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10 OSes We Left Behind
CWmike writes "As the tech community gears up to celebrate Unix's 40th birthday this summer, one thing is clear: People do love operating systems. They rely on them, get exasperated by them and live with their little foibles. So now that we're more than 30 years into the era of the personal computer, Computerworld writers and editors, like all technology aficionados, find ourselves with lots of memories and reactions to the OSes of yesteryear (pics galore). We have said goodbye to some of them with regret. (So long, AmigaOS!) Some of them we tossed carelessly aside. (Adios, Windows Me!) Some, we threw out with great force. (Don't let the door hit you on the way out, MS-DOS 4.0!) Today we honor a handful of the most memorable operating systems and interfaces that have graced our desktops over the years. Plus: We take a look back at 40 years since Unix was introduced."
They left out Atari TOS!
Poke 53280,0
Poke 53281,0
New
Ready.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Ah the good ol' operating systems of yesteryear.
It was great and ahead of its time, but the Amiga was a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts.
The OS plus the hardware platform of Agnus, Denise, made the Amiga special.
The OS on its own was less special, even though it was far ahead of the glorified dos shell that windows was.
Um, Unix was insubordinate. Unix was late in its tasks. Unix didn't offer anything to the team - it didn't work well with Windows. Unix refused to take time off - it insisted on working all the time; even when other OSes wanted the time off.Unix is not a team player. Unix refuses to learn new technologies (specifics available one request). Unix made sexual advances to other OSes: tried to "hadnshake" with Windows, "Integrated" with OS X.
It is my profound conclusion and advice that Unix should be terminated. It is an "out of date" operating system and therefore; contributes to an"out of date" business model.
FTA: "Some of them we tossed carelessly aside. (Adios, Windows Me!)"
I took great care in building a trebuchet capable of tossing Windows Me far enough from in order to keep it from further damaging my poor, unsuspecting PC.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Operating+Systems&articleId=9129459&taxonomyId=89
Sigh. It's nice to see the pendants are alive and well on Slashdot.
My first 3 years of programming were spent on CDC 6600s running SCOPE. You learn a lot about efficient debugging when you're using punched cards and even a short job has a half hour turnaround time.
When I started out in the 70's it was the command line, and it really was just a line :-) Punch-cards & paper tape, an acoustic coupler the size of a Mini (car that is)
:^D
Fast forward 30 years....................... It's a bloody command line again.
One consolation though, my right shoulder doesn't hurt any more
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
I don't understand the criteria used to select these operating systems to remember. It's mostly consumer OSes, but then they throw in some hobby OSes (plus the bizarre X-Windows, which they admit is not an OS, and I claim is still alive).
The ones I remember most fondly include:
Pr1mos
Multics
Tops-20 (Twenex)
Tops-10
ITS
VMS
VM/CMS
MVS
RSTS
RSX
Ah OS/2 an amazing OS in many ways.
I remember on a Pentium 90 being able to actually WORK in an imaging application, while I was simultaneously both printing a document and copying a floppy disk.
All current OSes seem to momentarily halt to do one task or another even today.
Pendants? Like those things that hang off a jewelry?
(Sorry, I had to...)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
The last shot in the picture gallery of X is what a lot of my Debian servers look like. I still love twm. I generally just install it and gvim on a server and it's all the gui I ever need. I simply copy the system.twmrc file to root/.twmrc, add the keyword "RandomPlacement" and change that ugly green color to midnightblue.
Once I got used to the keyboard shortcuts I find it works really well. Of course on a server I'm generally just running multiple xterms and gvim. Oh and maybe a browser or an Xman page...
If you ask me, some things never go out of style. ;-)
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
No need to be so pendantic...
IMO, DOS 5.0 was the best OS Microsoft made.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
They get the not really gone part down. But, I mean its still the heart and soul of the majority of *Nix desktop environments for good or bad. And most of the folks using Linux or Solaris or BSD know that it is the case. By the way I still love NeXtstep - what an interface. Great for a lefty like me.
ACK
I hope you have learned the lesson: Try a new version of Windows only after the third service pack is released. Let others have the early adopter pain.
This was a really good article.
It comes along at the same time as this one:
http://technologizer.com/2009/03/26/whatever-happened-to/
This article is an amazing summary of 25 pieces of technology (HW, SW, services) that are still around but are (almost) completely forgotten by everyone. Good read.
The Amiga OS was great back in the day, and a lot of companies believe it or not used them (the LIRR for example), and used that OS long after the Amigas were being produced.
