Slashdot Mirror
Old Operating Systems Never Die
Harry writes "Haiku, an open-source re-creation of legendary 1990s operating system BeOS, was released in alpha form this week. The news made me happy and led me to check in on the status of other once-prominent OSes — CP/M, OS/2, AmigaOS, and more. Remarkably, none of them are truly defunct: In one form or another, they or their descendants are still available, being used by real people to accomplish useful tasks. Has there ever been a major OS that simply went away, period?"
Apple hires hit men to track down users and kill them
Was it THAT good, or is it doubly obsolete? ;)
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
I don't see too many instances of the Sinclair ZX-81 OS around anymore, but then I will admit I haven't performed an exhaustive search.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Windows Vista disappeared October 25th 2009.
I'm posting from win3.1 because it uses so much less resources it is so much faster!
I don't think anyone willingly uses Windows ME for any useful task anymore.
My first thought was VMS, but of course there's an open version of that.
And somebody open-sourced CP/M.
But "exists as an open-source hobby project" is a bit bringing back your dead lover as a zombie. Yeah, it's still around, but it's not really the same. Unless you're really, really kinky.
Windows Vista?
- I hope
Don't forget good old 4690 OS!
TOS. Enough said!
/me ducks and covers in preparation for a massive flaming form all the ST users out there! ;-)
Noone is using WIndows to do some real job.
Who's Noone, and what's he/she using Windows for? Sounds fairly self-defeating, really; I mean, no one important is using it anymore, so Noone might need a new set of talents soon...
The operating systems behind many abacuses have since passed away. May they rest in peace.
TRS-DOS for a TRS80 model 12
Holy crap that's a PITA to find even an image of a disk to find online.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Never seen one, heard of an emulator, or know of one still running.
Altho I don't think one could consider it a "major" OS
Does anyone have a machine capable of running Multix any more? That was a historically important machine, but I don't think there is any hardware available to run it any more.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Microsoft BOB... I somehow dont see that one making a comeback! :-P
'ByeOs'.
Would you like a slice of toast?
Not true. Plenty of people in the print media use macs and are also averse to upgrading because their tight print deadlines leave no margin for error. If something works, they don't fiddle with it. Ever.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I for one will really be surprised if there is a running Multics outside of a museum.
Stupid appears to be abundant on slashdot this afternoon.
Multics is officially dead. The last site to be using it went offline almost nine years ago. Multics was open sourced two or three years ago, but I haven't heard of anybody taking advantage of that to try using it again.
IBM 360/MFT and MVT
The Incompatible TimeShare system of MIT yore, as I understand it, is truly no more, unless somebody's been *extra* *careful* to keep their PDP-6 in working order all these years.
Oh well, at least we got the Jargon file out of it.
s/this afternoon//
I hate printers.
They fade away.
How do you pronounce Noone? Like the time? NOO NEE? NOO UN? Is one of the n's silent? Wich one?
Microsoft had one that never made it.
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Has there ever been a major OS that simply went away, period?
I think RSX-11, RT-11 and RSTS/E fit that. Some of the PDP operating systems are dead probably because they're still closed source otherwise I'm guessing hobbyists would still be maintaining them.
My work here is dung.
Is it still being developed?
IIRC Linux was supposed to be a temporary stand-in until the Hurd was ready to go.
Don't all successful ie useful OS's rely on Unix as the core?
Someone complained to me just yesterday that libpng's cmake generates a DLL with a name that doesn't fit the 8.3-style filename required by his system.
long enough for this question even to have a point?
Talk to me in 100 years.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
MSDOS still has its place in many commercial/industrial applications. If you bought a giant 100k machine that uses a weirdo controller card that's only supported under DOS, you're probably still using it today. If you don't need multitasking, DOS is really not that bad.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Palm is missing, I really loved my PalmV and my m515 at those times (m515 still works).
Unluckily Murphy was right.
I was going to suggest Univac's exec 8, which I used in college, or maybe Modcomp's Max IV, from my first job, but it looks like they or their descendant OSes are still around.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
BSD is dying.
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
Hey, I have a cousin named Noone, and its pronounced New-Knee you insensitive clod!
in a way, they are still here, today. Some of them evolved to i.e. our moderns birds. Some of the old OSs are still here, in a way or another. Think in CP/M, on which was based DOS, over it was built Windows'95, and probably part of it ended in Windows NT and keep that way all up to Windows 7 perhaps. The same could be said about old versions of current operating systems, like i.e. Linux 0.9, maybe there is no running instance of it, but on it was built all the rest.
What was the last popular operating system built totally from scratch?
It's Peter Noone, of Herman's Hermits. Like his performing career, it's still chugging along.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I remember typing LOAD"*",8,1 for my GUI and it wasn't Amiga OS. How I miss GEOS also typing LOAD"GEOS",8,1 and LOAD"GEOS",8 followed by RUN worked.
GLaDOS went away when I threw that b%$^& into the fire.
I'm pretty sure Windows ME is dead.
Has there ever been a major OS that simply went away, period?
Windows ME? No, well it should have...bloody piece of shit.
We still use Mac OS 9.4. We have two machines running Mac OS 9.4 that act as controllers for some very expensive equipment. I dread the day those machines won't run anymore. It is going to cost a chunk of money the company won't want to spend to replace that whole system (the machines they control and the computers).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
VMS is very much still in production:
- ported to Itanium
- fully supported by HP
- IPv6 compliant
- java, apache, etc. available
You'd be surprised how long a Windows OS can stick around...
Last I heard they were still using Windows NT in some airline in-seat multimedia devices, Windows 3.1 in some government applications, and I've even got some clients who are stickin' to Windows 98 on some of the PCs in their healthcare facility...
The amiga hardware was way ahead of its time and so was the software for that matter. The mac hardware was basically a weak copy of the amiga stuff. Apple basically just stuck with the amiga copy stuff and incremental improvements to it until they switch over to using PC hardware piece by piece. Today a mac is basically just a severely overpriced pc that you have to buy to be able to use a user friendly operating system.
Where Amigas really shined was video editing. It was a very long time indeed before Amiga stopped being the tool of choice for video work. Everything up to the special effects on Babylon 5 were done with Amigas. After commadore died it took apple a long time to catch up with the Amiga.
That leaves an extra space after slashdot. I wouldn't mention it, but look where we are...
Nullius in verba
You're still compiling your code. Come back to us when you finally get your DE compiled.
I guess no one (stifle, stifle) here ever watched "The Librarian: Quest for the Spear". Nicole Noone (Sonya Walger) was/is so HOT! A geek dream come true!
Never trust a man wearing a coat and tie!
Actually the real sound standard was AdLib. Before ripping of the OPL2 chip and adding a simple DAC (which even they screwed up with their own later versions of cards), all Un-Creative had was a souped-up pc-speaker 12-channel card called the Gameblaster.
The English version of the ITS wikipedia entry claims that there are still a couple of machines running ITS.... ;-)
Anybody knows where ? I miss my MIT-AI ITS account
It not, ... check out http://www.poppyfields.net/filks/00117.html
Cheers :-)
> What did AmigaOS give us?
The first wave of affordable and accessable CGI and video editing.
It took WinDOS machines a considerable amount of time to "catch up"
sufficiently enough such that ancient Amigas could be taken out of
service.
