A look at operating systems that time forgot

I never used anything else in those days. I started with DOS and Windows 3.1
I had seen my brother using his ZX Sinclair and Spectrum, but I was always a Microsoft DOS and Windows man.
Only started playing with Linux when Red Hat started making theirs more user freindly.
Then Ubuntu came along and changed everything.
 
OS/2 lives on in Windows; MS&IBM jointly developed OS/2, and NT was to be the original OS/2 3.0, until IBM/MS had a kerfuffle and parted ways. Win2k8/Windows7 are direct descendants of that product. NT (OS/2 3.0) was made to be a very portable OS, and we're still seeing the fruits of that labour now, as MS announced Win7 ARM version last month.
 
Standard Bank, for example, replaced its original OS/2-based ATMs with Windows-based systems just a couple of years ago.
Click to expand...

Coincidentally, a few years ago I noticed quite a few ATM's out of order with a very familiar looking background image in place of their ATM interface...
 
I played around with ReactOS on a VM. Was interesting. Very alpha though, but fun to play with.

I wasn't exposed to any of the other OSes. Started with DOS 5.0 up to DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1. Now on Windows 7, FreeBSD and Fedora Linux.
 
Last edited:
South Africa's Standard Bank, for example, replaced its original OS/2-based ATMs with Windows-based systems just a couple of years ago. For all intents and purposes OS/2 is gone.
Click to expand...
Not true, or rather, not entirely accurate. I have a friend who works DieBold contracts for STD Bank and most of the ATM's are still OS/2, only a handful are Windows based and they are the high maintenance ones. OS/2 is still very widely used on many, many ATM's to this day.
 
Amiga OS, the Amiga has a beatiful paint program which one of my customers used to design knitting patterns. I then built a relay based interface to control the knitting machine, dispensing with much more difficult design methods and paper tape based machine control. The Argus even wrote an article about it.
 
Amiga was way ahead of it's time. It was the first home PC to multitask, and had advanced graphics - it also introduced cheap video editing for the masses.
 
TwoCents1000 said:
If we look at 'recent' (i.e. from the 90's onward), we should not forget SCO Unix which was the premier Intel Unix in it's day, running many business applications.

Then there was Novell's attempt to build a GUI-driven Unix, called Unixware. They had everything going for them but failed with style. And thus the mighty Novell also fell.

But the one that should get a proper mention must be CP/M.
Click to expand...

Agree about CP/M, the granddaddy of all microprocessor operating systems. Dunno about SCO Unix though, Convergent and Sequent had Intel-based Unix boxes in the late 80s and early nineties which ran vanilla Unix SVID. Some big institutions used the multiprocessor Sequent boxes.
 
Synaesthesia said:
Amiga was way ahead of it's time. It was the first home PC to multitask, and had advanced graphics - it also introduced cheap video editing for the masses.
Click to expand...

Problem was the idiots at Commodore could not organise a pissup in a brewery and only punted the machine in the graphics & gaming departments. They should have aggressively marketed it to the business world as well. God, it was more powerful than any PC of the day (running dos based apps at the time so far behind they were) and also much cheaper, talk about lost opportunities.
 
ponder said:
Considering it came out in 1985, years before others, it was well advanced and stayed more advanced even after time in the market. Truly revolutionary, your cousin had every reason to look down on the other crap available at the time.

OS/2 was also a decent thing, way more so than MSs first attempts at Windows. Pity it did not succeed as we would have been much further along today.

MS has never really made anything. But it just shows you once again you don't need a technically superior product to gain market dominance.
Click to expand...

You almost never need a tech. superior product to get market share, all you need is the the masses access to your product and make the entry cost very low. MS knew this, hence most people liked the look of the MacOS and OS/2 but DOS ran on 640k, so even if you craved the MacOS, your budget had you on DOS. So market share rose, and with market share came applications and today Windows dominates the desktop with something like 90% market share.
 
MarthinusSwart said:
You almost never need a tech. superior product to get market share, all you need is the the masses access to your product and make the entry cost very low. MS knew this, hence most people liked the look of the MacOS and OS/2 but DOS ran on 640k, so even if you craved the MacOS, your budget had you on DOS. So market share rose, and with market share came applications and today Windows dominates the desktop with something like 90% market share.
Click to expand...

Agreed but in the case of Amiga they were cheaper. In this case it wasn't a price issue but a marketing/sales thing, they never targeted the business market like MS did.
 
To me the biggest disappointment of an OS that went nowhere was OS9 which ran on the Motorola platform. Try and imagine 4 users logged in to a 56 KB Pc with 1MHz processor; now imagine how that OS would have performed on today's hardware.

OS9 was based on Unix, with the developers fully aware of the hardware limitations, so they wrote some really tight code.

Unfortunately Motorola succumbed to Intel's better marketing and thus OS9 died in unison.
 
bekdik said:
To me the biggest disappointment of an OS that went nowhere was OS9 which ran on the Motorola platform. Try and imagine 4 users logged in to a 56 KB Pc with 1MHz processor; now imagine how that OS would have performed on today's hardware.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that puppy also had a real-time kernel.
 
Don't forget about Windows Vista: forgotten BEFORE it was replaced by Windows 7.
 
ponder said:
Considering it came out in 1985, years before others, it was well advanced and stayed more advanced even after time in the market. Truly revolutionary, your cousin had every reason to look down on the other crap available at the time.

OS/2 was also a decent thing, way more so than MSs first attempts at Windo
ws. Pity it did not succeed as we would have been much further along today.

MS has never really made anything. But it just shows you once again you don't need a technically superior product to gain market dominance.
Click to expand...

True, but MS survived, more than likely due to their devious tactics etc., and still exists, whereas AmigaOS is nowhere to be seen.

Garyvdh said:
I never used anything else in those days. I started with DOS and Windows 3.1
I had seen my brother using his ZX Sinclair and Spectrum, but I was always a Microsoft DOS and Windows man.
Only started playing with Linux when Red Hat started making theirs more user freindly.
Then Ubuntu came along and changed everything.
Click to expand...

Played with Sinclair before getting a PC and moving onto DOS, even ran DR-DOS for awile as an alternative to MS-DOS. Guess I have always been looking for an alternative to MS software.

B
 
The_Librarian said:
Also had some experience with SCO Openserver v5.0.x - very, very stable. Unfortunately, finding new drivers etc for new hardware is an excercise in futility, and it is also not easy to set up. But, once set up and configured properly, will run for years without needing any poking and prodding from administrators.
Click to expand...

Sco was Rock Rock solid, but as you say unfortunately not kept up to pace with hardware development.

I administered a Sco server for 10 years using FreeDos PC's to emulate the Wyse terminals. BSA must have hated me.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X