Oh, wait I guess it has been getting internal and external vanity surgery for a long time, and is now know as z/OS. It's still around, but not really what it used to be, but still can't get rid of nasty habits, like JCL and little boys.
I guess it's kind of sort of like the Michael Jackson of operating systems. Or maybe Doctor Who.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
A mildly amusing snipe at the end of the article mentions the author missing out on computers that used good-old cassette tape.
Some of us remember punched cards, the things we had at home were toys with cassette players attached.
I still think the Z80 and successors were great processors - why did we end up with that piece of shit the 8086?
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
is an ad-infested mess. Wonder if story submitter is getting a slice?
Saying "people do love operating systems" is like saying people love water. People need an operating to run applications like they need water to continue living. How else are they going to live/interact with their data most of the time?
Though MS-DOS is thankfully antiquated these days, it did show us the true value in COPY RIGHTING your stuff!
The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments. - Nietzche
Windows 3.1
Windows 3.11
Windows NT 4.0
Windows 95
Windows 98
Windows 98se
Windows ME
Windows 2000
Windows Vista
Windows 7
Great site with lots of pics of old OS user interfaces: http://toastytech.com/guis/
I fondly remember ProDOS for the Apple //.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
RIP PalmOS
Nostalgia
It seems a lot less painful after it heals. Also, you get a cool scar to show to others.
Back then it was way better.
The good, the evil and the vacuum tubes.
MS BOB was the OS that made computing personal for me.
Just shedding a tear for my favorite o/s ever, OS/2. Did what I wanted it to, when I wanted it--and quickly, too. Gone, but not forgotten. . .
As for left-behind os's, I left Windows behind in 2002 and have never looked back.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
Where's Microsoft Bob?
While there are lots of little things in this article that indicate the author has never used anything that didn't come out of Cupertino, the one thing that bugged me the most was his willful ignorance of preemptive multi-tasking.
In preemptive multitasking, the OS gives each application running a time-slice to do their thing and then, typically, takes control and gives the next app it's turn. This means you can put any program you want in the background and it will keep on running. We take this for granted today, but prior to 1995, most users never had this luxury. Amiga was probably the earliest OS to go sort of mainstream that had preemptive multitasking.
The article says:
"It wasn't until the late 1990s that Windows NT, OS/2 and the Mac OS were able to multitask as well -- and they required vast hardware resources to do it."
Wrong. Windows95 had full preemptive multitasking. It didn't have protected memory. That feature would stay in the NT stream until XP. However, mainstream MS users enjoyed preemptive multitasking from 1995 on.
MacOS, on the other hand, never had preemptive multitasking. Later versions had cooperative multitasking which relied on programs being specially written to support it. However, just one app running without that support was all it took to bring your Mac to a screeching halt. The late 90's were a horrible time to be a Mac user, and Apple's market share declined sharply during this period because of how primitive the last versions of MacOS were compared to everything else on the market. After the return of Jobs in the late 90's, Apple started to turn around by making flashy hardware, colored iMac's, those god-awful puck-mice, etc.. It wasn't until OSX came along that Apple was able to attract (at least some) users more interested in working on their macs than in how they looked.
Neither article mentions Coherent, a clone of Unix v.7. Their early version could run on lowly pre-386 hardware. They didn't have TCP/IP or virtual memory (until later versions), but they did include C development tools and UUCP.
End anonymous moderation and posting on
My only gripe with this article is that it seems to imply that over the past 40 years only ten OSes have been "left behind". That's silly. Anyone who was using minicomputers in the 1970s or 1980s can create a list of at least ten more that are no longer in wide use. My guess is that the original author wasn't using computers 30 or 40 years ago. :-)
What, no VAX VMS or OpenVMS? People still use it in healthcare systems even though it came out around 1978. How I miss the good old days in the 1990's using a vax/vms in high school and UUCP'ing to send mail out of the building, and using our student BBS authored in DCL.
Believe me, if I started murdering people, there would be none of you left.
I'd consider the Archimedes RISC OS to have been more significant than something like GEOS. 386BSD was the first true Open Source UNIX-like OS for the PC, yet never gets a mention. MSX was trashy, but was the first effort to get a truly cross-vendor platform. Back when Windows 3.x had no notion of preemption, there were OS' for the PC (Desqview and GEM) that were at least going in the right direction.
Although GNU's HURD gets a brief mention, MACH is more than HURD and the fate of the original HURD cannot be understood without understanding the fate of MACH. Plan 9's fate is also unmentioned, although it likely had a major influence on the way people imagine clusters and cloud computing today.