Any Macs that "caught up" were probably the price of a new car. [snicker]
You might as well say that Irix made AmigaOS moot if you are going to
use absurd standards like that.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I knew a woman a few years back who worked for IBM. She brought me a full deck of Warp CDs, over from New Zealand where she worked. This actually was only just after the release of Warp 4; I think we're talking around 1995 or so.
She was fanatical about 0S/2; she thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. I installed it for probably two days, after she left, was bored and deeply unimpressed by what I saw, and took it off again.
Truth be told, I just didn't see the point. Yes, the fact that it segregated processes in memory was nice, but at the time, I was a DOS dinosaur, (who has since become a console zealot with FreeBSD) and really wasn't impressed with the WPS at all. I just saw something which looked like Windows 3.1, (which due to both its' instability and its' ugliness, I hated) and had various obscure programs, a couple of which were comms programs that were clearly designed for talking to mainframes that I'd never heard of, and had no use for.
IBM never understood the desktop; not like Microsoft. Back then at least, IBM were too busy trying to tell people what they should like, (mainframes) rather than paying attention to what people actually did like. (The desktop)
The single main thing I love about FreeBSD is, that I don't have to care about what anyone else wants. I can use Ratpoison if I want, and if the Windows refugees tell me they wish people like me didn't exist because of that, (and they often do) I can simply ignore it.
No such version of Mac OS was ever released, you'd best check that system version again
I was going to suggest VS OS, which ran on the old Wang VS minis, but, nope, Wikipedia says it's still out there. Dear God, they just don't die, do they?
How many Pr1mes are still in operation? I guess there may be 1-2 still around out there? PRIMOS was quite nice in some ways.
Given the options at the time, windows 3.10 (not even 3.11), NT (expensive), solaris (even more expensive), VMS (What, am I made of money?), linux (you HAD to compile your own kernel and use insmod manually), OS/2 was a great way to get 32 bit computing. It was cheap. You could run multiple DOS instances with different memory configurations. It was marketed horribly, windows 3.11 was 'good enough' and windows 95 made it irrelevant for the common user.
level control systems, now owned by Meyer Sound, still has installations from 1996 that are running with either original BeBoxes (repackaged into rack mount cases) or older intel hardware.
http://testou.free.fr/www.beatjapan.org/mirror/www.be.com/developers/developer_news/spotlight/lcs.html
People didn't upgrade because there was no need to; it was not broken and the hardware still works.
One live musical show was using one of these rack mounted original BeBox with Dual Processors. A few years ago it stopped working; they rebooted it and it worked but only one CPU was running. The problem was that they one cpu fan stopped turning, the cpu got very hot - so hot that it unsoldered itself and fell. But the system worked just fine on a reboot, just a little slower!
--jeffk++
ipv6 is my vpn
Probably doesn't count as "major" but there were a lot of users (campus-wide IBM mainframe systems at something like nine colleges at its peak in the 1980s). There was talk of running it under emulation back when the mainframes were being shut down but if that happened, it never escaped captivity at UMich. I used it on a dual-processor 3081 (and later 3090) at RPI and absolutely despised it, until they replaced it with RS/6000s and Suns and we all realized how much more work you can get done on a system that actually STAYS UP! And has an absolutely insane printing system, and half a dozen 9-track tape drives, and a plotter, and network coprocessors, etc. etc. etc. Great system for doing real work on. Now it's apparently gone without a trace. I'd *love* to have it running on Hercules or something.
s/s\/(this afternoon)\/\//s\/$1\/$1 involving regular expressions\//
[signature]
The Last version of "classic" Mac OS Was 9.2.2. You might refer to 9.0.4 which was the last version of 9.0.x.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
My father used to be a programmer, and he first told me about Pick. It used a database as the filesystem; it was decades ahead of its' time.
From what Dad said, its' inventor, Dick Pick, was a lot like Tesla, in that he was apparently very sensitive, and didn't want to widely market the system. So as a result, although it was used in a few places, it seems to have largely died on the vine.
The single main reason why that is a shame, is because it may be the only working example we've ever had, of an OS with a true database filesystem. Nobody else, it seems, has really been able to do that to a fully working degree, yes; BeOS maybe, but it's the only other one if so.
My company still has Amiga OS running on seventeen production Amigas.
Ten years ago (for Y2K compliance testing), we evaluated whether it was more cost effective to replace it or to certify it. The costs of replacement of our homegrown app was prohibitively expensive at the time.
The sucker just runs and runs. We have Ebay set up to notify us whenever Amigas go up for auction, and periodically pick up spare parts at bargain basement prices. Estimated cost to rewrite the application: $40K. Total cost spent over ten years buying replacement parts: maybe 5K.
n/t
apparently it's still available and according to wiki it's still being maintained and used
The Admin and the Engineer
I'm currently involved in a project for one of our refining customers. They have a complex program called UNIPOL, developed by Union Carbide, written in FORTRAN 77. It's running on an ancient UNIX-based proprietary Honeywell OS. Not sure what the computer looks like, but it's probably never been turned off since its installation in the 1970s. The project involves converting the FORTRAN to good, old Visual Basic to run on super reliable Windows Server 2003.
*chirp* *chirp*
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
A modified version of OS/2 is still being sold by Serenity Systems as eComStation.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
You couldn't be more wrong. PC-DOS and DR-DOS were still being licensed for niche applications just a few years ago. Those haven't gone away yet; they're just no longer in development. FreeDOS may be primarily a for-its-own-sake hobby, but the fact that it's still under development means that Windowless DOS is far from dead.
And Mac OS 9 still lives on, I assure you. Macs are notoriously long-lived for one thing, so there are undoubtedly Quadras, Performas, and old iMacs out there purring away under OS 9 for somebody's kindergartner to play games on, or for Grandma to type her memoirs. OS 9/Classic was still supported under OS X as recently as Tiger (if you have a PPC machine), and as a matter of fact, although it won't run on my Intel Snow-Leopard machine, I still run Fontographer (a Classic-only app) on my G4 Mac Mini from time to time.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I was going to say GEOS, but apparently that is still around in some form.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)
http://www.breadbox.com/
Amazing.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
sad as it is, im sorry inform you that most production lines and such in factories actually run on windows, so does most high tech measuring equipment i have seen. does that qualify as a real job?
It seems that the p-System -- the underlying OS for UCSD Pascal -- is no more.
It had a number of features like direct feed-back from the compiler to the editor, highlighting lines in error, which was a major step forward, especially for me, as I had done most of my programming on my Apple ][ in 6502 assembler. (Digression: Steve Wozniak is a genius in my humble opinion.)
UCSD Pascal was unique in the way that it compiled to pseudo-code (p-code, why does that make me think of Java?) and was mostly written in p-code itself, apart from machine-dependent parts.
Other "features" made the system a bit quirky, like contiguous files only, which meant you had to pre-allocate space for files if you wanted to write to more than one on a disk.
But hey, I could exercise my theoretical knowledge, gleaned from Niklaus Wirth's Pascal book (red and white and from Springer Verlag) on my Apple!
Why not mention that OS as well?
How about A/UX - that went away when the Power Macs arrived. There are a handful of machines on the net still running it.
It's debatable whether you could call it a "major OS," but it's an SVR variant (definitely major) with BSD extensions. It was a reliable and highly-polished OS sold by a major vendor. Today, you'd have to get it on eBay along with the 680x0 Mac to run it.
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
I don't see the original post mentioning OS9, but I'm pretty sure he/she was referring to OS9, the real-time multitasking OS written originally for the Motorola 6809 (Not MacOS 9). OS9 is still alive and well.
