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Old Operating Systems Never Die

Posted by timothy on from the they-just-start-running-in-loops dept.

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?"

4 of 875 comments (clear)

  1. Multics by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:VMS? by WinterSolstice · · Score: 5, Informative

    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)

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    An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
  3. Re:Why is OS/2 mentioned twice in the article? by gmuslera · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:MacOS 9 by iamhassi · · Score: 5, Informative

    "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.

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    my karma will be here long after I'm gone