As is common with arbitrary top 10 lists, it shows far more about the prejudice of the one doing the selection than it does about the products being selected. There are no criteria for the list that I can see, other than the author knew how to spell the name.
It doesn't give credible coverage of the OS' that have died over the years, nor credible coverage of the reasons. In fact, I'm not even sure you can give credible coverage of the entire OS domain in a mere 10 entries. A list of 100 OS' might just about give a feel for the experiments and ambitions of developers, the path evolution has taken, but ten? And most of those being derivatives of each other, rather than independent lines of thinking!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I had an Amiga for a couple of years when they were popular. Many of my mates had Amigas then too. None of us used them for anything other than games, so we never seen anything beyond the white screen with the hand holding the floppy disc. I keep hearing about how well regarded the AmigaOS was but have never seen screenshots until this article.
DG/UX
ULTRIX (oh wait, it's called Tru64 now and it's still shipping)
RSTS/E
TOPS-20
RSX-11
PrimOS
Oh so many AT&T unix clones
Caldera
SunOS 4
NeXTStep (oh wait, it's called OSX now)
My favorite from the old days. A 36-bit OS, which was either 4 bits short or had 4 bits too many.
Now I'm getting all nostalgic. Where did I put my copy of "Alice's PDP-10"?
You can hack anything you want
In TECO and DDT...
Though I use multiple operating systems today, and like OS X and Linux the best, I gotta say, I miss Windows 95.
Yes, it was unstable. Yes, it was hyped to the clouds. Yes, it brought nothing new to computing that Mac OS and Amiga hadn't already done. But it was fun. Part of this is because Windows 95 coincided with the Internet really catching on with the public. Dial-up, and then cable, AOL (which, for all its criticisms, made the Internet available to the non-tech public), browsers, email, IRC... all of that was shiny and new back then, and Windows 95 carried it to most of the world. PC gaming really took off with Windows 95. Myst was a revolution. Doom II ate up a lot of my life. Who back then didn't spend many weekends staying up all night, to the breaking sun of dawn, playing games, "surfing the web", and chatting, in AOL rooms or IRC, with people far across the globe in real time? Who wasn't amazed and excited doing these things?
Guys, that was fun. And I miss those days. I still occasionally run Win 95 in VM just to play something like Hover. And when I do, I remember what it was like to actually enjoy the computer.
Modern personal computing was really built on what Windows 95 brought to the public. And now computing isn't fun anymore, anymore than, say, using a telephone is. It's ordinary, commonplace, and utilitarian now. Much like flying on a commercial airliner these days. Guys like Charles Lindbergh would be amazed if he could've seen what it was like to fly on a 777. But to us, eh, it's just a way to get from one place to another. And that pretty much sums up the feel of computing today.
One caviat here; I wasn't a Mac user back then, and I've since had a chance to play with Classic OS on an old iMac, and I gotta say, It was brilliant. It had it's own problems, but I have to admit that now I see what the big deal was. That was a special OS, and after playing with it for a weekend, I was actually overcome with a feeling of sadness at one point, because I realized that all throughout the nineties, I missed out on this. The classic Mac OS really was everything it's fans claimed.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Used heavily in Europe and in the DOD/DOT, BTOS/CTOS were pushed by Unisys for years. The hardware was 'slice' based meaning you could add a graphic processor, hard drive, tape drive by simply locking in a new slice. The OS was simple and pretty damn reliable.
wtf is nextstep on that list for? nextstep == mac os x
Wasn't the Z80 a clone of the 8086 or 8088?
Two decent articles from a magazine geared to the consumer computing world. "X" is certainly not an OS as was finally revealed on the last page of the first article. Every modern graphical display uses some mode of "X" to paint the picture. The foolishness of NT, up to and including NT7 (Windows 7) is making X an OS.
Surprisingly nobody mentions VMS, but doesn't everybody know VMS clicks up to WNT? IBM becomes HAL ...Duh!
The articles make it very clear every modern OS is somehow related to UNIX. It fails to mention that QDOS means "Quick and Dirty Operating System". The extremely awkward '\' and the use of '/' as a weak form of '-' in Unix, were indeed intended to poke fun at Unix itself. (Microsoft never got the joke.)
In many cases, the Unix command line is far more efficient than using a graphical environment. The awkwardness of DOS may be just cause for saying the command line in Windows may not be better at anything. (CMD is the suckiest shell ever made.) If stuck with Windows, (rarely happens) the CMD shell can really save you, but lacks most of the useful commands and features of the Unix shells.
