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."
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.
s/this afternoon//
I hate printers.
You are wrong.
I send old copies of Windows ME to my sworn enemies.
I'm using ME for a useful task - I have it on a PC in the garage that I'm using to prop up a pile of lumber.
No sig? Sigh...
Widnows Vista was stilborn.
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
YOU FIEND!!!! Oh the humanity!
It's Peter Noone, of Herman's Hermits. Like his performing career, it's still chugging along.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
GLaDOS went away when I threw that b%$^& into the fire.
They are re-releasing that as Windows 7... oh wait, no somebody said it has cool new features like... ummm new themes, a fade-in effect on the start button and the biggest revision to the task bar since win95... its 10 pixels taller.
Are you kidding? TOS is still used through-out the computing industry. In fact its normally pretty big news when people make TOS modifications as they are behind some of the biggest pieces of software out there in the world.
What people don't know is that the team behind TOS shifted its emphasis towards specialising in very hard to understand and complicated programmes that were designed to confuse those who read them, like Perl but with longer words. This new coding approach was then adopted by Lawyers everywhere which is why everyone now clearly states they have a "TOS" for their website/software/whatever.
Over beer in 1993 an Atari developer was asked by someone what TOS stood for and jokingly said "Terms of Service". This name stuck, particularly with the lawyers and hence TOS now dominates as the underlying operating system for legal documents.
What most people don't realise is that you can run "Chess Master 2000" on the Supreme Court.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I've been officially dead before, twice actually. So that's no guarantee it's not around.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I actually have a friend of mine that's still running Windows Me and - get this - accesses the Internet via an AOL dial-up account. When I asked him why he doesn't just get DSL or some other form of broadband, he said, "If I do that, I'll get viruses faster!" I really couldn't argue with that.
It's not all bad, though. When he asked me to install AOL on his computer (under protest, mind you) and get him set up, I set up AOL to use pulse-dialing (think old-school rotary phone) when making its calls. It turns out that, once set, you can't unset that, so, every time he tries to get on to the Internet at home, he has to sit there and wait... "TICK-TICK-TICK-TICK... TICK-TICK-TICK... TICK-TICK-TICK-TICK-TICK..." and so on for about 45 seconds or so. I told him it was my way of getting even.
You're still compiling your code. Come back to us when you finally get your DE compiled.
You can't fade away properly when you only have 16 colors, you insensitive clod!
If only the same could be said of the users of said medical computers...
Microsoft had one that never made it.
I'm pretty sure Bob was reincarnated as Clippy.
"modern" and "WinXP" don't belong in the same sentence.
I don't get it? Why would a guy named "Dick Pick" be so sensitive?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Windows--in my head. Took several counseling sessions and intense electro-shock therapy, but my therapist says the scars are slowly healing.
Your friend is adorable.
I don't think anyone willingly uses Windows ME for any useful task anymore.
Were they ever able to? ;)
I had a firewall machine with windows ME that had an uptime of over 3 months at one point. I then took it down for fear that breaking the laws of probability like that would cause the universe to fold in on itself.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Why are you befriending elderly men?
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
I'm not dead yet, i'm getting better!
Jonathanjk.com
I believe that most of Google's internal servers run on their customized version of Plan 9.
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.
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.