Familiar names like Windows, macOS, and Linux dominate the world of operating systems. Beneath that mainstream layer, though, lives a shadowy ecosystem of niche projects that often carry strange ...

Probably not too many people around the world celebrated November 1st, 2023, but on this momentous date FreeBSD celebrated its 30th birthday. As the first original fork of the first complete and open ...

First launched in 2018, the open-source SerenityOS offers its users a stripped-back GUI-based operating system that melds a 1990s desktop aesthetic with a focus on productivity for power users. It isn ...

"The UNIX Operating System" is a documentary that Bell Labs made in 1982 about UNIX's significance, impact and usability. Even 10 years after its first installation, it's still an introduction to the ...

WTF?! Nintendo positioned the Famicom to feel more like a computer than its Western counterpart – the NES – hence the name Family Computer. The additional storage and memory from the Disk System ...

Long before Windows, and even before MS-DOS, Microsoft sold a Unix-based operating system it called Xenix in 1980. It was the first OS made by the company, but it eventually sold it off in 1987. On ...

Ultimately, every problem in the constantly evolving IT software stack becomes a database problem, which is why there are 418 different databases and datastores in the DB Engines rankings and there ...

Microsoft finally open sources DOS 1.0 - and it's so much more than the code ...

Looking for non-Linux open-source options? From ghosts of past operating systems to fascinating works in progress, here are ...

One of the most common ways of comparing the processing power of some microcontroller or older smartphone in a fantastical way was to say that they had more processing power than the Apollo Guidance ...

Ars Technica has been separating the signal from the noise for over 25 years. With our unique combination of technical savvy and wide-ranging interest in the technological arts and sciences, Ars is ...