Might I add, I forever tossed out the idea of using NT back in 1993 when it destroyed ten CD writeables that were ten or twenty bucks each. Long live Unix and X!
You were lucky. We only had a CDC 6400 in the first years. (See the photo and download the manuals.)
Then we got a 6600, and later the memory was upgraded to 100,000 60-bit words. That's 100,000 octal, or 32,768 words of memory. Wow, the equivalent of 246K of today's bytes! (That's Kilo, not Mega.) If you wanted to run a program that used all the memory, you had to get special permission from the head of IT.
I was working for a research lab, and I wrote a program in Fortran to analyze data to calculate the distance of the center of the universe, based on measurements of the intensity of millimeter wave radiation in outer space. My present analysis of the value of that research is based on how many starving people it fed: 0.
I also did least-squares curve fitting for something we were doing with spectroscopy. I was impressed that the 6600 could invert one of my big matrices in 40 milliseconds.
The computers only cost $4 million each, but we had a staff of 40 people to keep them running. And, of course, the computers had to have their own special air-conditioned room, with a space under the floor for cables.
One of the most amazing facts of human history is how far we have come in only 40 years.
Anyone ever wonder how much code from DOS 4.0, and probably even earlier, ... ?
is in Windows 7, due to backward compatibility and code fudging
If you're interested in facts I'll tell you what they are and I'll give you sources - Chomsky on The Big Idea
Ok, we have the PC OSes, of course.
We have the Amiga OS, ok.
We have Commodore OSes, ok, if you must.
We have TRSDOS, ok, for the few who used it.
Why no DOS 3.3 or ProDos?
"I still think the Z80 and successors were great processors - why did we end up with that piece of shit the 8086?"
That 800lb gorilla known as I.B.M.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Let's not forget Control Data Corporation's PLATO network back in 1980ish. Think pre-internet.. where all the computers talked to each other.. LONG LIVE EMPIRE!!!!! ROMS SUCK!
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
It was software-compatible with 8080, but had twice the registers and supported faster clocks, among other things. Their 16-bit offering was Z8000, I think, but once IBM PC went with 8088, it had no chance.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
See here: http://www.aqfl.net/?q=node/6890
I am curious on people's favorite old OS with those picks.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
You do know that the Z80 was just a clone from the same line that spawned the 8086 right?
might I suggest a visit to gamingmuseum.com ?
You can play Galactic Trader online there. An old favorite of mine, regardless of the fact that I haven't been there for quite some time...
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
It was
POKE 23641,194
RUN
and the same address with value 197 that produced really interesting results.
Haven't we replaced that crap with Plan 9 yet??
Tandy/Radio Shack introduces a line of affordable home computers, and debuts a family-friendly operating system called TRS-DOS with such Rated-M-for-Mature commands as KILL. Other companies' versions of DOS substitute the less menacing DEL command, for Delete.
It's just a word. Deal with it.
> Saying "people do love operating systems" is like saying people love water.
Spoken like someone that never had to put up with MS-DOS.
Yes, the operating system matters. It what enables you to do everything else.
If it's done right, it lets you do your thing and gets out of the way. If it
isn't done right, then it consumes more time than your "work".
Did you just get off the turnip truck? Surely you've heard complaints along these lines before.
This is Slashdot.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
AROS is an open source operating system largely source-compatible with AmigaOS 3.x APIs and runs on modern PCs. It's not "finished", and shares AmigaOS weaknesses as well as strengths, but is usable (helped by recompiles of a load of amiga stuff from the Aminet (still around!) I guess) :
http://aros.sourceforge.net/
Grab a liveCD from Icaros desktop and give it a go.
http://vmwaros.blogspot.com/
I wouldn't really want to use a system lacking full memory protection in the modern era (though some effort at retrofitting memory protection is underway IIRC), but it does work.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
I always thought that Amiga and Playboy contracted Cheech and Chong to do that video. They did some acid, turned on some funky black lights, and filmed some old skank dancing. Filmed with a jerky 8mm camera. I swore off those dots candies after watching this, then reading about LSD laced dots being sold in the ghetto.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Gone but not forgotten: 10 operating systems the world left behind
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Operating+Systems&articleId=9129459&taxonomyId=89
Timeline: 40 years of OS milestones
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Operating+Systems&articleId=9129498&taxonomyId=89
I still think the Z80 and successors were great processors - why did we end up with that piece of shit the 8086?
For the same reason that so many people are currently running Vista.
What about plan9? It was the first OS to use UTF-8 natively. No ITS, TWENEX, VMS, etc. are included either.