BTOS is dead as far as I know. It's almost impossible to find anything on the internet about it...
except I do have a B28 at home that can run it... but that machine hasn't been powered on for years.
The Atïari ST GEM desktop is long gone (plus it's GEMini/MiNT and NeoDesk derivitives although they were basically just shells), as is the 8-bit Atari-DOS.
The original version of pre-MS-DOS that Bill stole the code for in the early 80s still lives on in CMD shells everywhere, but other than that we've got one terminal that sits there doing nothing but running Paradox still.
>whoosh
I'm very impressed. An operating system, Coded in Haiku.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Whatever it was called dead except for emulation for old games.
I think this is in bit heaven.
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/harris/brochures/Harris_Systems_Brochure_Nov81.pdf
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
AMOS -- I used to do some programming on Alpha Micro's -- AMOS wasn't that bad. AMOS is still being used in some form or another as near as I can tell from WikiPedia.
"i lost my dignity on a slippery wiener"
I s'pose there are nostalgic types still using it, but I don't imagine there being any development going on for it. 'Course, people do come up with odd hobbies these days...
+1 Disagree
Just watched an episode of "How Its Made" with my kids yesterday, and was stunned to see an old Apple II being used to control machinery that was manufacturing felt cloth. My jaw dropped when I saw it. Had to rewind and watch it again. The episode was filmed, I think, in 2007. Haven't Apple II's been obsolete for about 25 years?
Haven't seen a TI 99/4(A) in use in a while, and since the OS was (I think) in ROM...
And then we''ll play some nice games, really looking forward to it :)
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Just because, I guess, no hardware can run it anymore. 'Twas fun however, back in the early 80s... Or maybe someone wrote an emulator (not so unlikely) and got the software from IBM (very unlikely) and the source (highly improbable)?
DOS/FreeDOS are used extensively for BIOS patching though single user mode Linux boot cd's are fairly common as well.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
There are still a few BBS's I used to sysop that still are running the combination of DOS/Quarterdeck QEMM/DESQview combo running on 28.8 dialup (for the purests) and TCP/IP backends (for telnet access.) Oh the memory but DESQview was damn near an OS and a few have custom handbuild OS subsystems for their BBS. Suprisingly it wasn't that hard to write up a custom BBS system back then. There are still a few PC\DOS PS1 gateway (as in gateway services, not the brand) boxes out there.
Renegade 4 EVAH! EAT IT WILDCAT AND YOU PROBOARD WEAK SAUCED POSERS!!! ACiD > TRiBE iCE MUAHAAHHAAHHH the ANSI wars are ONE!! BWHAHHAHAAA errr.. crap I'm old...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
This morning I watched an episode of How It's Made and they were showing how the paper rolls for player pianos were still being made today. They showed some guy playing a special piano that made marks on a roll of paper with rods that came down onto carbon copy stuff which made marks on the paper underneath it. And then they showed a more modern approach that had a guy playing on an electronic keyboard that was presumably hooked up to the computer there via midi. But the kicker was what was done with that data once it was on that computer. They said it was transfered to another computer to do the actual manufacturing of the final paper rolls, and they cut to some guy inserting a 5-1/4" floppy into one of the old external Apple floppy drives, and then he leaned over and did some typing on an Apple II sitting beside the cutting machine, which then proceeded to cut the holes into the paper as it was fed through. Couldn't believe it.
Fascinating, since there was no version beyond 9.2.2.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
I will admit, I loved my Amiga. It was my only friend. It was awesome in its day. I held the banner of Amiga zealot proudly until '95.
Today, I see the Mac fanbois and Linux zealots, and I harbor scorn and envy. There is no platform that deserves such a pedestal. Not just because the Amiga died, but through it's death I could see the world for the cold place it is. OSes & manufacturers will come and go. Apple will die, and Linux will fade. I know not when, but they will. Yet, I am envious of the fanaticism these people hold. The joy they get from the belief their system is superior to all else. I remember when I had faith in Commodore and wish for those days of old.
Today, I move quietly from machine to machine and hold no special attachment to any OS. They are all the same despite their differences.
Once. A few years ago. There was a brief moment I thought I heard the song of BSD, but I turned around and it was just a wrinkled old harlot clearing her throat.
No, the Amiga died, and so did my passion. I miss my old friend, but there will be no more friends like her. Now we only visit -- in the still of the night -- when I am fast asleep.
Windows--in my head. Took several counseling sessions and intense electro-shock therapy, but my therapist says the scars are slowly healing.
Wonderful network operating system with an networked/integrated security model and full ACL implementation and a network file system implementation that I have yet to see the equal of. In some aspects, it sounds like some modern operating systems today, but this was the mid to late eighties when Windows was a glorified file manager.
Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.
There's still lots of video toaster systems used in the TV/video industry that are running AmigaOS.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Does anyone use PRIMOS anymore? My engineering school had a couple of PRIME machines in the mid 80s. Can any of them be still in operation?
Seriously, I remember back in the day using BeOS and being completely floored by it, for about ten minutes. Here was a new OS and it was super fast at some of the tasks that made computers really grind to a halt back then. And it was stable. Remember, this was back when we were all rebooting our Windows boxes once a day at least while doing real work. Macs were better for stability, but only let one program do real work at a time. Unix boxes were rock solid, but it was rare to find one that had crazy advanced features like color display. Linux was rock solid to, but it took a smart guy a non-trivial amount of time to get one actually working.
In comparison to the available options it was almost hard to believe. The only real reason not to use it was lack of applications, which is what I realized in short order. A few dozen actually usable programs were about it. Still, if some companies had jumped on it and pre-installed it would have dragged the computing world half a decade or more into the future. Microsoft killed it with threats and legal action against any company who dared dual install it beside Windows or who even wanted to keep selling Windows and sell BeOS too. If ever there was a time for the feds to step in, that was it, but Be was a tiny company and the niche for an alternative vertically integrated system was taken by Apple. That one instance of shady dealing on MS's part crippled OS development and made it clear to everyone there was no point investing in the desktop OS market. If something so obviously superior, already in a stable and running form couldn't compete against MS's hold on vendors, what was the point in wasting money?
Seeing this just makes me angry all over again how corporate greed and crime has held back progress. Screw you early 90's MS execs. I hope you tell your kids how you managed to cripple OS development around the world with your crimes.
Windows 7.
All of Hewlett Packard's 9800 Series computers I/O systems were on ROM, with a few exceptions that ran HP-UX. You could expand many of them to run HP-Basic and Fortran, and all of them could utilize assembly code. To contrast their code with the code you find today, nobody has found a bug on their first computer with a qwerty keyboard (the 9825) to this day. While there might be a stray HP 9800 series computer controlling some industrial equipment out there somewhere, I think it's safe to say that those OS's are dead.
One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces. - PF
OK, now I'm curious. Film recorders perhaps, or maybe a high-end-but-older A/V conversion rig?
No one uses UNICS anymore? Just spinoffs of UNIX..?
My freshman year at CSU the CS department retired their Cyber Mainframe running NOS. We joked that it stood for "No OS".
You can find an emulator for the Cyber - even so it doesn't come with the OS (in this case it is truely "No OS"):
http://members.iinet.net.au/~tom-hunter/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_Cyber
-CF
The operating system which practically powered the core of the British pre-Internet academic network was (SERCnet/JANET) GEC OS4000,which run upon GEC minicomputers.
