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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
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.
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
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
You do know that the Z80 was just a clone from the same line that spawned the 8086 right?
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.
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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