Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Apple hires hit men to track down users and kill them
Was it THAT good, or is it doubly obsolete? ;)
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Windows Vista disappeared October 25th 2009.
I don't think anyone willingly uses Windows ME for any useful task anymore.
TOS. Enough said!
/me ducks and covers in preparation for a massive flaming form all the ST users out there! ;-)
Noone is using WIndows to do some real job.
Who's Noone, and what's he/she using Windows for? Sounds fairly self-defeating, really; I mean, no one important is using it anymore, so Noone might need a new set of talents soon...
The operating systems behind many abacuses have since passed away. May they rest in peace.
Companies definitely still use VMS.
TRS-DOS for a TRS80 model 12
Holy crap that's a PITA to find even an image of a disk to find online.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Never seen one, heard of an emulator, or know of one still running.
Stupid appears to be abundant on slashdot this afternoon.
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.
IBM 360/MFT and MVT
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.
The Incompatible TimeShare system of MIT yore, as I understand it, is truly no more, unless somebody's been *extra* *careful* to keep their PDP-6 in working order all these years.
Oh well, at least we got the Jargon file out of it.
s/this afternoon//
I hate printers.
VMS is not dead. Most of the products you use today are in part of a production system build on VMS. They have trying to get rid of it for decades. However the cost of moving off of it is still cheaper then paying the remaining VMS developers full 1990's consulting fees to keep it going.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Microsoft had one that never made it.
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Has there ever been a major OS that simply went away, period?
I think RSX-11, RT-11 and RSTS/E fit that. Some of the PDP operating systems are dead probably because they're still closed source otherwise I'm guessing hobbyists would still be maintaining them.
My work here is dung.
Is it still being developed?
IIRC Linux was supposed to be a temporary stand-in until the Hurd was ready to go.
MSDOS still has its place in many commercial/industrial applications. If you bought a giant 100k machine that uses a weirdo controller card that's only supported under DOS, you're probably still using it today. If you don't need multitasking, DOS is really not that bad.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
And somebody open-sourced CP/M.
Not to mention the millions of machines running WinME, which still has the DOS kernel under it, which is derived from a cheap CP/M clone...
There are a lot of OSes which predate Unix, as well as many OSes since which have had a different lineage (VMS related stuff, such as Windows).
For the most part, I suspect that the useful applications have predominantly lived on beyond the useful lives of the operating systems. That's typically how things work. The apps have been ported to the new OS, and lived on there. In a sense, the spirit of many older OSes - the good ideas - have lived on vicariously through these apps.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
It's Peter Noone, of Herman's Hermits. Like his performing career, it's still chugging along.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
GLaDOS went away when I threw that b%$^& into the fire.
Also worth noting why it'll be a long time before it's truly dead: the two devices at the bottom of that list. Symbol SPTs are used by a large number of warehouse stock control systems / courier delivery systems, and will survive as a legacy system long after every other user of PalmOS has bitten the dust.
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/
We still use Mac OS 9.4. We have two machines running Mac OS 9.4 that act as controllers for some very expensive equipment. I dread the day those machines won't run anymore. It is going to cost a chunk of money the company won't want to spend to replace that whole system (the machines they control and the computers).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
VMS is very much still in production:
- ported to Itanium
- fully supported by HP
- IPv6 compliant
- java, apache, etc. available
The amiga hardware was way ahead of its time and so was the software for that matter. The mac hardware was basically a weak copy of the amiga stuff. Apple basically just stuck with the amiga copy stuff and incremental improvements to it until they switch over to using PC hardware piece by piece. Today a mac is basically just a severely overpriced pc that you have to buy to be able to use a user friendly operating system.
Where Amigas really shined was video editing. It was a very long time indeed before Amiga stopped being the tool of choice for video work. Everything up to the special effects on Babylon 5 were done with Amigas. After commadore died it took apple a long time to catch up with the Amiga.
The English version of the ITS wikipedia entry claims that there are still a couple of machines running ITS.... ;-)
Anybody knows where ? I miss my MIT-AI ITS account
It not, ... check out http://www.poppyfields.net/filks/00117.html
Cheers :-)
You can't fade away properly when you only have 16 colors, you insensitive clod!