The strangest thing about it was that half of the OS was implemented in hardware as part of the CPU.
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
Xenix. I realize its cousins are still out there (Unix variants from its ancestors), but MS just stopped making it, it died, they never did anything with it again...unless NT3.51 POSIX stuff is from that?...
Flow cytometers
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Human 203900.9 is clearly the oldest and still receiving monthly updates.
Some feel the last 600 or so updates have introduced a lot of bugs, but there is evidence those bugs have existed since the early beta tests. The manuals are also a bit dated, with much of the troubleshooting section involving banging on things with stone axes.
FreeDOS is still maintaned, gets new drivers all the time, and so on. I can't see how DOS can be dead either.
Rethinking email
You know, the OS from the people who created Unix.
They also had an associated embedded OS called Inferno. Philips actually used Inferno in an Internet telephone. Funny that it wasn't a success. It cost something like $600 or $800 10 years ago, and took literally minutes to load a web page at modem speeds.
A quick google search doesn't show any version port or otherwise of FF on OS 9. I think you are thinking of the Mozilla Classic Suite or whatever they called it then.
Wang VD mini? Sounds like something CmdrTaco would enjoy.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Has anyone seen a CTOS system lately. A fully networked micro kernel that I think Unisys killed
I wonder why the article omitted QNX. I saw a brief demo of this operating system sometime in 2000-2001 and was not impressed too much. I wonder what happened to it since then.
I think the reason OS 9 sucks is sadly the only really horrible thing about an otherwise nice OS. It is terribly unstable compared to OSX or Win2000+. I realized it then, but going back it is really a major advancement. All G3's can run some flavor of OSX albiet sometimes slowly. I'd take some sluggish behavior over single application caused crashes.
GlobalView; The precursor to all graphical OS desktop environments, which died in the early 90's (RIP). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlobalView Why that 'Xerox 8010' workstation was so sexy back then that it made MS-DOS 1.0 look like..., well..., MS-DOS 1.0. Windows 7 might be a tough competitor these days, but it was born in the wrong century to compete for that same GUI Desktop title. ;)
OS/2 is really quite amazing as you say, but a quick correction. The last version of Opera for OS/2 was 5.12.
When I started with computers that were disk-capable, it was i8080 and Z80 based using dumb terminals. Installing CP/M-80 on a system required assembly language skills because you had to write your own BIOS to interface CP/M to your peripherals. Added a new serial or parallel port? Write your own driver for it!
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
ENIAC 1 - Is no moore (Pun intended)... the pieces were drawn and quartered. See Wiki The Moore's School of Engineering is also no more, it was swallowed by University of Pennsylvania.
he he... he said swallowed
nobody's mentioned the Apollo boxes..
Domain OS was... well, weird.
Support FSF: Stop thinking with your wallet, and think with your imagination. (cc/non-commercial)
No OS seems to simply die off anymore, if you include emulators as well. Even stuff as ancient as operating systems for the DEC PDP-11 http://www.pdp11.org/, or IBM's System/370 http://www.hercules-390.org/ have emulators these days that not only still can run them, but apparently, people still use as well...
Oh wait, I use that for Oregon Trail and Strategic Conquest.
Is anyone Windows 3.11? I seriously doubt it, since it is a work group OS, mostly used at the work place. If an office is still using Windows 3.11, they are either out of business or have replaced it with another OS in order to keep up with new software.
TOP DSLR Cameras Reviews of the top DSLRs
No it doesn't. There's no space between the second and third /, it just looks like there is.
The Amstrad PCW runs on CP/M. There were 200,000 units sold and they are still in use and there is still some 3rd party support.
http://www.luxsoft.demon.co.uk/lux/pcw.html
I believe the hitchhikers guides were written on the PCW.
And still stands as the fastest Windows OS.
The Windows 95 beta is really interesting, though.
Have you considered SheepShaver? It runs under linux and supports up to OS 9.0.4. I don't know how it would handle whatever I/O port you're using though.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Thanks for that link. I suspect there would be problems (the hardware and software involved are very idiosyncratic), but I will check it out.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Coherent is dead.
Windows 98 first edition kinda disappeared, ME haunts my dreams and makes my nightmares look happy. In 5 months there will be Vista to regret and make fun of, hell why wait!
Cue the car analogy!
There are still Model T Fords being driven today, so from that perspective you could say that, no, no operating system is ever likely to truly go extinct.
There are, however, some that likely are only in use by hobbyists, collectors or historians (probably via emulation). I would say that list at least includes Apple's DOS (and alies, such as ProntoDOS), Pro-DOS, SOS as well as TRS-DOS and NewDOS.
It was the GUI that came with my Amstrad 6400 back in '87. A 16-color GUI running on an 8086 w/ 640k ram and a 20 meg hard drive. It was slow as shit, though.
I do outsourced IT support... So I run into all sorts of odd operating systems.
We've got a client, a sheet metal company, that runs some kind of plasma cutter thing off DOS 3.something
They've got another location a few hours away that runs a newer version of the same plasma cutter off Windows 2000.
Speaking of Windows 2000 - we've got a couple clients that won't run anything else. Their entire operation, all their workstations, is built on Windows 2000.
We've got a client, a truck shop, that runs a couple impact printers off Windows 98 machines. And they've got an old Mac OS 7 machine they keep around to access their old accounting program once in a while.
We had someone come in recently who was looking to purchase a new computer. They finally decided their old one just wasn't cutting it anymore. They were upgrading from Windows 3.1
We've got a couple medical offices running some older (10+ years) IBM machines... AS/400's and the like... They're running some version of AIX... Couldn't tell you which one though, because we never have to touch them. Those things are rock solid.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
All of the OSes you name are microprocessor OSes.
I can think of a number of mainframe and minicomputer OSes that are - in some cases (e.g. Multics) - sadly no longer with us.
Has there ever been a major OS that simply went away, period?
Ohio Scientific? They were at one time almost a major competitor for Apple and Commodore, back in the early PET days. The C2-4P was my first computer.
Gone but not forgotten.
Steaming POS that it was.
I learned from PC-MOS that sometimes bosses can't admit that they are blitheringly wrong.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
About 10 years ago I came across a chain of drug stores in the northeast that was able to run 12 cash registers using a 286 as the central server, serving 12 cash registers.
You can imagine my amazement as I watched a 286 that had the power to send prices to 12 registers at once and receive sales back from all 12 registers, run reports and updates, all without blinking an eye! At the time, Windows 95 could barely keep one computer running, so seeing it run 12 registers simultaneously was quite amazing.
That was years ago, but apparently Flex-OS lives on as IBM's 4690 Operating system. It was originally started by Digital Research as "DOS 286" so it's come quite a long way, and hasn't died at all.
At my job, the only software that is available for our vibration analyzers for our boilers runs on DOS.
EMAS, and Multics. Two major operating systems that don't run anywhere, even under emulation.
Data General made this OS (and derivative) for their 16- and 32-bit minicomputers in the early '80s. My high school had one and it's what I learned Pascal on. Since DG seems to have dropped the line in 1988 and switched to concentrating on their Unix derivative before finally crashing and burning in 1999, and it never ran on machines that most hobbyists would be familiar with, I suspect that there are few orphaned installations out there...but apparently I'm wrong.
CP/M is probably not in use much, but has anyone seen a working MP/M (multi-user CP/M) system in the past 15 years?
