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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?"
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."
I don't think anyone willingly uses Windows ME for any useful task anymore.
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.
Never seen one, heard of an emulator, or know of one still running.
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.
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.
s/this afternoon//
I hate printers.
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.
They call it "z/OS" now.
Is it still being developed?
IIRC Linux was supposed to be a temporary stand-in until the Hurd was ready to go.
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.
Are you kidding? TOS is still used through-out the computing industry. In fact its normally pretty big news when people make TOS modifications as they are behind some of the biggest pieces of software out there in the world.
What people don't know is that the team behind TOS shifted its emphasis towards specialising in very hard to understand and complicated programmes that were designed to confuse those who read them, like Perl but with longer words. This new coding approach was then adopted by Lawyers everywhere which is why everyone now clearly states they have a "TOS" for their website/software/whatever.
Over beer in 1993 an Atari developer was asked by someone what TOS stood for and jokingly said "Terms of Service". This name stuck, particularly with the lawyers and hence TOS now dominates as the underlying operating system for legal documents.
What most people don't realise is that you can run "Chess Master 2000" on the Supreme Court.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
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/
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.
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...)
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
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.
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.
nobody's mentioned the Apollo boxes..
Domain OS was... well, weird.
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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.