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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?"
Nobody uses it anymore, period. The inherent flaw where it became unstable and bluescreened after 30-something days kind of led to it dying out very fast.
BSD is dying.
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
As opposed to "we have not succeded but let's sell it anyway", I guess.
You mean, like Vista?
OS/2 wasn't in the same category as Windows 95 - it was in the same category as Windows NT.
Rubbish. NT was substantially more advanced than OS/2. Multiuser, SMP capable, fully 32 bit, almost-a-microkernel, etc.
That is, after all, why it was originally built to replace OS/2.
OS/2 and Windows NT required much more memory than Windows 9x. Once you got an OS/2 machine up to >= 16Meg of memory, it was just fine.
Of course, Windows 95 delivered essentially equivalent functionality in half the RAM, and also while managing to deliver such "advanced" functionality as a dynamically sized disk cache.