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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."
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.
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.
I have fond memories of OS/9 running on my Tandy CoCo3 with 128mb of RAM. I did some of my first explorations into the world of a pre-emptive multitasking kernel on that critter. It was a damned elegant operating system.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
X on a server? Heresy I tell you.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Ever see a MOD file? Any idea where they came from? SoundTracker was the first tracker, or in modern parlance, music sequencer program available for any platform. All current sequencers, including stuff like Rosegarden, pay homage to SoundTracker.
My blog
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.
Deluxe Paint 4. I still know professional artists in the FilmFX and games industries who still use it now for texturing work (via an emulator obviously...).
Ah... TOPS-20. When men were men, and TECO was the text editor of choice!
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Remember Apollo Domain/OS? That was a really great operating system for it's day (late 80's). It had a security model integrated with the filesystem and was network aware (like LDAP sort of) and the networking filesystem was better than anything I've seen since then.
Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.
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.
We stopped showing that one off when the State of the Art demo came out :)
Go look, it's still good.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FB10C16xSqY|
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)
...as much as I like my old Atari, I will freely admit that TOS was a bit redundant.
X shouldn't have been on that list (cause it aint gone).
Win95 shouldn't be on there because it was essentially more of the same crap that preceeded it.
NT 3.51 would have been a more appropriate thing to put in it's place.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Oh, the ATARI ST fanboy springs back to life. Allow me to put you back in your place. The ST was pure shit. Compared to the Amiga, it was worse in every possible aspect from Graphics (less colors, resolution modes), Sound (No digital sound, synth only), GUI design (even worse than MAC), and performance (lacked true multitasking).
Don't even get me started on the software library. Look at Image FX and show me any program for the ST that did anything even close. Exactly. In terms of creativity, there was simply more software for the Amiga in every category. 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.
"When you see a unixer brainwashed beyond saving, kick him out of the door." - Xah Lee
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
I grew up on DOS. I played DOS games and learned how DOS worked (and enjoyed msdosshell to get to my apogee games lol). Fond memories of fond times.
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...
I still have a soft spot for RMX. A multitasking, realtime OS that ran on the 8086 (and even the 8080). One of the first programming languages I learned was PL/M, which didn't really take off outside RMX (although I learned on the DOS version). It's astonishing how quaint and backwards C seems as a low-level language after using PL/M again.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
>>>The Atari ST ran an awful lot of music studios in the 1980
The irony of that is the ST had a lousy sound chip. It didn't sound much better than an 8-bit NES or 8-bit Atari 800, and yet claimed to be a 16/32-bit machine. Hmmm. A better home PC for the late 80s or early 90s was an off-the-shelf Amiga or the Macintosh with color/sound chips added. (Notice I don't recommend an actual PC - since they pretty much sucked prior to 1995.)
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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.
Hah.
The first ever morph shown on television was generated on an Amiga, in software called Morph Plus. Later it evolved (morphed?) into a program called Elastic Reality (written by me) which became the de-facto morph/roto program for SGI workstations.
Not to mention countless television shows in the 90s with cutting edge 3D graphics rendered in a little program called Lightwave 3D. Guess where that came from?
Show's what you know.
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.