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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."
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Operating+Systems&articleId=9129459&taxonomyId=89
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
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.
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.
> Name one good Amiga Application.
Deluxe Paint III.
> None of the Amiga games/demos used the OS for anything
Loads of shitty bloated American games did (lounge suit larry or whatever the fuck it was called, monkey island etc etc), but none of the fast, European arcade/console-style games did.
Leisure Suit Larry
Sadly, it still seems to be in development.
NewTek's VideoToaster.
It was at the forefront of video editing technology for many years. I used it in school in the mid-late nineties because it was still the best option around for small-scale stuff.
$> man woman $> Segmentation fault. (Core dumped)
Erm.. Lightwave from Newtek. That used to be an Amiga Exclusive and still is a Killer app for it. Chances are if you watch any TV in the early 90's you probably saw an Amgia Videotoaster with Lightwave sequence. Babylon5, Seaquest DSV, The Chart Show.
And lets not forget such gems as Brilliance (which was FAR batter than Dpaint IMO).
Plus the Amiga OS was:-
1) user friendly from day one
2) had a VERY small footprint
3) TRUE multitasking (and still is)
4) No damn Registry or hoping that when you uninstalled an app that it removed everything. Delete the folder and a few library files and that was it.. Done.
My advice is use the OS and then comment, you obviously didn't (or was an old foaming at the mouth ST owner. In its heyday the Amiga OS had Apple on its knees in regards to functionality.
Have you been asleep all these years?
LightWave, Imagine, ImageFX, Arexx, Directory Opus or DirWork, RGS(Realtime Granular Synth, which only just NOW has non-Amiga clones almost 20 years after it was written), MindEye, omg do I really have to go on? Bars and Pipes(which Microsoft loved enough to buy it so they could remove the competition)...
You could also simultaneously display screens with different resolutions. IIRC, that can't be done even to this day.
AmigaOS itself was great cause you got a preemptive multitasking GUI in under 512k. Can you even boot Vista in under 512 Meg?
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
Deluxe Paint IV
The Art Department
Real 3D
DevPack
AWeb
OctaMed
Also some of the large adventure games did use the OS. I had Beneath a Steel Sky installed to the hard disk for example.
Well it nearly caught up to DR-DOS 5 which had been out for nearly two years. It had almost as many facilities, interestingly many add ons in MS-DOS 5 were third-party 'cut down' versions that MS did not pay for, the third parties 'donated' them in the hope and expectation of upgrades to full versions.
But then just a handfull of months later DR-DOS 6 arrived and MS-DOS 5 was poor by comparision for a year until MS could catch up with their 6.
OpenVMS is still in active development .... So not gone .... ...and Windows NT was written by the development team who wrote VMS! (Oh how are the mighty fallen)
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
wtf is nextstep on that list for? nextstep == mac os x
I used to know a guy who ran GeoWorks on his XT, with all of 512k of RAM. It multitasked, I'm not sure by what method, but it could be busy printing invoices in the background while he was surfing the 'net (in textmode) and reading/sending emails, all with no slowdowns or "system busy" lagging. He was still using it for everyday stuff in the mid-1990s.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Extended and Expanded memory weren't compatible. They were different standards. I didn't spend hours configuring himem, nor had multiple profiles. I just ran QEMM. I had one profile that had almost all the 640K "barrier" memory free. And it allocated extended and expanded as needed from the SAME pool of memory.
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.
Jobs and OS X came to Apple at the same time with the acquisition of Next.
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.
You do know that the Z80 was just a clone from the same line that spawned the 8086 right?
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.
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
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."
...which is absolutely correct.
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.
...which doesn't contradict what the "Apple Fanboy" said.
Plus, Windows95 was still a DOS shell. It was a very flawed implementation of
"pre-emptive multitasking" so much so that many of us prefered NT at that time.
Now while it was true that NT was available then, it was still as the author
described it (required more resources) and was far from a mainstream product
for consumer use.
This was a common problem/complaint/hurdle of all of the "serious" PC
operating systems in the mid 90s. Mid 90's PCs just didn't cut the
mustard. Windows 3.1 even didn't really do well until the bottom fell
out of memory prices around 1996.
Not being a Lemming doesn't make you an Apple Fanboy.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
On a related note, one of the developers of MIDI software for the ST was Charles Johnson, of Codehead Software (along with John Eidsvoog), and is now behind the conservative (to put it mildly) blog, Little Green Footballs.
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.
IIRC spotting the source video the dancers from State of the Art are mostly "traced" (rotoscoped) from - I think it may have been from a "Prince" music video of all things, though I can't find it online (it means sifting through a load of Prince videos, which is not something I enjoy o_O).
OTOH, the later Nine Fingers"by the same people used dancers dancing specifically for the demo.
