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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?"
Companies definitely still use VMS.
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.
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.
No, it was just rebranded.
IBM 360/MFT and MVT
Surely you jest... since
A) VMS is still in active use and development
B) The "Open" in OpenVMS means it is POSIX compliant (and the term open has NOTHING to do with open source. It actually has many software patents)
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
That is what you think!!!!!
It is a very easy way to visualize numbers when you are trained to use one.
Of Course, they get to the point where they create an imaginary one in there heads,
hence you see them scratching on the table to solve equations.
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.
You've obviously never been down to your local Chinatown (assuming you have one). The abacus is still alive and well in a lot of places. Somebody who really knows how to use one can beat out most people with a calculator, simply because the calculator-user can't punch the keys fast enough.
Microsoft had one that never made it.
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Back then yes, was THAT good. The desktop (WPS) was simply amazing, HPFS had features that would be nice to see in main linux filesystems (was so aggresive with putting files in contiguous blocks that a defrag script back then just renamed forth and back all files to do the work), and had good management of memory and multitasking. In a modern pc, with current memory/clock speeds, if you manage that it work with all the hardware, would fly. Still today, there is some software maintained for it (i think that i.e. Opera 10 have an OS/2 version). If it (or some of the good portions of it, i.e. the wps) would have been released like 10 years ago in public domain/open source/etc) you probably would be using a derivative of it right now.
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!
Still no 1.0 release
There are a lot of OSes which predate Unix, as well as many OSes since which have had a different lineage (VMS related stuff, such as Windows).
For the most part, I suspect that the useful applications have predominantly lived on beyond the useful lives of the operating systems. That's typically how things work. The apps have been ported to the new OS, and lived on there. In a sense, the spirit of many older OSes - the good ideas - have lived on vicariously through these apps.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Well, I have to deal with an embedded medical computer that runs WinME (It's designed to control a gamma probe). So, unfortunately, WinME is not completely dead.
You can get the latest version of Firefox for OS/2 too. ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest-3.5/contrib/firefox-3.5.3.en-US.os2.zip Nathan
VMS is very much still in production:
- ported to Itanium
- fully supported by HP
- IPv6 compliant
- java, apache, etc. available
Yep. The last Multics installation closed in 2000, but they released the source under the MIT license in 2007.
It may be 7 digits, but at least it's a semiprime
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 :-)
"he was having issues with some third party websites and software "
I'm lucky enough to have a iMac (not using it right now) with OS 9 and IE 5 and the internet is pretty much unusable. Flash doesn't work, so no youtube, and webmail sites like hotmail, gmail and yahoo also do not work. About the only thing that does work is Google and news sites.
However the new Classilla browser might have changed all that. I'll have to dig out the iMac and see how it does.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Oh, it's still around. In fact, Debian even maintains a distribution for it. That said, my understanding is that stability and performance are still rather miserable.
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.
The user should look up the Mozilla Firefox ports to OS 9.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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 -
apparently it's still available and according to wiki it's still being maintained and used
The Admin and the Engineer
A modified version of OS/2 is still being sold by Serenity Systems as eComStation.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
I worked at several computer stores back then and it was the exact opposite actually. Windows 95 would not run very well on a 486 unless you had at least 16MB RAM (where 4 and 8 was the standard back then) especially if you started adding more applications or device drivers. Some 486 processors (IBM's Blue Lightning) actually had issues because they were based on the 386's with added instructions and would BSOD no matter what. A Pentium did actually much better.
OS/2 Warp 4 had some wonderful applications and did very well on both 386 and 486, never crashed (it was more stable than most workstation UNIX back then) and could run Windows' 16-bit programs. The great thing is that IBM kept support around for a long, long time so many banks were running it in their offices even until very recently.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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!
Or try out iCab... Shareware, but it's *mostly* modern. I haven't tried Flash with it yet, though...
+1 Disagree
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.
Hurd got to a state where it was actually usable - there was a Debian distro of it, you could run X, you could run various applications, it was *real*. But that version was based on the Mach microkernel. Since then they went down the route of porting to the L4 microkernel (generally considered faster but I suspect YMMV depending on design & implementation of what you run on top of it). That work had some interesting ideas but last rumour I'd heard was that they'd stopped *that* port and that someone was working on a new microkernel that better fit their needs.
Hurd's design had nice features. For instance, it's fundamental to the design that users can replace OS components with their own, so custom userspace filesystems were easily supported. Linux gained this capability through FUSE but Hurd had it baked naturally into the design AFAIK.
I'd be quite interested in playing with Hurd but my main issue is that I don't perceive there being a very cohesive effort around it now, so I wouldn't know how to contribute or whether it would help at all. That might *just* be my perception, however the project has manifestly been "on the way" for a very long time.
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.
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.
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.
Well, that seriously depends on who you ask. :)
The FSF, for example:
would not agree with you it seems.
In any case, OpenVMS still has nothing to do with being "Open Source". This goes over the source of the 'Open' buzzword (now largely disused) and its relationship to POSIX as opposed to this new fangled F/OSS stuff.
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
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.
There is a fairly recent port, but it is also a Mozilla port, as opposed to a Firefox port.
http://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/
It looks like they basically are trying to update the 6 year old Mozilla for OS 9 with all the updates Mozilla/Firefox has seen since then.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
It's too bad IBM only got a clue about usability when it was too late. OS/2 Warp 4 looks reasonably pleasant for example, but by then who cared? Windows 95 may have had an incredibly shitty (from a technical standpoint) desktop but it did more or less function in a sane manner.
Worse, there's Calmira which is a rather good w95 style interface for 3.1. It's on my old 486 8mb Thinkpad that can't install 32bit 95 thanks to a memory flaw, and it runs great.
But yeah, like a number of people I have a w98 partition on my main machine for gaming -- it's depressing and shocking how fast basic duties are handled. Want to dig up a file with the file manager? BANG, things open. You can turn off all the eye candy you want in KDE and Gnome, but you never get anywhere near that responsiveness, or even the responsiveness the 98 interface has on late Pentium I machines. Nor with any of the lightweight '*box' managers, which aren't as feature-rich as 98.
[Fair's fair - we should point out to the unexperienced that 3.1 is crummy for graphics, and there are no CSS-capable browsers for 16bit. You /can/ use it online, but only in the same way you /can/ use Lynx.]
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"
What about iCab? I went to the iCab homepage and I see version 3.0.5 for download, from 1/1/08... that's a bit behind the latest OS X version (4.6.1) but it might be more usable than IE.
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]