I'll bring up one I've mentioned a couple of times, & that's
Operating Systems (second edition) by H.M. Deitel (
egad! I had no idea I was sitting on a veritable gold mine). I know there's a third edition, but I'm not going to recommend something I've not read.
It's a text book, & has the obvious editorial bent of a text book, but it's a great overview from the days of yore, when Windows was nothing but a graphical shell for DOS, UNIX was going to be on 80% of computers, and the few PCs would run OS/2. It also covers MVS/VM & Mac OS, & dedicates a pretty fair section to networking basics.
Some choice quotes:
11.1 The 1980s saw the introduction of highly parallel architectures. The 1990s will see the development of concurrent programming languages and operating systems to control and make effective use of parallel hardware structures.
16.16 TCP/IP is important to operating system students because it is so widely used. Its success has been mostly limited to the United States; it has not been accepted as a world-wide standard. Many industry observers believe that TCP/IP-based networks will be popular through the 1990s, but they will gradually be displaced by OSI-based network solutions.
16.17 It is clear that OSI will become the primary networking protocols of the next decade or two.
(sorry, I find the OSI stuff hilarious)
19.16 Microsoft and IBM have developed a strong partnership devoted to evolving MS-DOS and OS/2 as the standards of the IBM-compatible personal computing industry. The UNIX and Macintosh operating systems have their large and loyal followings. Can all these standards prosper? Will one of them displace the others and dominate the marketplace, or will they all merge to produce one system that will satisfy the requirements of today's diverse user communities? We may have to wait until the mid 1990s to answer these questions.
