#DESKTOP SYSTEM MONITOR TOOLS SOFTWARE#

Operating systems typically had some internal monitoring services (for managing such things as multiple users and virtual memory). It wouldn’t be inaccurate to characterize the mainframe (and early minicomputer) era as The Age Of (Almost) No Monitoring. So in this post, we’ll take a big-picture look at monitoring tool history, and in the process, touch on some of the key points and highlights.

#DESKTOP SYSTEM MONITOR TOOLS SOFTWARE#

More than anything else, the real importance of the history of monitoring tools lies not in the story of any specific tool (as interesting as that may be in some cases), but in the overall course of that history-where it has taken the software development/deployment community, and where it is likely to lead. (I’m sure that some last-one-standing die-hard out there still swears by the CP/M DDT X command…) Why Care About the History of Monitoring Software? If I forget to mention your favorite monitoring tool, mea culpa. However, in the paragraphs below, I’ll cover the basics of how monitoring software has evolved along with computer systems over the decades. To be sure, there is no way to even start to do justice to this topic in a single blog post. In this post, we survey the history of monitoring tools. (If you are one of those people, more power to you.)

Monitoring software has been around in one form or another since the early years of computing, and few people who are active in the profession today were working then. How have monitoring tools evolved over the years? That’s a big question, and one that few people are capable of answering based on personal experience.

Desktop system monitor tools