I'm still using a Win98 Plus! pack on my Vista machine and it works really well. The last time I saw one of my doctors five years ago he was still running his office on Windows 3.1. Hmmm. I guess I shouldn't have upgraded.
Maybe he's talking about Craig Noone or Jimmie Noone or Kathleen Noone or any of those
My VIC-20 with tape drive I stole from school is still working.
Ah, but that pattern doesn't capture the space after 'slashdot'. A pattern that would work is:
s/ this afternoon//
Pedantic? Yes, but that's what I believe my GP (your P) was referring to.
"I've spent my whole life figuring out crazy ways to do things. It'll work." -- Montgomery Scott, "Relics"
In all seriousness, I can report that I have seen a copy of Windows ME running on an office computer within the last three months. It was in Paraguay. Forty kilometers off the asphalt. In a school.
They mainly used it for a pirated copy of Microsoft Encarta (circa 1990-something), which is a priceless educational resource in a place with no newspapers and no public internet.
And come to it, it was about the only legally licensed copy of Windows in the town. Everybody else was running pirated copies of XP, although some of those had little imitation Vista desktop widgets.
John Hancock wuz here.
that's dead. In fact, it was pretty much stillborn.
Probably the most bulletproof (literally, they were built like tanks!) system out there, Cromemco had very good S-100/IEEE-696 systems, running Z-80s and M680x0 processors.
For operating systems, they had CDOS (like CP/M only better) and Cromix, a UNIX-Like system. I have actually used one which also ran AT&T System V UNIX. Unfortunately, they were priced out of the range of most folks.
I still have a ton of documentation and disks in my basement for these beasts!
... if that's your best, your best won't do... - Twisted Sister
TSS/360 is dead and gone. You can actually download (some of?) the source for TSS/370, which was a sort-of successor. The TSS/360 installation at Carnegie Mellon University was turned off right about the time I left there, and I think it was either the last or the next-to-last TSS/360 running.
I know one piece of medical equipment that is still being made and uses DOS. The reason is that it has some real time requirements where Windows will fail, and the company never got around to port the software to a real time capable OS.
C - the footgun of programming languages
I'm sure Vista will fade away and not be used in the future! :D
I don't know if IBM even supports it anymore (they probably do), but I saw an ATM a short time ago that was using OS/2... so there has got to be more of them out there. OS/2 was used lot in things like ATM's and cash registers. I think people would be surprised if they knew just how old some of the software was that businesses were using for single-purpose machines. My local pizza place uses what appears to be DOS for their order systems. The old CRT's that the pizza makers get the info from certainly looks like a DOS screen.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
How do you pronounce Noone? Like the time? NOO NEE? NOO UN? Is one of the n's silent? Wich one?
It's new-nee, and it's a she.
-- Joren
The Uptime-Project, collected data on uptimes from users until 1 March 2007, and the current record for longest uptime is 11 years, 303 days, 20 hours and 57 minutes on a computer running OpenVMS. Rumours mention in January 2008 that Iarnród Éireann had an OpenVMS machine up for 18 years,[1] which was restarted just for Y2K tests. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uptime
I was going to say GEOS, which was an 8-bit GUI operating system on the C-64, but I figured out it is still around.
I remember thinking how cool it was because they wrote some really low level machine language routines that could detect when you opened and closed the 1541 floppy drive automatically, so instead of saying "Insert next disk and press Enter" like so many other programs of the time, it actually detected when you closed the drive door (engaged read/write heads) and automatically started reading from the 5.25" floppy disk. I guess you had to be there to see it, but it seemed impressive to me at the time.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Strange how people love to refer to the special effects on Babylon 5. They were pretty horrid. I could never make it through a show because I was so distracted by them. Star Trek TNG and DS9 did CGI much better, albeit a little later.
A rolling stone is worth two in the bush!
As in Asta la I think.
So Apple invented a time machine, sent engineers forward in time to copy the Amiga, then went back in time to create the Mac before the Amiga even existed? Wow, that's actually more impressive.
I used to work on RSX-11, RT-11 and RSTS/E in the '70s. Good place to start, I thought.
But this thread will never cover all of the OSes that ran on PDP11. (According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP_11#The_decline_of_the_PDP-11):
From Digital: * BATCH-11/DOS-11 * CAPS-11 (Cassette Based Programme development System)[5] * GAMMA-11[5] * DSM-11 * IAS * P/OS * RSTS/E * RSX-11 * RT-11 * Ultrix-11
From third parties: * ANDOS * CSI-DOS * DEMOS (Soviet Union) * Duress (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign/Datalogics)[5] * Fuzzball * MERT[5] * Micropower Pascal[5] * MK-DOS * MONECS * MTS (Multi-Tasking System written in RTL/2 by SPL)[5] * MUMPS * PC11 (Decus 11-501/Pilkington)[5] * Sphere (Infosphere - Portland Oregon 1981-87)[5] * Softech Microsystems UCSD System with UCSD Pascal[5] * TRAX (Transaction Processing system)[5] * TRIPOS * TSX-Plus * Unix (many versions, including Version 6 Unix, Version 7 Unix, UNIX System III, and 2BSD) * Venix (implementation/port of Unix developed by VenturCom)[5]
I fairly sure NASA's AGC isn't in use any more.
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
The Apple III OS was born broken and died quickly.
OTOH, Apple's DOS 3.1 through 3.3, ProDOS and ProDOS 16 are alive and well on my Apple collection. My ProDOS 16 Apple IIgs still has Wolfram's first cellular autonoma program on it.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Windows ME (or just Windows)
Possibly it (and me both) belong in a museum. And yes, I can use it. No, I haven't for ages.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
I haven't seen either in quite some time, and given that TOPS-20 ran on a 36-bit architecture I can't believe anyone would still have hardware capable of running it. Did they die with DEC?
... about dead OSes, no one has mentioned that BSD is dying?
CTOS: Convergent Technologies Operating System. They also had a CTIX, which ya'll can figure out what it was.
Windows 1.0 is lightweight and agile on a modern PC and has no known viruses.
I recommend it for everyday use with Trumpet Winsock for INternet access.
No sig today...
There's this island somewhere in the Pacific where they still use Apple II's to keep the world from ending. From the screenshots I've seen they don't appear to be running the old Apple OS on them, though.
OSFree is an open source alternative to OS/2. As IBM could not open source OS/2 because of over 300 licensed code bases that went into developing it, they instead spund it off to Serenity systems to create an OEM version of OS/2 named eComStation. But OSFree is an attempt to build an open sourced OS/2 from scratch to work with MS-DOS, OS/2 1.X command, OS/2 2.0 3.0 and 4.0 (Warp and Merlin), and even some eComStation compatibility. I am not sure if they will try a WIN-OS2 substation or use ODIN to run 16 bit and 32 bit Windows applications. ODIN was the OS/2 version of WINE.
OSFree hasn't reached Alpha phase yet, but they are working on creating a LiveCD version that boots, and a version of OSFree that runs in Linux but runs OS/2 programs inside of Linux, like that Borg or Ferengi version of OS/2 ran under Windows to run OS/2 programs in a different OS.
