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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!
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.
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
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.
All current OSes? Try something other than Windows, you might be surprised.
No joke. I can't understand why intensive disk I/O, with the CPU spiking under 5%, causes windows applications to respond as if a high-priority thread were calculating PI in the background. SMS updates + on-access virus scanning make the whole OS very nearly unusable. Even though it doesn't use almost any real CPU time, if I set the priority to BELOW NORMAL everything running at NORMAL priority is immediately responsive again.
Is the OS swapping out executable code in deference to having a large data cache? That's the only case I can think of where IO should affect application performance - if it's already loaded, it should be executing while IO for another process happens in the background. Or maybe it's registry data that's swapped out. Either way, I cannot understand why my dual-core CPU at 2% usage doesn't respond to something that the user is doing.
I copy a large data file from one partition to another and Windows tells me my virtual memory is low. You're caching a huge file just in case I might want to load it again?
The worst part is when something spikes the CPU, and CTRL+ALT+DEL takes a minute or two to bring up the task manager.
RIP PalmOS
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.
I only ever owned one device that ran EPOC16, but it did manage to run a multitasking graphical environment on that device, with a 3.84MHz 8086-compatible and 256KB of RAM. The RAM was also used as a RAM disk for storing files.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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?
One of the saddest losses was A/UX, the first UNIX to be suitable for the home user. If Apple had kept developing it after the PowerPC switch then the current OS landscape might be very different. The same is true of Xenix. It's strange to think that both Apple and Microsoft used to sell UNIX systems way back in the '80s.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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?
Yes, and then you'll list about 90 OSes that most people haven't heard of or don't care about. The 10 that the article has listed (actually 9 since X Window isn't an OS) most computing people have heard of and know about in passing at least.
Under Windows 95 with a 2x CD recorder (4x were too expensive) we used to set the recording up.
Once the key was pressed we'd take a large but gentle step away from the machine so as to not inadvertently move the mouse while it was "working"
Half an hour later we'd return carefully to the room to see if the CD light was still on.
Temperamental semi-Operating System. Attempting any task while a write was in progress yielded a coffee mat.
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
I presume you're being funny, but why was 2000 bad, and XP good? XP is mostly 2000 with extra fluff I usually turn off, and newer drivers/updates installed as standard (which is handy to save downloading, but this didn't apply when 2000 was a recent OS). And XP was hated on places like Slashdot when it first came out - everyone preferred 2000...