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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!
Poke 53280,0
Poke 53281,0
New
Ready.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
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.
Um, Unix was insubordinate. Unix was late in its tasks. Unix didn't offer anything to the team - it didn't work well with Windows. Unix refused to take time off - it insisted on working all the time; even when other OSes wanted the time off.Unix is not a team player. Unix refuses to learn new technologies (specifics available one request). Unix made sexual advances to other OSes: tried to "hadnshake" with Windows, "Integrated" with OS X.
It is my profound conclusion and advice that Unix should be terminated. It is an "out of date" operating system and therefore; contributes to an"out of date" business model.
FTA: "Some of them we tossed carelessly aside. (Adios, Windows Me!)"
I took great care in building a trebuchet capable of tossing Windows Me far enough from in order to keep it from further damaging my poor, unsuspecting PC.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Operating+Systems&articleId=9129459&taxonomyId=89
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.
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
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.
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. ;-)
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No need to be so pendantic...
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.
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.
Windows 3.1
Windows 3.11
Windows NT 4.0
Windows 95
Windows 98
Windows 98se
Windows ME
Windows 2000
Windows Vista
Windows 7
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.
RIP PalmOS
MS BOB was the OS that made computing personal for me.
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.
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.
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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.
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)
I had an Amiga for a couple of years when they were popular. Many of my mates had Amigas then too. None of us used them for anything other than games, so we never seen anything beyond the white screen with the hand holding the floppy disc. I keep hearing about how well regarded the AmigaOS was but have never seen screenshots until this article.
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
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.
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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.
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?
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.
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.
Geez, how could you miss "fingered CP/M"
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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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.