Why has Slashdot almost ignored AROS Amiga Research OS? It has gone beyond what HaikuOS has and has had a LiveCD and VMWare image for a long time now. It is based on AmigaOS 3.1 APIs and written from scratch, IIRC AmigaOS 4.X was using AROS code to build it on. So while it is like an older AmigaOS 3.1 version it can run in a virtual machine or LiveCD or even a version that runs inside of Linux to run AROS programs. What Amiga Fan that runs Linux wouldn't want an AROS subsystem? All AROS lacks is decent applications, but that is being worked on with the AROS bounty system.
FreeDOS is a MS-DOS replacement. It can run the FreeGEM replacement GUI for Windows 3.X (basically a 16 bit GUI that runs GEM programs over DOS) or OpenGEM. But most think OpenGEM is the better of the 16 bit GUIS for DOS.
ReactOS is based on WINE to become a stand alone OS that is Windows XP/2003 compatible. It hasn't reached Beta stage yet, and lacks proper driver support, but it can be run via VmWare virtual machines or a LiveCD. The Virtual machine comes bundled with QEMU available from the downloads section and it is good to download and try out. It doesn't support modern 32 bit Windows programs but can be made to run the older ones that don't require .Net libraries or the BITS service. In about five years time it should become stable enough to reach the Beta stage and support most drivers and be able to be installed to an actual machine. By the time it reaches 1.0 status, Microsoft will have abandoned Windows XP and most likely have Windows 8 or 9 with a Virtual PC mode to run XP software like Windows 7 does. The Windows Legacy Software is not going away, and Microsoft proved that with the XP Virtual Machine for Windows 7 Pro and up users. Many software companies cannot afford to upgrade their software to work on Windows Vista or above and many small businesses have their old business software written for DOS, 16 bit Windows, or Windows XP or lower, and cannot afford to buy new machines that run Windows Vista or Windows 7 and lose compatibility with their legacy Windows software for business.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I see him just about every year at Epcot's Flower & Garden Festival - still puts on an entertaining show after all these years, and is a great guy to talk to.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
I work at a small I shop in NZ and roughly 4-5 times a month someone brings in a winME or win98 machine that's inevitably infested with ten trillion kinds of malware and has an expired OEM version of nortons. In these situations my usual response is to : 1. Kill it with Fire 2. KILL IT WITH FIRE 3. Kill customer *and* machine with fire. 4. All of the above. Just to be sure. On the plus side, I'm getting a large portion of these users migrated onto ubuntu as it's a *lot* cheaper than either replacing the machine with one that can deal with a modern OS or partial upgrade and installing XP/Vista. It's a bit heavier from a support point of view, but at least I don't have to deal with the "It's saying I've got $malware_of_the_week - fix it now!!!" calls.
come to the dark side, we have penguins.
special effects for Jurassic Park was done on Amiga too!
I just remembered another gem that CMU was running: TSS-8, which ran the EDUsystem-50 variant of the PDP-8.
I wouldn't be surprised if some school out there is still running a TSS-8 instance in a dark corner.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_General:
Data General (DG) was founded by several engineers from Digital Equipment Corporation who were frustrated with DEC's management and left to form their own company. The chief protagonists were Edson deCastro, Henry Burkhardt III, and Richard Sogge of Digital Equipment (DEC), and Herbert Richman of Fairchild Semiconductor. The company was incorporated in the state of Delaware in April 1968.
De Castro was the chief engineer in charge of the PDP-8, DEC's line of inexpensive computers that created the minicomputer market. It was designed specifically to be used in lab equipment settings; as the technology improved, it was shrunk-fit into a 19-inch rack. Many PDP-8's still operate today, decades later. de Castro, convinced he could do one better, began work on his new 16-bit design.
The result was released in 1969 as the Nova. Designed to be rack-mounted similarly to the later PDP-8 machines, it was smaller in height and ran considerably faster. Launched as "the best small computer in the world", the Nova quickly gained a huge following and made the company flush with cash, although Data General had to defend itself from misappropriation of its trade secrets[1]. With the initial success of the Nova, Data General went public in the fall of 1969. The Nova, like the [DEC}PDP-8, used a simple accumulator-based architecture. It lacked general registers and the stack-pointer functionality of the more advanced [DEC]PDP-11
Your kidding right? The Mac architecture of the late 80's was nothing like the Amiga. You actually managed to insult the Amiga in the process of singing praises.
Ensemble? I still have a copy.
I have a copy of Chuck Moore's FORTH operating system for the IBM 1130. It's on 80-column cards, punched at Kitt Peak Observatory/NRAO in the mid 1970's. You're welcome to port this to OSX...
I think your confused... your thinking of Carnosaur
*BSD
2002 called. It wants its joke back.
With any modern dual-core CPU it takes so little time to compile things these days it's not even an issue anymore..
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Same way you pronounce Noonian Soong.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
In the Unix -> Linux style, another OS to be ressurrected as a GPL-licensed reimplementation is VMS. Whilst the Open in OpenVMS doesn't refer to Open Source, the Free in FreeVMS really does mean Freedom.
The project's website is here:
http://www.freevms.net/
It appears to be based on Linux kernel code but implementing VMS-like behaviour on top of that. I've always heard that (if it wasn't for Unix), VMS would be *the* hacker OS. Plus Unix was popular because its code was pretty commonly available in the early days. VMS itself sounds awesome in a number of ways and I'm aware that it's still used in the Real World, although you rarely observe it directly.
FreeVMS are looking for developers, it would seem...
I made a living programming Macs in the late 1980's and sold Amiga software. I can't say that either one of them directly copied the other, although the Amiga's IFF file format was developed by people who had cross-platform ambitions and there is a small debt it owes to Mac resource fork organization.
As far as AmigaOS is dead, I'm not even sure if it's finally no longer being developed for, although it's years out of the mainstream. Emulation for the vintage AmigaOS, however, is up-to-date for 1999 (httlp://.www.amigaforever.com). In fact, I was using it earlier this week to try and convert some old files I had.
There's also no space between the first slash and the 't' of this. Man, I'm worse than the other guy...
Scott Joplin is famous for hand "editing" player piano rolls, adding notes by hand to improve the music roll before being sold.
Sort of like binary editing your object file :-)
OS/2 is forever my favorite free operating system because IBM gave away so may copies on floppy disk. The complete set was 20+ disks if I remember right.
Just reformat and re-use. Never did install it.
Not impressed with Haiku. Linux ftw.
Back in '77 when I started out with computers, I learnt to program the wonderful Casio accounting computer. It was built into an office desk and used a continuously circulating paper tape as the program storage. I can't remember the actual name of the O/S, but after all these years would love to read more about it....
XENIX was a SCO system. Yes, MS had a hand in its initial development, but it was supported and maintained by SCO for most of its existence.
And, of course, what happened to SCO means that there's pretty much zero chance of a revival. (Boy do I not miss fourteen-character filenames; almost as bad as DOS).
He's talking about the space right after the t of slashdot.
Surely INTERACTIVE UNIX is dead? :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTERACTIVE_UNIX
Um, you know the mac hardware was designed about 3 years before the Amiga? And the architecture was pretty much entirely different?
I mean, I'm a huge Amiga fan, but Apple didn't copy it.
-josh
...we played a joke on a sales guy by installing Bob on his laptop. We bought it off eBay. I bet you can still find it. Our sales guy turned out to be smart enough to go "what is this shit???" and he de-installed. I wonder how many would take a shine to it if you "made the switch" on them.
