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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."
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.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Operating+Systems&articleId=9129459&taxonomyId=89
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.
If the PC is your baby, Windows ME is child molestation. 'nuff said.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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
No need to be so pendantic...
All current OSes? Try something other than Windows, you might be surprised.
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.
> 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.
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
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/
Fuck yeah! MOD(:P) parent up.
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'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.
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
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.