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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.
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/
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)
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.