The worst thing about ST fanboys was that they distracted Commodore (a company not very bright to begin with) from the real enemy, the PC. Atari's design sucked from the get go and it was never going to lead anywhere. From the first day of launch the Amiga should have went after the PC market and left ST users behind to rot.
Actually the Amiga could run MS/PC DOS, as well as the Mac OS. Of course it required a third party board to run DOS and a board as well as Mac memory chips to run Mac OS. I was amazed the first tyme I saw an Amiga running Workbench, Mac software, and Windows at the same tyme.
I think the problem is more than just what you say though it's part of it. Commodore sucked at marketing the Amiga period. I didn't see the Escom deal as any better, but when Gateway bought it I was hoping they'd resurrect the Amiga.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
The royalty among operating systems in the 1970s:
ITS
TOPS-10
TENEX
TOPS-20
MULTICS
VAX/VMS
RSX-11
any IBM mainframe OS
and yes
UNIX
All now gone except for UNIX.
Okay, Windows XP was usable after service pack 2.
But things are different now. Now there is no need for a new operating system. When Windows XP was first released, we needed to escape the deterioration of Windows 98.
OS-9 was my very first "real" operating system. It was a multiuser, multitasking, RTOS for the Tandy Color Computer.
--fatboy
AmigaOS 4.1 was released in September 2008. Sure, there may be a miniscule number of people still using/buying it in your terms, but it's still here.
You ended up with an 8086? Most have moved on by now I gather =)
DEC OS/8 and TSS-8.
Ah, the joys of booting a PDP-8, burned indellibly in my memory 35 years ago. Magic incantations as you turned the key, then several minutes of manual labour with toggle switches, loading machine instructions and then executing them, all so it could read the bootstrap tape-reader hard-coded on a circuit board. And when I say hard-coded, it involved snipped conductors...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I have fond memories of VMS from my days as a student sysadmin for our department VAX cluster in grad school. Walked in one morning to a couple of phone calls asking why the system couldn't find their files. The system disk's heads had crashed into the platter and the entire, enormous 300MB disk was garbage. VMS *didn't care*. It was happily running along, sending an occasional message about missing files, but otherwise fine. Try that on your puny modern OS. We had someone (accidentally) run a denial of service attack on the system and it just queued up the jobs and kept on ticking. It was as close to bulletproof as anything I've ever seen.
How about obscure bad old Unices? Ultrics was a fun one, for values of fun approaching zero.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Not only does it miss some biggies (oh like VMS) but it is rife with errors. For example right away it says:
"Two of our early favorite programs -- WordStar and dBase -- were developed for CP/M; thanks to the operating system, they could run unaltered on 8080-, 8088- and 8086-based computers."
The 8080 (and Z80) opcodes are very different than those of the 8086 and 8088. First CP/M was made for the 8080, then it worked on the largely compatible Z80 and 8085. Then a port was made to the 8088 and 8086, CP/M-86. Programs were said to be source compatible, but back then large chunks of programs were written in assembly, so they would need to be rewritten. Also CP/M did little to abstract the peculiarities of the console and printers used in different systems so there was in fact lots of different code for that as well. Moreover some programs were written that took advantage of Z80 features, I think dBase was in fact one of those.
"Windows 95 coincided with the Internet really catching on with the public. Dial-up, and then cable, AOL (which, for all its criticisms, made the Internet available to the non-tech public), browsers, email, IRC... all of that was shiny and new back then, and Windows 95 carried it to most of the world"
Not according to Wikipedia as 'Consumer versions of Windows were originally designed for ease-of-use on a single-user PC without a network connection, and did not have security features built in from the outset'
and
'Windows NT and its successors are designed for security (including on a network) and multi-user PCs, but were not initially designed with Internet security in mind'
davecb5620@gmail.com
Saying "people do love operating systems" is like saying people love water.
People do love OSes. Look at the flame wars that start when someone says one OS is better than another. You've got your Linux fanboys, OS X fanboys, and your Windows fanboys.
People need an operating to run applications like they need water to continue living. How else are they going to live/interact with their data most of the time?
I try to keep in mind that an OS is just a tool and you should use the best tool for a job but I'm guilty of supporting one OS over another too.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
What the hell is wrong with moderating on slashdot? The thread is about forgotten operating systems. Coherent is one of them. Seriously, WTF? There should be a mechanism to track idiotic mods and revoke their moderation privileges for three months.