How many Pr1mes are still in operation? I guess there may be 1-2 still around out there? PRIMOS was quite nice in some ways.
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
The Last version of "classic" Mac OS Was 9.2.2. You might refer to 9.0.4 which was the last version of 9.0.x.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
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.
apparently it's still available and according to wiki it's still being maintained and used
The Admin and the Engineer
A modified version of OS/2 is still being sold by Serenity Systems as eComStation.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
OS/2 was stupid because IBM already had AIX and could have ported that to x86 instead of starting a new OS. AIX, while not a wonderful operating system in every way, would run on fairly substandard hardware "back in the day" and it would have made more sense than starting all over. Alternately, IBM had also already ported BSD to ROMP and so I imagine they at one time people who knew it well enough to have made a PC-BSD-OS with IBM's name on it. They didn't do that either. Instead we got OS/2, which was barely compatible with anything, and thus had no reason to exist.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It seems that the p-System -- the underlying OS for UCSD Pascal -- is no more.
It had a number of features like direct feed-back from the compiler to the editor, highlighting lines in error, which was a major step forward, especially for me, as I had done most of my programming on my Apple ][ in 6502 assembler. (Digression: Steve Wozniak is a genius in my humble opinion.)
UCSD Pascal was unique in the way that it compiled to pseudo-code (p-code, why does that make me think of Java?) and was mostly written in p-code itself, apart from machine-dependent parts.
Other "features" made the system a bit quirky, like contiguous files only, which meant you had to pre-allocate space for files if you wanted to write to more than one on a disk.
But hey, I could exercise my theoretical knowledge, gleaned from Niklaus Wirth's Pascal book (red and white and from Springer Verlag) on my Apple!
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
DOS/FreeDOS are used extensively for BIOS patching though single user mode Linux boot cd's are fairly common as well.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
There are still a few BBS's I used to sysop that still are running the combination of DOS/Quarterdeck QEMM/DESQview combo running on 28.8 dialup (for the purests) and TCP/IP backends (for telnet access.) Oh the memory but DESQview was damn near an OS and a few have custom handbuild OS subsystems for their BBS. Suprisingly it wasn't that hard to write up a custom BBS system back then. There are still a few PC\DOS PS1 gateway (as in gateway services, not the brand) boxes out there.
Renegade 4 EVAH! EAT IT WILDCAT AND YOU PROBOARD WEAK SAUCED POSERS!!! ACiD > TRiBE iCE MUAHAAHHAAHHH the ANSI wars are ONE!! BWHAHHAHAAA errr.. crap I'm old...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
This morning I watched an episode of How It's Made and they were showing how the paper rolls for player pianos were still being made today. They showed some guy playing a special piano that made marks on a roll of paper with rods that came down onto carbon copy stuff which made marks on the paper underneath it. And then they showed a more modern approach that had a guy playing on an electronic keyboard that was presumably hooked up to the computer there via midi. But the kicker was what was done with that data once it was on that computer. They said it was transfered to another computer to do the actual manufacturing of the final paper rolls, and they cut to some guy inserting a 5-1/4" floppy into one of the old external Apple floppy drives, and then he leaned over and did some typing on an Apple II sitting beside the cutting machine, which then proceeded to cut the holes into the paper as it was fed through. Couldn't believe it.
I will admit, I loved my Amiga. It was my only friend. It was awesome in its day. I held the banner of Amiga zealot proudly until '95.
Today, I see the Mac fanbois and Linux zealots, and I harbor scorn and envy. There is no platform that deserves such a pedestal. Not just because the Amiga died, but through it's death I could see the world for the cold place it is. OSes & manufacturers will come and go. Apple will die, and Linux will fade. I know not when, but they will. Yet, I am envious of the fanaticism these people hold. The joy they get from the belief their system is superior to all else. I remember when I had faith in Commodore and wish for those days of old.