Oh, and as others have pointed out Bob wasn't really an OS; but then neither was Windows when it first came out... it was just a GUI shell for DOS. True story: When I was in tech support we had a user who said "Word Perfect" when she was asked what her OS was. A new tech who was full of himself might have written her off as an idiot; but somebody had informed me that Word Perfect had written its own GUI shell that ran on top of DOS at some point. From the user standpoint, anything that you interract with and can use to launch apps is easily termed an OS. The layer below that which handles hardware is transparent to them. Since Windows 3.x was being called an OS, the woman was well within her rights to call the WP shell an OS, IMHO. IIRC, you could go run/start/progman in Windows95 and get the old Win3.x shell. This was sometimes done in support for techs using scripts that were based on the old UI! Ahhh.... memories.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
DOS has mutlitasking as well, via TSRs. Great fun to write those, amazing the stuff you could do, adding applications to DOS that are accessible with a keypress. Norton used to do this, when they were good (and run by Peter Norton).
FMS, the Fortran Monitor System for the IBM 709, 7090 and 7094, is truly dead. It was replaced by IBSYS, which evolved into OS/360.
I prefer iPinot
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Mostly true of mom and pop shops. The regional magazine publisher I worked for completed the transition to OS X back when 10.3 was out. Ultimately moving to a full digital work flow gave the editors more time to deadline. Since everything is direct to plate printing all proofing is done digitally aside from the final press check. That week of back and forth proofing via bluelines, color keys and whatever was cut down significantly.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Plan 9 finally found its place, IBM BlueGebe/L and BG/L runs Plan 9. Plan 9 is not a bad, dead or weird OS, it is just "UNIX is good enough" what kills it. We all use good parts of it, for example Unicode belongs to it, procfs belongs to it or it is "lite" implementation. Do you know a single Unix-like technology instantly adopted by entire industry? It is just a small part of Plan9, Unicode.
Also the times of everyone wanting to run exact same application on multiple devices has not come yet. Supercomputers with insane computing power actually does better with plan 9 since they deal with massive amount of processes distributed to amazing amount of CPUs and memory.
You know what? Something makes me feel like Apple will be bragging "Built on Plan 9" just like "Built on UNIX" in distant future. As usual, users won't know/care about it but the GUI and Frameworks will give the difference. For example, "copy" photoshop process to home computer or laptop while leaving etc.
BTW if you really want to see "weirdest of weird" OS, which first released in 1961 and has Knuth as intern code in it, look nothing else than Burroughs MCP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_MCP
It is still used, maintained and you must pay millions of dollars to "have" it (more like rent). It has a name like "master control program", need to say more? :)
Consult a textbook instead of the argument that failed to convince the Judge in Microsoft vs Netscape.
A solitaire game, web browser and even a shell are applications in userspace and not part of the operating system. The gnu tools are applications. The gnu operating system is called Hurd.
to put it simply, the beige box under your desk is not the "hard drive" and GNU is not the OS on a linux or BSD system.
Has there ever been a major OS that simply went away, period?"
Michigan Terminal System
It was a mainframe system used by several universities, including the one I went to. According to http://www.clock.org/~jss/work/mts/timeline.html the last site shutdown June 1999.
You don't need an apostrophe after possessive "its."
...a major OS that simply went away, period?
Windows Me.
I hope it did.
I recently used a self-booting floppy disk to run DOS and play a few old late 1980s DOS games on my fairly new AMD 64 computer.
I changed the BIOS settings on my AMD-64 X2 4200+ computer, so that it would boot from a floppy disk. I then booted up my computer using the PC-DOS 2000 installation floppy disk #1. While running DOS from the floppy, I used the format command to create several more self-booting floppy disks. I had to swap disks in the process, since I only have one floppy drive. I could not use my hard disk, since DOS did not recognize the Linux EXT3 partitions on my SATA hard disk. I made sure to format the floppy disks as a self-booting floppy and also made sure not to accidentally format my 500 GB hard drive as a 1.44 MB self booting DOS floppy disk (if that is even possible).
IBM PC-DOS 2000 was a minor Y2K upgrade to PC-DOS 97, which surprisingly, could still be purchased up until several years ago.
I then copied several old shareware games and one old commercial game, onto each of the old floppy disks. Then I rebooted the computer and played a few of the old games for several hours. I was surprised to see that my 20 inch Dell flat screen monitor could actually do 640 x 480 resolution, which was the standard resolution for a VGA monitor used back then. CGI and EGA monitors had an even lower resolution.
For a couple of days, I played some old games such as Commander Keen, Galactic Battle and Island of Danger. Island of Danger, is a text mode game where a capital letter "I" is my hover craft and it fires asterisks at the missile launchers and other targets. I forget what letter of the alphabet was used as missiles. The text characters used to create the scenery came in several colors. The other two games actually ran in graphics mode, with better graphics.
I also created a self-booting FreeDOS boot disk, at one point, and ran another game from it. FreeDOS is still available from FreeDOS.org for free. I could have also used my old Microsoft DOS 3.3 or DOS 5.0 or DOS 6.0 floppies to create self-booting floppies.
After removing the floppy disk, my computer was still able to boot up into Linux just fine. So, I had not messed anything up on my hard drive or the boot sector of my hard drive. I then installed the Linux version of DOSBox, under Linux, and was then able to play those same old shareware DOS games full screen from within Linux.
Someday, I might get around to trying out a game or two, which was made sometime later than the late 1980s. It would be interesting to see how the newer games compare. But, it is good to know that there are still ways to play the old DOS games, on newer computers.
A couple of years ago, I briefly actually had FreeDOS and then later PC-DOS 2000, installed on a FAT16 primary first partition, of a parallel ATA hard drive, on my AMD 64 computer. I also had Linux installed on another partition. But, in a later experiment, I was not able to install it successfully on a SATA hard drive, which I was later using instead. I mention that, just in case someone here feels the urge to install DOS on their computer, for some reason.
I heard of an emulator being developed a few years ago, but never saw anything come out of it. I'm afraid that one is quite dead.
You just got troll'd!
I don't think anyone uses IS-DOS for real life tasks. IS-DOS was a somewhat weak DOS clone made as replacement for TR-DOS but it seriously suffered from the low resources of Speccy.
You are all forgetting/never even hearing of Microsoft Bob.
The "dancing bunnies problem" is vastly over rated in comparison between the broken behaviour resulting from the train wreck of NT colliding with MSDOS(including win98 front end) and applications written with the MSDOS mindset, and it' only really possible due to the latter.
I had a shining example of that idiocy yesterday when it was declared all MS Windows users in my company need to run as Administrator due to an internally developed "vital" dotnet app that needs to write a file to the root of the C: drive. Why does it need this? Because the app is a pathetic attempt at a flat file inventory database without any support for multiple people using it. It puts the hardcoded file on the C: drive to list the path to a lockfile! It's this sort of extreme laziness, ignorance and stupidity in developers that grew up with MSDOS and the many incarnations of VB that give us an environment that is unsafe without adult supervision. Even the UAC box hell such an app would produce on Vista/Win7 is not going to teach such developers that it is a bad idea.
The "dancing bunnies" problem is only possible due to the problem of a generation of Microsoft platform developers that might as well be on drugs.
I would like to correct one thing that I said. It looks like I was wrong about Islands of Dangers being a text game. As I look at it again, they actually just look like simple graphics.
Compiled a desktop environment (including all the supporting libraries) recently? They seem to have scaled in compile time along with CPU speed.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
When I started working as a programmer there was someone there who was still supporting BOS
The OS was written in COBOL was well as the applications it ran.