End anonymous moderation and posting on
One thing is for sure, the worse is better principal applies to operating systems. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
Somewhere there is an alternate universe where Windows 95/98/ME/Vista never happend, where OS/2 was the major OS on desktops.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I took a class in Linux but the computers in class didn't have Linux installed. Instead they had Coherent.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Since no one else seems fit to reminisce about OS/2 in the comments, let me be the first. I miss that OS. For it's time it was a powerful piece of software. I could go on an on about multi-tasking and protected memory support (OS/2 3.0 vs Window 95) and it's general robustness compared to other OS's of the era, but mostly I miss the shell. A truly OO based shell that allowed for nearly infinite customization.
I've worked with a lot of IBM software and I must say that it was perhaps the best software product IBM ever produced. Too bad it's dead.
I knew the end was neigh though when I saw my first "Warp" commercial. Man was that a stupid idea. It was code-named Warp (ala Star Trek) by engineers and techies because of it's lighter footprint made it so much faster than previous versions and other PC OS's, but the marketing folks somehow translated Warp to mean a mind-altering experience (think acid trip surrounded by tie-dyed t-shirts). Idiots!
AutoPager Fx extension
Pagerization userscript
Anyone want my functioning RiscPC 700, with RiscOS and NetBSD?
With Acorn C/C++ and Star Fighter 3000.
Kim0
...is better than none at all.
And that's why those who did use OS/2 2.x or 3.x almost unanimously considered it much better than the Windows versions of the time (3.1, 3.11, 95. 98, NT) running on the hardware of the time.
There is still nothing to equal the WorkPlaceShell as an object-oriented interface. Oh, and you could run multiple window managers simultaneously on different desktops (PM, WinOS2, XFree86) or even on the same desktop (PM, WinOS2, IBM Xserver), if you wanted. I did so, with useful applications running in all desktops, and NFS server & client - on a Toshiba T5200 (20MHz 386 with 14MB RAM).
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
GEOS still ran on top of the OS powering the C64. You also didn't boot the box with it or anything; you loaded and started it like any other autostart program (or game).
Geez, how could you miss "fingered CP/M"
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yep. those are some good examples.
Multics, in particular, is a key classic example.
I would add to that list
OS/360 (MVS and VM/CMS were later derivatives)
GeCos (ran practically all the commercial dial-in timesharing in the pre minicomputer era)
(the CDC and early PDP-11 operating systems were really about as interesting as DOS 2.0 - ie not very)
MUMPS and Pick (Integrated OS and database systems)
and then some examples from this side of the Atlantic
Atlas Supervisor (the first Virtual Memory - tho' not Virtual Machine - OS)
George 3 (just about the only OS as interesting as Multics, probably the last major mainframe OS to be written in assembler, and abandoned for a much inferior design when a new range of computers was produced)
George 4 (its cousin with paging)
A few very interesting research systems - one or two of which escaped into the wider world.
A lot of boring clones of PDP DOS.
XEN (you can argue whether or not it is an OS)
At last it is putting an end to Balmer whining about "30 year old technology" . . .
hawk
I cannot believe nobody has mentioned the OS9 operating system on the Dragon64 yet. Multi-User, multi-tasking OS humming along in a mere 64kb of RAM off two 180kb 5.25" floppies (parallel, not serial like the shitty 1541 c64 stuff, featuring lightning fast loading times), serial port console capability, word processor, Pascal compiler, RMS software (not *the* RMS, but the record management system ;-)... simply a great machine for its time, powered by the Motorola 6809E which featured 16bit ops even back in the late 80's.
I have the original machine, disks and manuals sitting on the shelf next to me, and it's still a good feeling to have owned such a great machine when the rest of the world was still running MVS on 300 baud modems.
Ever wondered whats wrong with the world? http://www.ishmael.org/
For those not in the know, these two command were, on the Commodore 64, the registers for the screen background color and border color, and zero was the code for black. "New" tells the BASIC interpreter to empty out, and "Ready." is the prompt from the BASIC interpreter.
I can't speak to whether it is the load (it was a normal p90 Dell type computer).
Please use the phrasal verb "speak to" only with an interlocutor as a complement. By "speak to" do you mean "comment on" "speak about", or somesuch, or does "can't speak to" mean "don't know about"?
Set your phasers on "funky"!
I ran MS-DOS emulation on my ST in software.
If I recall right DOS ran in an '86 on the board which made it faster than running in emulation.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
According to Mike Cowlishaw the original reason for choosing the 8086 over the superior 68000 was the 1 year deadline imposed on the IBM-PC dev team. The Intel chip had better dev tools.
