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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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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
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
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.