One Man's Trash Is Another Man's Treasure.
Count me in.
I happen to actually support some old-mac users dealing daily with this version of iCab, that indeed was operational well before Classilia was even thought of...
Herve S.
... except that the Macintosh/Lisa operating system predates Amiga OS, and both come from different codebases. Both in turn took their cues from the Xerox Star operating system and its GUI. Apple made different choices than Commodore did in their OS, paring out multitasking and not adding it until the MultiFinder in System 6.5. The Amiga OS was amazing in many ways, but it was geared more to animation and video work whilst Apple concentrated on print, pioneering the use of PostScript and the tools of the DTP revolution.
You may know and love your Amiga, but you seem to be unaware of the actual history of computing and the GUI.
Apple brought itself back from the dead only by looking past the spinning pinwheel of NeXT waiting for an MOD write and recognizing the value in NeXTstep to be reused as OSX. Microsoft eventually recognized that GUIs, preemtive multitasking and TCP/IP protocols weren't just passing fads and eventually incorporated these into Windows 95. But it seems far more common to speak of one's own OS with religious fervor and ignoring the possibility of value in features the only exist in other dead or alive OSs.
My own favorite features which seemed to die with their OS/company...:
O.K. Sorry if I sound like an Amiga fanboy, it's the 'dead' OS I know best.
My hardware *requires* an old OS ,so I am locked into it forever.
I have have 2 Citizen CNC lathes that run Windows 95 with a real-time Kernel for the user interface, and use Mitsubishi PLCs to run the machine behind that.
The expected life of the machine tool is 25 years. Contrast that to a new OS every 5 or so years from MS.
I already have problems finding PCMCIA network cards that have windows 95 drivers So imagine finding one 10 years
from now. Or to find a tech to fix a problem with Win95 10 years from now.
My point is that tightly integrated hardware is like a life-support for old OS's
You are not going to throw out a $235,000 machine because the OS is old.
Vista?
Ran on their Eclipse/MV line of minicomputers. DG headed towards 88K & Intel aviion boxes running DX/UX but got bought by EMC and their server line was dropped.
Lindows....Im pretty sure no one uses that.
Ironically enough, and one of the reasons a new effects team had to b ecreated, the company doing the effects put their A team onto DS9 and their Z to B5
I love the B5 space battles on my 37" HD widescreen, upscaled and drooling
I am looking towards the near future when people will be calling windowsXP an old and tired OS, it seems no one wants to get rid of it.,...it runs fine, works well, and keeping up with the patches, is usually pretty safe..when well configured. I am liking XP so far (pro only, home is garbage)...and would hate to see the day when people write posts about it like this one, talking about those good old days of using it to do read emails, or surf the web.... I just can't see it...I think it will still be used 15 years from now!
I work for a large UK supermarket chain (the largest, actually) and their computer systems and supporting software are pretty old. The tills run NT4 and the SBO/print queue manager is an IBM RS6000 (a PowerPC based machine, I believe) running OpenVMS.
The most up-to-date bits of kit are the checkout servers and the employee terminals- they run XP, but all of the software they run is either 16bit Windows stuff or terminal emulators to talk to that OpenVMS machine or the datacentres; having said that, I know of at least one store in our area that's still using an IBM 3151 orange-screen terminal. The in-house word processor is Ami Pro, a dreadful piece of software. I'd almost forgotten how annoying the 8.3 filename limit was :)
Anyway, with mission-critical stuff, the motto is usually "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". In our case, it seems to be "If it ain't completely broke, ignore it."
How about Vulcan OS which ran on Harris minicomputers in the late 70s and 80s. I cut my teeth on Vulcan on a Harris H500 on my junior college. Even learned Harris assembly language.
Now there was an OS that was before its time
The news made me happy and led me to check in on the status of other once-prominent OSes
Though I'm not sure I'd call it prominent, I was really surprised to find that SpartaDOS for the Atari 8-bit is still actively being developed. The current version is 4.42, released on 12/25/2008. You can download it from http://trub.atari8.info/index.php?ref=sdx_upgrade_en
By the way, if anyone knows how to access the H1: drive from this OS under the atari800 emulator, please let me know. It keeps telling the device dosn't exist.
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
What, no reference to NeXT? Doesn't anyone else have that magnesium slab sitting around pouting for not being used in a strange mirror image of its creator at the time?
Up to about a year ago I was still supporting a MPE/iX HP3000 machine. . .I never even knew it existed till I started my job.
Everything up to the special effects on Babylon 5 were done with Amigas
Only for the first season or two. After that they could afford real computers (Alphas).
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"Sounds like you didn't actually use it much. The SIQ was a notorious OS/2 problem and would usually lock it up at least every couple of days " - by drsmithy (35869) on Thursday September 17, @03:21PM (#29457597)
If by "SIQ" you mean "single message queue"? Then, I have an answer: The reason for that, iirc, & I understood what I read correctly (&, I am pretty sure I did), was because unlike modern Windows NT-based OS', OS/2 had only a single messaging queue for every app, & that was what caused that issue. It was EASY for it to get "hung up" if 1 app in the message train got stupid.
I never once had a problem with it, but, then again, I wasn't exactly "pushing my machine around too hard" back then, anyhow (@ least earlier on circa 1994-1995, bit more later as I got into coding professionally though, but most of that was done on Windows anyhow for me), & OS/2 ran like a DREAM on a 486 Dx/2 66mhz CPU machine + 16mb of RAM, & even BETTER when I "stepped that up" to a 486 Dx/4 133mhz CPU + 32mb of RAM onboard.
I liked it. A lot...
Anyhow - on the message queue issue? From what I understand also, Windows NT-based OS' designers (many worked w/ IBM mind you, in the designs of OS/2 & I suspect that is why NTFS is an improvement on HPFS, which was good in its own right, but not as good as NTFS (acl's & more are in it is why)) realized this, & designed in MULTIPLE MESSAGE QUEUES into Windows NT-based OS' so that would not happen to Microsoft's NT-based Operating Systems.
APK
P.S.=> I was a BIG "fan" of OS/2 2.0-4.0 "Warp" in my day, circa 1994-1999 or so, loved it - I even had a boatload of great utilities for it, in GammaTech Utilities for OS/2, BackMaster for OS/2, FaxWorks for OS/2. Technologically, back then @ least? I think OS/2 truly had Windows 9x beat by a LONG shot, but NT was "waiting in the wings" from MS, & got the best of OS/2. Sometimes, I wonder if that's a good thing, or not (but, only SOMEtimes)... apk
By any chance could you confirm for that year, it wouldn't have been a "central" Processing Unit but somthing spread around a breadboard? If I'm not mistaken, the hobbyist market flourished with open source to change that firmware to what they desired. I vastly remember recent computers from the years of 1990 that had a BIOS and bootstrap console that behaved less a transition but a full kernel, somewhat like M68K Apple Macs perhaps and maybe a rare $5k RadioShack Tandy on OS/2?
Those were the days, but you had it better and to see what you had back then to be re-invented and shrunk down to size into modern equipment is a coveted aspiration.
I find it inspiring if we could reserect these companies and their architectures by implementing them in a newer fab, for research and development purposes of existant code that had yet to be transcribed. It would be nice to have a system like this running on a 9-volt battery as a handheld or strapped to "the back of the hand" as I would like to Watch it become.