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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?"
Never seen one, heard of an emulator, or know of one still running.
Actually, as recently as last year I encountered a user who had OS 9 at home, running some ancient version of the mac version of IE (5.x), he was having issues with some third party websites and software but refused to accept that the problem was on his end, kind of like your average Win95/98/ME user...
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
I make my living supporting RT/RSX/RSTS customers so I can assure you they're alive (the copyrights are now held by Mentec). Hobbyists run them too -- telnet to mim.update.uu.se to see an RSX system. Maintenance -- well yeah they've been stagnant since the Y2K fixes went in, but so are the applications so changes would just break things at this point.
And yes they're closed source as in, you can't just download the source for free, but the source was *available* for a fairly reasonable price (and it's *beautiful*, much more readable than any free stuff I've seen). Dunno what to call that but "closed source" is a little strong -- this isn't Windows by a long shot!
Even if you use contemporary hardware. I fired up an old Win95 box a few months ago, and was startled by how much more responsive it was compared to the modern WinXP system I use at work. We've all been given the frog-in-pot-of-water treatment, learning to expect gradually more sluggish UIs.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Version 8.4 of OpenVMS for Integrity and Alpha is entering beta (field test) for prodution release early next year.
h21007.www2.hp.com/portal/site/dspp/menuitem.863c3e4cbcdc3f3515b49c108973a801/?ciid=66a2aea9e2f73210VgnVCM100000a360ea10RCRD
To be sure, this is about a year late, and HP has laid off most of the experienced team (including some original developers from the 1970's) moving development to India (where DEC has started development teams decades ago), so it's not as if this is HP's lead investment. I've met some of the Indian developers, and they seemed intelligent, interested in promoting VMS, and willing to learn new and unique skills specific to VMS (i.e. crash dump analysis).
VAX/VMS is still at version 7.3, and will probably stay there, although patches are still being released.
There is a free licensing program for non-commercial use for any VAX, Alpha, or Integrity system, including emulators (SIMH is free and supports VAX).
www.openvmshobbyist.com
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 wife still runs MacOS 9 on an old G3 Gossamer. It does everything she wants and needs. Why upgrade? There are lots of people still using MacOS 9.
I'm pretty sure the original poster for OS9 was not talking about MacOS 9. There's an old OS called OS9 that had nothing to do with Macs. It was one of the rirst real-time multitasking OSes. It's still going strong with hobbists because it's tiny, efficient, and powerful. It was originally developed for the Motorola 6809, which is where it gets it's name.
Verdict: NOT DEAD (OS9 nor MacOS 9)
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."
Even if you use contemporary hardware. I fired up an old Win95 box a few months ago, and was startled by how much more responsive it was compared to the modern WinXP system I use at work. We've all been given the frog-in-pot-of-water treatment, learning to expect gradually more sluggish UIs.
I know this is probably going to be perceived as flamebait, but... this is only true if by "we've all" you mean "all us Windows users". It certainly hasn't been my experience with the various major releases of OS X (10.2 through 10.6) - on the same hardware, each release has been faster. Well, there was one exception... 10.5.0 Leopard was unusually buggy for an Apple release, and those bugs were irritating enough that I didn't notice any relative performance changes versus 10.4, one way or the other.
As far as the Linux desktop goes, my only experience was back when gnome moved from gtk to gtk2 (gnome versions 1.4 to 2 IIRC) - that particular upgrade did support your statement.
#DeleteChrome
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.
The original Windows 95 release was quite usable in 8MB of RAM. It wasn't until IE4 beefed up the shell that 16MB+ became necessary.
At the same time, OS/2 basically required 16MB (you could limp by in 12MB), and NT4 20MB.
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) [...]
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 (and that's if you weren't doing anything particularly interesting).
Between OS/2 and a properly setup Windows 95 system, without any 16-bit drivers or (to a lesser degree) programs, the stability difference was negligible - but Windows 95 ran equally well on 1/2 to 2/3 the hardware and had _vastly_ better compatibility.
Actually I have a customer that refuses to let go of his old WinME box he keeps in the back, and for him it is a great little OS. You see, working PC repair I believe I have found what was the big fuckup in WinME. WinME allowed the OEMs to use either the older Vxd drivers, or the new WDM driver model. That was a bad idea of Itanic proportions.
You see my customer got one of the few boxes that the OEM used NOTHING but WDM drivers, and it is solid and pain free. Myself and most others at the time got the fucked up OEM version because MSFT allowed both driver models (you still owe me an apology and a copy of Win2K Bill Gates!) which equaled an unstable mess. If you had a box with ONLY WDM drivers it runs fine, but HP and many others reused their Win9X drivers for the older onboard parts and only provided WDM for newer onboards and cards. This caused driver contentions and all kinds of instability, like how I could set my watch by my WinME box (which I am actually typing this on. With Win2K it has been running for nearly 9 years as a rock solid Netbox) die within 5 minutes of boot every. single. time. even if you didn't actually touch anything. The onboard sound was Vxd, the video WDM and so a crashing we will go.
So don't be surprised that there are plenty of old boxes doing a single job and doing it well. Many are either like the DOS 3 box I built for a lumber mill where they had a CNC controller that wouldn't run on anything else, or like the WinME guy and running an old astronomy program and doing it quite well, or myself and this Win2K Netbox. If it works why toss it out?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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)
I recently did some consulting at a company that does large-scale data transfer (from tape, paper, microfilm, microfiche, to tape, paper, microfilm, microfiche, or DVD; quite a few banks use them to transfer data from mainframe tapes to something useful). They still use Photoshop on MacOS 9 on their high-resolution A3 scanner; it runs faster than OS X on the machine connected to it and there's only one program running, so there's not much difference between the program crashing and the OS crashing.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
NT was substantially more advanced than OS/2. Multiuser, SMP capable, fully 32 bit, almost-a-microkernel, etc.
This is the thing I never quite got. NT4 ran fine in 32 MB of ram, and it made 128 MB of ram seem infinite. And it did in fact multitask very well. I never understood why it was that XP had to be SO much heavier than NT, while still doing essentially the same stuff. I've always had this nagging feeling that the team that built NT4 really knew what they were doing, and that the guys that came after just weren't as good at their game.
For long term Win9x usage I've found the best thing to do is get rid of the cruft, that is any crap you are not using. The money spent on a copy of Win98 Lite goes a long way when it comes to keeping Win9x alive for long periods IMHO. If you have an old copy of Win95 lying around you can even replace the slower Win98 shell with the non IE based Win95 shell and make it a screaming demon even on really old boxes.
I used Win98 Lite myself to strip down an old 733Mhz I keep for a Win98/DOS game box. It is easy to use and really gave that box a kick in the pants. They have a demo if there is anybody out there still needing Win9x for one reason or another. But if you want to keep a Win9x box going there is no better tool.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.