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?"

Comments

MacOS 9

[tetsukaze]

Apple hires hit men to track down users and kill them

Re:MacOS 9

[iamhassi]

"he was having issues with some third party websites and software "

I'm lucky enough to have a iMac (not using it right now) with OS 9 and IE 5 and the internet is pretty much unusable. Flash doesn't work, so no youtube, and webmail sites like hotmail, gmail and yahoo also do not work. About the only thing that does work is Google and news sites.

However the new Classilla browser might have changed all that. I'll have to dig out the iMac and see how it does.

Re:MacOS 9

[joeyblades]

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)

Re:MacOS 9

[hairyfeet]

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?

ME

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think anyone willingly uses Windows ME for any useful task anymore.

Re:ME

[oatworm]

I actually have a friend of mine that's still running Windows Me and - get this - accesses the Internet via an AOL dial-up account. When I asked him why he doesn't just get DSL or some other form of broadband, he said, "If I do that, I'll get viruses faster!" I really couldn't argue with that.

It's not all bad, though. When he asked me to install AOL on his computer (under protest, mind you) and get him set up, I set up AOL to use pulse-dialing (think old-school rotary phone) when making its calls. It turns out that, once set, you can't unset that, so, every time he tries to get on to the Internet at home, he has to sit there and wait... "TICK-TICK-TICK-TICK... TICK-TICK-TICK... TICK-TICK-TICK-TICK-TICK..." and so on for about 45 seconds or so. I told him it was my way of getting even.

Re:ME

[orb_nsc]

Your friend is adorable.

Re:ME

[Jedi Alec]

I don't think anyone willingly uses Windows ME for any useful task anymore.

Were they ever able to? ;)

I had a firewall machine with windows ME that had an uptime of over 3 months at one point. I then took it down for fear that breaking the laws of probability like that would cause the universe to fold in on itself.

Re:Why is OS/2 mentioned twice in the article?

[Eudial]

OS/2 is clearly half an OS. So OS/2 + OS/2 = OS.

Multics

[riley]

Never seen one, heard of an emulator, or know of one still running.

Re:Multics

[geekoid]

I've been officially dead before, twice actually. So that's no guarantee it's not around.
 

Multics

[Chris Mattern]

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.

Re:VMS?

[WinterSolstice]

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)

Re:Why is OS/2 mentioned twice in the article?

[gmuslera]

Back then yes, was THAT good. The desktop (WPS) was simply amazing, HPFS had features that would be nice to see in main linux filesystems (was so aggresive with putting files in contiguous blocks that a defrag script back then just renamed forth and back all files to do the work), and had good management of memory and multitasking. In a modern pc, with current memory/clock speeds, if you manage that it work with all the hardware, would fly. Still today, there is some software maintained for it (i think that i.e. Opera 10 have an OS/2 version). If it (or some of the good portions of it, i.e. the wps) would have been released like 10 years ago in public domain/open source/etc) you probably would be using a derivative of it right now.

Re:RSX-11, RT-11 and RSTS/E

[KC1P]

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!

Re:Win 3.1

[tverbeek]

I'm posting from win3.1 because it uses so much less resources it is so much faster!

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.

Re:Why is OS/2 mentioned twice in the article?

[nizo]

At 1920 screen resolution...

Weren't screens made up of a 10x10 array of clay tablets back then?

Re:What about Pick?

[GodfatherofSoul]

I don't get it? Why would a guy named "Dick Pick" be so sensitive?