on most x86, x64, PowerPC, Itanium 2, and z9 (IBM mainframe) servers.
9. Ubuntu - Ubuntu is a community developed, linux-based operating system that is perfect for laptops, desktops and servers. It contains all the applications you need - a web browser, presentation, document and spreadsheet software, instant messaging and much more.
10. Linspire - Formally Lindows, Linspire is a full-featured desktop Linux operating system like Microsoft Windows XP or Apple Mac OSX.

One Response to “Top 10 Operating Systems”

1. Jan C Says:
   May 18th, 2007 at 5:50 pm

   I’d like to mention a few mobile operating systems:
   - Symbian OS
   - Palm OS
   - Pocket PC

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