Creaky Operating Systems Form IT Foundations

maotx writes "The Washington Post has an article on how aging operating systems are still widely used. The article states that "The research firm IDC estimates that of the roughly 514 million paid-for copies of Windows on desktops and laptops worldwide at the end of 2004, almost 21 percent were the aging Win 95, 98 and Millennium Edition releases." That equates to around 108 million copies being used."

Comments

Maybe a wake up for the OS Companies?

[PepeGSay]

This sounds like a message for the users, but maybe it is a wakeup for the OS makers. If that many people still see their OS as viable and are willing to use it... then should the OS companies really be holding a gun to their head in what can only be an attempt to wring more money from them?

Re:Maybe a wake up for the OS Companies?

[typhoonius]

I was thinking about this earlier. It's a common karma-grab to post something about how software today is bloated and worthless and how all the interim upgrades have just been shoved down our throats. But in defense of the software giants, modern operating systems really are quite a bit better than the ones from ten years ago.

Windows, for instance, moved its low-level internals to a much more clean and stable codebase. Longhorn has the potential to do the same for the high-level components (and maybe even provide some fascimile of security).

Compared to its "Classic" releases, Mac OS has arguably regressed in terms of speed and UI consistency, but it's rock-solid stable now (and it's getting faster, and it's constantly getting useful new features such as Expose and Spotlight).

And on the Unix side, we didn't even have KDE or GNOME ten years ago.

And across the board, we have niceties such as USB, wi-fi, and journaling file systems that we take for granted now.

If an old system still works, then, by all means, keep using it, but personally, I'm glad I don't have to reboot my computer every day anymore.

Not everyone is a geek

[FunWithHeadlines]

And there is a sizable portion of the computer-user population that views their computer as a simple tool for a specific job. Grandma wants her email, and so to her it's an email receiver and not much else. Any ol' OS will do the job for her, so whatever she has is what she's used to is what she'll keep. Forever. It's not as if machines break down all that often. And if all you use the machine for is one simple job, it doesn't seem slow to the user. It's good enough.

It's like the toaster to them. Who buys a new toaster or blender until the old one breaks? Same with computers for a surprising number of people. I've seen it with my relatives, I've seen it with friends. I've been appalled by what some of them use, but talk to them about upgrading and it's "No thanks, it works just fine."

I used NT 4.0 for a long time because

[Anonymous Cowdog]

I used NT 4.0 forever because it just had such a workmanlike user interface.

Actually, ObOnTopic, the most interesting thing to me about this topic is how easily Microsoft killed NT 4.0 by simply witholding support for USB. NT4 actually was, ah, very workable, if not workmanlike, except for that crucial missing USB connectivity in the later years.

I still use win 98s

[Turn-X Alphonse]

I still use Wndows 98 because I don't want to pay for an OS I won't use for more then a few months. I'm switching to Ubuntu Linux soon and if my modem wasn't a winmodem I'd already be using it.

Qemu, vmware, bochs as archival software.

[dameron]

About six months ago I had to access some information on an aging (as in 13 year old) PICK server. The multiport board was fried years ago and I couldn't raise a terminal on the serial port. After a few hours of trying to capture the data I had the person who needed access to it copy it to a pad of paper from the screen.

Not good, to say the least, but the server in question hadn't been fired up in years.

Since then I've been putting disk images of our currently running database software on a Qemu image along with a copy of the qemu source and binaries on a DVD (and in the future the media might change, but you get the idea).

For emergency situations I can put a dvd into any available machine and have a "live" version of our DB running in minutes. I'd have loved it if I could've booted that PICK server in an emulator.

-dameron

Re:Insurance company.

[TykeClone]

Fedline is the old (and still used) system used by banks to communicate with the Fed. It's used to originate and receive wires, ACH, MICR Files (check information), and other stuff. Security was "job 1" for this software and it was apparently developed sometime in the 1980's.

The system uses an ISA hardware encryption board and runs on DOS.

In the late 90's, the Fed was working on developing a Fedline system for Windows (NT at the time), but was unable to deliver it.

They are now working on a web based solution (not sure about how much more secure that will be than an NT based solution...) which, if adequately secure, will be much nicer to work with than the old Fedline solution.

The one nice thing about Fedline is that it gives you a place to put old, out of service machines. My most current Fedline machine is a Pentium-90 with a bunch of RAM - horribly over performing for the task, but it met the specs required to run Fedline (ISA slot, DOS compatible) when the last one died.