Today, I move quietly from machine to machine and hold no special attachment to any OS. They are all the same despite their differences.
Once. A few years ago. There was a brief moment I thought I heard the song of BSD, but I turned around and it was just a wrinkled old harlot clearing her throat.
No, the Amiga died, and so did my passion. I miss my old friend, but there will be no more friends like her. Now we only visit -- in the still of the night -- when I am fast asleep.
Windows--in my head. Took several counseling sessions and intense electro-shock therapy, but my therapist says the scars are slowly healing.
There's still lots of video toaster systems used in the TV/video industry that are running AmigaOS.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Does anyone use PRIMOS anymore? My engineering school had a couple of PRIME machines in the mid 80s. Can any of them be still in operation?
Seriously, I remember back in the day using BeOS and being completely floored by it, for about ten minutes. Here was a new OS and it was super fast at some of the tasks that made computers really grind to a halt back then. And it was stable. Remember, this was back when we were all rebooting our Windows boxes once a day at least while doing real work. Macs were better for stability, but only let one program do real work at a time. Unix boxes were rock solid, but it was rare to find one that had crazy advanced features like color display. Linux was rock solid to, but it took a smart guy a non-trivial amount of time to get one actually working.
In comparison to the available options it was almost hard to believe. The only real reason not to use it was lack of applications, which is what I realized in short order. A few dozen actually usable programs were about it. Still, if some companies had jumped on it and pre-installed it would have dragged the computing world half a decade or more into the future. Microsoft killed it with threats and legal action against any company who dared dual install it beside Windows or who even wanted to keep selling Windows and sell BeOS too. If ever there was a time for the feds to step in, that was it, but Be was a tiny company and the niche for an alternative vertically integrated system was taken by Apple. That one instance of shady dealing on MS's part crippled OS development and made it clear to everyone there was no point investing in the desktop OS market. If something so obviously superior, already in a stable and running form couldn't compete against MS's hold on vendors, what was the point in wasting money?
Seeing this just makes me angry all over again how corporate greed and crime has held back progress. Screw you early 90's MS execs. I hope you tell your kids how you managed to cripple OS development around the world with your crimes.
Well, that seriously depends on who you ask. :)
The FSF, for example:
would not agree with you it seems.
In any case, OpenVMS still has nothing to do with being "Open Source". This goes over the source of the 'Open' buzzword (now largely disused) and its relationship to POSIX as opposed to this new fangled F/OSS stuff.
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
My freshman year at CSU the CS department retired their Cyber Mainframe running NOS. We joked that it stood for "No OS".
You can find an emulator for the Cyber - even so it doesn't come with the OS (in this case it is truely "No OS"):
http://members.iinet.net.au/~tom-hunter/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_Cyber
-CF
The operating system which practically powered the core of the British pre-Internet academic network was (SERCnet/JANET) GEC OS4000,which run upon GEC minicomputers.
The strangest thing about it was that half of the OS was implemented in hardware as part of the CPU.
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
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)
There is a fairly recent port, but it is also a Mozilla port, as opposed to a Firefox port.
http://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/
It looks like they basically are trying to update the 6 year old Mozilla for OS 9 with all the updates Mozilla/Firefox has seen since then.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Worse, there's Calmira which is a rather good w95 style interface for 3.1. It's on my old 486 8mb Thinkpad that can't install 32bit 95 thanks to a memory flaw, and it runs great.
But yeah, like a number of people I have a w98 partition on my main machine for gaming -- it's depressing and shocking how fast basic duties are handled. Want to dig up a file with the file manager? BANG, things open. You can turn off all the eye candy you want in KDE and Gnome, but you never get anywhere near that responsiveness, or even the responsiveness the 98 interface has on late Pentium I machines. Nor with any of the lightweight '*box' managers, which aren't as feature-rich as 98.
[Fair's fair - we should point out to the unexperienced that 3.1 is crummy for graphics, and there are no CSS-capable browsers for 16bit. You /can/ use it online, but only in the same way you /can/ use Lynx.]
I believe that most of Google's internal servers run on their customized version of Plan 9.