"VMS isn't dead either. It's still supported for VAX, Alpha and Itanium hardware, although you can only buy new Itanium systems running it. Somewhat ironically, the 4-ring protection model introduced with the 80386 was designed to make porting VMS to Intel chips (from VAX) easier. Instead, VMS went to Alpha, which only had two protection modes..." - by TheRaven64 (641858) on Thursday March 26, @02:21PM (#27345419) Homepage
Agreed, & that's one I've had exposure to, from the midrange &/or mainframe world in the 1980's - 1990's as well... &, it also "lives on" in other ways, per my subject-line in my reply here:
----
"It's still supported for VAX, Alpha and Itanium hardware, although you can only buy new Itanium systems running it. Somewhat ironically, the 4-ring protection model introduced with the 80386 was designed to make porting VMS to Intel chips (from VAX) easier. Instead, VMS went to Alpha, which only had two protection modes..." - by TheRaven64 (641858) on Thursday March 26, @02:21PM (#27345419) Homepage
However, since this is about PC OS' I would think, though the title doesn't say so specifically, but those are mostly the examples we've been shown? I think this one's about PC OS' I.E.-> Moreso than those for mainframes & midranges, like IBM System 34/36/38's & AS400 (now called zOS iirc)?
Imo, this is sort of important (as to VMS and OS/2 "still living on"):
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9129912&pageNumber=6
That OS, in (OS/2) by IBM + Microsoft, became a good part of the Windows NT-based OS family by Microsoft really, & I really liked it, &, there is a reason I mention it.
(GammaTech Utilities backup & disk defrag come to mind, good stuff that rounded Os/2 2.0-Warp 4 out nicely!)
Also in the Windows NT-based OS family by Microsoft, what other OS ontop of Os/2 are in its foundations??
You guessed it:
VMS by Digital
(Since its designer/architect (D. Cutler) was from DEC... )
So, VMS & OS/2 aren't "really totally dead", either, if you think about it.
"Old Chevy's never die: They just get faster"
As the saying goes!
(I suppose, that I could also say that "Windows 95 lives on" in the GUI interface as well I suppose, but, that's technically not an OS, only a shell for it... & even things from UNIX are part of it, such as the BSD IP stack, but again, not an OS)
APK
P.S.=> Thought I'd add that all in, as to my thoughts on Os/2 &/or VMS still "living on" & how/why, as well as being in agreement - albeit, in a slightly different way, because they helped shape the most used Operating System on the planet in Windows NT based ones which run on the most used hardware platform on the planet in x86 that keeps NASDAQ going 24x7 to the "fabled '5-9's'" of 99.999% uptime via failover clustering in combination w/ SQLServer 2005 acting as the official trade data dessimination system for they -> http://windowsfs.com/enews/nasdaq-migrates-to-sql-server-2005 , as well as being shown (once security-hardened) to be virus/trojan/malware/spyware free for 1++ yrs. (&, for myself, the same & for more than a decade so for myself in fact) here -> http://www.xtremepccentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=df24f74dc34060c57fa9e14fb57e5a87&t=28430&page=3 as well as being extremely stable & with faster performance after tuning... apk
I'm hoping to pension off two systems running THEOS this year - anyone else out there using THEOS?
AT&ROFLMAO
You're right. A top 10, especially a badly selected one isn't very informative. Why is this even on /.? What would be really nice is a family tree of operating systems, showing the branches where OS/2 splits of from NT, or the merges where NT takes of 3.1's API, where people got there tech and inspriation from, when certain key features where introduced, and so on. It would be far more interesting than a stupid top 10.
Quoting Wikipedia instead of regaling us with tales of yore? Heresy!
Both of you are correct btw. The reason we had so much trouble with viruses and worms suddenly deliverable by the internet was because of the aforementioned design flaws in Win95. It was unix' trial by fire in the universities that enabled it to deliver its very enviable reliability to Linux and OSX.
Oh and we were using Windows for Workgroups (3.11) to connect up to the internet.
as well as Mac memory chips to run Mac OS.
Just to clarify - only earlier emulators needed a physical chip, later ones such as Shapeshifter and Fusion only needed a ROM image that could be loaded from disk.
Thanks for the correction, I wasn't sure about the details.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I was monkeying around with a C64 emulator the other day, and it struck me how bad those old OSes were. I do have some nostalgia for these things, but more for the times they represented in my life than because I miss the hardware and software. In truth they were mostly cobbled-together messes.
BeOS is the only one I truly miss, and that is because it had something none of the current OSes have: Low user latency. With the current crop of OSes we take it for granted that:
What I miss about BeOS was the whole design aesthetic of putting the user first, never blocking user input, and making the common use cases fast.
