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."

Comments

Bastards!

[lastchance_000]

They left out Atari TOS!

Re:Bastards!

[Joce640k]

The Atari ST ran an awful lot of music studios in the 1980s.

Re:Bastards!

[Tomun]

Thus demonstrating that Apple don't always innovate, they copy good ideas too.

Re:Bastards!

[commodore64_love]

None of those old Amiga demos look impressive today, because the PCs have caught-up in power and ability, but if you had seen those demos back in 1988 you would have had the same reaction I did - mouth dropping open followed by "wow" followed by "Mom and dad I want one".

At that same time period, Macs were graphical but still black-and-white, IBM PCs were plain-text screens that went "beep", and Commodore 64s had decent music but only 16 ugly colors. People didn't realize it in 1985, but the Amiga was the first multimedia computer - you could watch or produce both music and video, like seaQuest and Babylon 5 and the Lion King. ----- Or games. Owning an Amiga for gaming was like owning a Sega Genesis back when most people were still playing primitive 8-bit Ataris or NESes.

Re:OS/2 STILL multitasks better than Windoze

[Yvan256]

All current OSes? Try something other than Windows, you might be surprised.

Re:That last screen shot of X

[just_another_sean]

X on a server? Heresy I tell you.

I was waiting for that. Yes since about Etch I've decided that's OK to put a minimal X on a server. I finally decided that a graphical browser for googling solutions and multiple xterms are better then lynx and virtual terminals.

But I respect your opinion and would use a command line (80x25 of course) until death to defend your right to hold it! :-)

(and hey, no fair, I see your sig!)

Re:DOS 5.0

[GMFTatsujin]

Ah, the many hours configuring himem ... the multiple memory manager profiles, the keeping straight of incompatibilities between extended and expanded memory, finding the settings that would work with Wing Commander, changing them to work with Star Trek 25th Anniverary ... those were the days.

The days of grinding awfulness, but days, none the less. It taught me a whole lot about how DOS did business, that's for sure.

One more (recent) Addition to the list

[Alzheimers]

RIP PalmOS

There is a slight Mac head skew here...

[Cordath]

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.

Re:Amiga was more than just the OS

[Skuld-Chan]

The hardware was OK by 1991 when it finally got the ability to display 8 bit color with AGA without cheating (yes, before that ECS/OCS Amiga's could only do 32 colours in low res, 16 in high res). Even when Commodore shut down the Amiga could only do 8 bit audio (it was high quality actually, but still only 8 bits). The way the Amiga video chips worked it was neat for platform games, side scrolling games and 2d/3d (animated) video effects and thats about it. Couldn't even do chunky video modes (without chunky 2 planar software routines) which were all the rage when Doom came out. Oh and the independent displays which allowed you to page through them like a notebook (best way I can describe it). Even the built in CIA (complex interface adapter) could only support 19.2k serial speed - 56.6k if you had an AGA machine with an 040. The hardware was OK, but getting dated - even on my A4000 when I got it new in 92.

The OS was state of the art though - I ran a bbs on a program called CNet connected to serial.device. Added another modem to some 4 port serial board called uart.device. Then the internet came along - ran the BBS over the net for a while on a driver called telser.device (it was a telnet modem emulator) - all without ANY modification to the Cnet software what-so-ever and it was cake to setup.

The OS lacked memory protection and was flakey if processes got out of hand (even then - I do remember using it for hours on end without issues) - still even if it crashed it took 2 seconds to boot - even if I had well over 50+ user started processes in user-startup.

Don't be fooled though - the real star of the show was the OS, and when I saw it (OS 4) demo'd on a modern machine using commodity hardware it was just as wonderful.

It wasn't a glorified ms-dos shell - it had real driver support, the OS supported windows, multi-tasking, libraries, it had an SDK and window resizing and scaling (automatically - unlike the Mac at the time) as a few of the hundreds of features all without Workbench (which is the GUI shell pictured in the article).

>> someone who used an Amiga for well over 8 years.

Re:OS/2 STILL multitasks better than Windoze

[PReDiToR]

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.