Ah, but that pattern doesn't capture the space after 'slashdot'. A pattern that would work is:
s/ this afternoon//
Pedantic? Yes, but that's what I believe my GP (your P) was referring to.
"I've spent my whole life figuring out crazy ways to do things. It'll work." -- Montgomery Scott, "Relics"
The Uptime-Project, collected data on uptimes from users until 1 March 2007, and the current record for longest uptime is 11 years, 303 days, 20 hours and 57 minutes on a computer running OpenVMS. Rumours mention in January 2008 that Iarnród Éireann had an OpenVMS machine up for 18 years,[1] which was restarted just for Y2K tests. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uptime
So Apple invented a time machine, sent engineers forward in time to copy the Amiga, then went back in time to create the Mac before the Amiga even existed? Wow, that's actually more impressive.
I used to work on RSX-11, RT-11 and RSTS/E in the '70s. Good place to start, I thought.
But this thread will never cover all of the OSes that ran on PDP11. (According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP_11#The_decline_of_the_PDP-11):
From Digital: * BATCH-11/DOS-11 * CAPS-11 (Cassette Based Programme development System)[5] * GAMMA-11[5] * DSM-11 * IAS * P/OS * RSTS/E * RSX-11 * RT-11 * Ultrix-11
From third parties: * ANDOS * CSI-DOS * DEMOS (Soviet Union) * Duress (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign/Datalogics)[5] * Fuzzball * MERT[5] * Micropower Pascal[5] * MK-DOS * MONECS * MTS (Multi-Tasking System written in RTL/2 by SPL)[5] * MUMPS * PC11 (Decus 11-501/Pilkington)[5] * Sphere (Infosphere - Portland Oregon 1981-87)[5] * Softech Microsystems UCSD System with UCSD Pascal[5] * TRAX (Transaction Processing system)[5] * TRIPOS * TSX-Plus * Unix (many versions, including Version 6 Unix, Version 7 Unix, UNIX System III, and 2BSD) * Venix (implementation/port of Unix developed by VenturCom)[5]
There's this island somewhere in the Pacific where they still use Apple II's to keep the world from ending. From the screenshots I've seen they don't appear to be running the old Apple OS on them, though.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_General:
Data General (DG) was founded by several engineers from Digital Equipment Corporation who were frustrated with DEC's management and left to form their own company. The chief protagonists were Edson deCastro, Henry Burkhardt III, and Richard Sogge of Digital Equipment (DEC), and Herbert Richman of Fairchild Semiconductor. The company was incorporated in the state of Delaware in April 1968.
De Castro was the chief engineer in charge of the PDP-8, DEC's line of inexpensive computers that created the minicomputer market. It was designed specifically to be used in lab equipment settings; as the technology improved, it was shrunk-fit into a 19-inch rack. Many PDP-8's still operate today, decades later. de Castro, convinced he could do one better, began work on his new 16-bit design.
The result was released in 1969 as the Nova. Designed to be rack-mounted similarly to the later PDP-8 machines, it was smaller in height and ran considerably faster. Launched as "the best small computer in the world", the Nova quickly gained a huge following and made the company flush with cash, although Data General had to defend itself from misappropriation of its trade secrets[1]. With the initial success of the Nova, Data General went public in the fall of 1969. The Nova, like the [DEC}PDP-8, used a simple accumulator-based architecture. It lacked general registers and the stack-pointer functionality of the more advanced [DEC]PDP-11
Apple brought itself back from the dead only by looking past the spinning pinwheel of NeXT waiting for an MOD write and recognizing the value in NeXTstep to be reused as OSX. Microsoft eventually recognized that GUIs, preemtive multitasking and TCP/IP protocols weren't just passing fads and eventually incorporated these into Windows 95. But it seems far more common to speak of one's own OS with religious fervor and ignoring the possibility of value in features the only exist in other dead or alive OSs.
My own favorite features which seemed to die with their OS/company...:
O.K. Sorry if I sound like an Amiga fanboy, it's the 'dead' OS I know best.