... Amiga OS bootet in 2 seconds... I miss those times. Computing was a lot of fun. Had a different flair somehow.
...run it on an Amiga using ShapeShifter.
I did all my web development circa 1996 on an Amiga. One problem - no Netscape. So I'd run MacOS in ShapeShifter to run Netscape, and do all my graphics and HTML editing on the Amiga side.
Amazingly, the emulated Mac (on a 68040 Amiga 4000) ran faster than a "real" Mac, and the whole system had no appreciable slowdown.
It was an incredible machine, that Amiga.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Aside from the fact that IBM chose the 8088, there are a number of reasons that the generally superior Z80 lost out in the long run.
Zilog concentrated on the wrong things. They disappointed their fans, and killed the companies that depended on them to be state-of-the-art.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
| VMS by Digital
| (Since its designer/architect (D. Cutler) was from DEC... )
'V' + 1 = 'W'
'M' + 1 = 'N'
'S' + 1 = 'T'
albeit nowhere near as clever as the "fork queue", hard to imagine he missed this one.
Ahhh.... So you chose Windows Bob over Vista; I'm honestly not sure if that was wise or not.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
No need to be so pendantic...
pedantic
"| VMS by Digital
| (Since its designer/architect (D. Cutler) was from DEC... )
'V' + 1 = 'W'
'M' + 1 = 'N'
'S' + 1 = 'T'
albeit nowhere near as clever as the "fork queue", hard to imagine he missed this one." - by mevets (322601) on Thursday March 26, @08:56PM (#27351517)
Thanks for the reply: That is a good one, almost like a prophetic clue or something... I'd seen it before over time, & you're right - I didn't put that one out.
----
"(I suppose, that I could also say that "Windows 95 lives on" in the GUI interface as well I suppose, but, that's technically not an OS, only a shell for it... & even things from UNIX are part of it, such as the BSD IP stack, but again, not an OS)" - by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26, @06:39PM (#27349907)
Additionally, in quoting part of my original posting? I could have also added that DOS also "lives on" still, in the Windows family of OS, in its commandline via the DOS prompt... as well as OS/2 there (.cmd files, anyone? Those weren't from DOS, for example, but instead from OS/2).
APK
GEOWORKS...ROFL, I remember it all too well...almost had me for a second until i upgraded to NT
Interesting bit of history ... someone kindly mod up the informative AC so all may enjoy.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Technically Microsoft is keeping a piece of Amiga alive. They bought out Caligari truepsace (3d modeller used for freespace 1/2 modding) and keep a windows port going (the original was on Amiga). I am involved with a project (open source unrelated to microsoft) which is porting/rewriting from scratch a clone of Caligari truespace (http://mg2modeller.sf.net)
Of why software patents should never exist. OS's have developed over the years with features being borrowed from each other. The list of screenshots is a great example of that, even for the non-technical viewers. There are a common core group of features all GUI interfaces have implemented, while specific programs or features are unique to a particular OS. Just because an OS uses boxes (windows) with pictures (icons, folders, files etc) does not mean the code or the implementation is the same as another OS's version. To make a GUI OS without that core group of features would be a waste of time, since nobody apart from the developers would use it; people are freaked out enough by a switch between two OS's when they DO have that common core group of features.
When the Mac GCR was released, the ST could run Mac software faster than any currently available Mac but for half the price.
So did the Amiga. I saw one running Workbench, Mac OS, and DOS all at the same tyme. Next to it was a new Mac and the Amiga ran Mac OS faster. I don't recall the price for each though. As Macs were expensive back then if pressed I'd say I thought the Mac cost more even with the Amiga being fully loaded, er configured to run DOS and Mac OS as well.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
FX!32 didn't work all that well. I bought the PC because all the reviews I read said it worked real good. But the only commercial app I was able to install with FX!32 was Borland C++ Powerbuilder. Luckily I bought a laptop I could install all the software I bought on as well, well not all because it didn't have enough RAM. What I found ironic was that I couldn't install a lot of the software I did buy I was able to install some open source and shareware programs.
I even called customer support for the software after trying to install the software but in every case I was told they didn't support the software on Alpha PCs. Searching the net the only suggestion I found was to update FX!32. Which I did but it didn't help. I then found one webpage that said it only worked with 32 bit software but some of my software was only 16 bit. Still, the 32 bit software I bought should have worked.
However even running software in emulation the software I was able to install did run a good deal faster than it ran on my laptop.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?