Operating systems that time forgot
Today’s IT world is dominated by Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Android and a handful of other operating systems – but what about in years gone by? We look back at five operating systems that enjoyed their own (often brief) limelight before fading away.
OS/2
Not quite gone but certainly far enough out of sight to be all but forgotten, OS/2 was the creation of Microsoft and IBM. First released in 1987, OS/2 had everything a user could want: a graphical interface, a task switcher and the High Performance File System.
Then, in 1990, along came Windows 3.0 and, despite generally being considered a poor relative, it killed off OS/2 within a couple of years. The rest is history.
OS/2 was, until very recently, widely used in the banking world and you’re sure to find a few bits and pieces of OS/2 running in big businesses. 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.
NextStep
NextStep was created by NeXT to power its own range of PCs in 1989. The multi-tasking operating system was advanced for its time and was developed as much to impress other developers as it was to run a PC. It was based on Unix and had cool features such as an object-orientated application layer, built-in Objective-C runtime and 3D widgets.
The last version of NextStep was version 3.3 in 1995 which had expanded to work on a range of platforms including Sun’s Sparc, Risc and Intel’s x86.
NextStep is technically not entirely gone as many of the technologies developed were used as the basis for Apple’s current Mac OS X.
BeOS
In the mid-1990s BeBox needed an operating system for their own PCs and so BeOS was born. BeOS was intended to be a system optimised for multimedia but ultimately never gained much traction. BeOS was designed to take advantage of the newest hardware available and included symmetric multi-processing, multi-threading and a 64-bit journalling system known as BFS.
More than anything BeOS stood out for its unique yellow-tabbed windows. You either loved it or hated it, and if the latter then you moved on.
Microsoft Bob
Bob is not really an operating system as such, but rather an interface. Released in 1995, Bob was essentially a non-technical, user-friendly interface for Windows 3.x and Windows 95.
The idea was that the desktop, instead of looking like a desktop, looked like the rooms in a house. You stored items in things than looked like cupboards, your “calendar” hung on the wall, the Rolodex on your side-table held your contact list and the pet dog in your house offered tips on using your computer.
The idea of making a PC easier to use was probably well-intentioned but the execution took dumbing-down to a new low. Unsurprisingly Bob didn’t last all that long and was quickly dropped.
AmigaOS
AmigaOS, as the name suggests, was the operating system developed for the Amiga personal computer. Originally created by Commodore in 1985, AmigaOS was introduced on the Amiga 1000 in that year. Initially AmigaOS ran on Motorola 68k processors but later expanded to other platforms including the PowerPC platform.
AmigaOS was hugely popular among PC enthusiasts and was designed as a true multi-threaded, multi-tasking, multimedia operating system. It also aimed to tightly integrated hardware and software to create a fast, powerful and easy to use operating system, something it did exceptionally well. So much so that more than 6 million Amiga PCs were sold.
AmigaOS inspired many other operating systems, including MorphOS, BeOS (which included some of Amiga’s features), and AmigaOS4, an OS for the AmigaOne platform that continues today, albeit in enthusiast circles only.
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