There's now a "making of Nine Fingers" video on youtube which shows them filming for the demo with very sweet (in an early-90s eurotrash fashion) german girls (especially obviously a little shy in their black outfits around 4:18).
IIRC, they did the CGI to Babylon 5 on Amigas. Basically, started the whole process of CGI.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
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.
My NT4 machine handled this fine. Heck, I used to burn CDs (at a blazing 4x on my brand new CD burner) and play Quakeworld at the same time on that baby.
NT was built to replace OS/2, and it showed. OS/2 was single user, had no SMP support and didn't even have a dynamic disk cache. That's before even getting into the 16 bit HPFS layer and the infamous Single Input Queue.
That's not really true. Tru64 is the "new" name for OSF/1, which is what DEC used to replace ULTRIX. OSF/1(/Tru64) is pretty indistinguishable from SVR4 though supposedly it has no AT&T derived code in it. ULTRIX was more of a BSD Unix, but borrowed a few concepts from VMS.
I am not by any stretch of the imagination, an Amiga fan. I never owned an Amiga, and the only time I ever used one was at a friend's house -- one time -- when I had to logon to a BBS to check my private mail.
I simply admire the Amiga as a computer that was well ahead of its time, something I didn't understand when I was 16 and 18 years old and lacked the imagination and insight to understand. I look back to those days and realize how stupid I was for making fun of all the Amiga users. :)
My blog
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The color Macintosh II came out in 1987. Pricey, but 256 colors out of a palette of millions in a 640x480 (std) or 70x x 512 (MaxAppleZoom) display. Apple IIGS came out with color in 1986. I forget the resolution/number of colors/palette issues on that machine, as I never had one.
The article left off Apple DOS 3.3.
Yes the first CGI was done on expensive supercomputers (i.e. Cray) and the earliest television show to use CGI was Doctor Who in 1987, but those effects were extremely expensive (millions of dollars) which is why most shows like Star Trek continued using models or artistic drawings. The Amiga was the first machine that could do CGI for less than $4000.
>>>I know the pilot had its CGI upgraded later
Bzzz. Producer J.Michael Straczynski re-edited the film since he didn't like the original version, and changed the music, but the CGI was left exactly the same as my ancient 1993 recording. Also according to JMS, the Amigas and Video Toasters were not retired until after season 1. This corresponds with the Lurkers Guide "later Pentiums/DEC Alphas were added" which is vague but refers to season 2 onward. You can see the corresponding increase in the CGI quality with episode 201. Prior to that there are many CGI scenes that appear very lo-resolution (you can see giant pixels).
The Babylon 5 effects crew abandoned ship with episode 401, and moved to Star Trek Voyager's season 3 and eventually DS9's season 6, replacing the model effects that had been Trek's preference.
Another show that used the Video Toaster was NBC's seaQuest. Like Babylon5 they probably started with Amiga (since the 1993 toaster only worked with Amigas) and later upgraded to newer hardware. Walt Disney also used Amigas to create the CGI scenes with the Rescuers, Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin, and more videogames than I can enumerate.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Apple's DOS 3.3 had nothing to do with Microsoft's DOS (MS-DOS). The former was written by Wozniak himself.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
A better way to put it would be "Without the failure of Acorn's Archimedes platforms to develop any significant market share whatsoever, in part because of a non-standard OS which didn't play well with others and which had a myopic backward architecture, Acorn would not have been forced to find a non-desktop application for the ARM CPU, and the ARM might have ended up being just another CPU to be ultimately replaced by the ix86 system."
I have a gut feeling that's not what you meant though...
Acorn developed an exciting system when they released the first ARM based computers. It was immensely disappointing they shipped first with Arthur and then with an OS that utterly failed to take advantage of the power of the underlying hardware (cooperative multitasking? really? AmigaOS had been out for three years. OS/2 for two) and which didn't even try to make it easy to interoperate with the outside world. "." as a directory separator? Really?
I don't know about CyberPaint, but there was actually an MS-DOS PC port of deluxe paint itself (roughly akin to amiga deluxe paint ii). It's not terrible or anything, though obviously dated, even compared to later amiga dpaint releases or even later amiga cloanto "personal paint" (ppaint).
TVPaint is very expensive, but still around in modern form, and also started out on the Amiga and was ported to the PC.
Idruna photogenics also started out as an amiga package - while it's marketed at image editing/film postprocessing, it inherits an unusual level of "original composition"* natural-media type tools.
* The core difference between amiga art/animation packages and most photoshop-like PC/Mac art packages is really that *most* Amiga art packages were oriented squarely at bitmapped image/animation original composition rather than photo manipulation. Both Photoshop and GIMP are cheerfully aimed at existing image manipulation (retouching/"airbrushing") first and foremost (as you can tell from the names, and they work well enough for that). In a lot of ways, modern vector art packages are closer "spiritual" successors of amiga bitmap (or occasionally vector towards the "end") art packages than modern bitmap art packages.