Old Operating Systems Never Die 875
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?"
Win 3.1 (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm posting from win3.1 because it uses so much less resources it is so much faster!
Multics (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:RSX-11, RT-11 and RSTS/E (Score:3, Interesting)
These OS's can be run using an emulator (simh for example), and there are sites still running these in production.
Re:Why is OS/2 mentioned twice in the article? (Score:3, Interesting)
I still have my Warp discs, and remember OS/2 VERY fondly. It was my desktop OS at work for a number of years, and was absolutely and utterly groundbreaking for its day. The rest of the company was on DOS and Windows 3.11, and I could run both of them as virtual machines on top of OS/2. All that on a "top end" 386SX. :)
Then Windows 95 came out a year later, based on largely the same codebase, and everyone flocked to it. I was sad, because OS/2 was a vastly superior OS, but since the company decided to go Win95, I had little choice but to follow suit, since I couldn't run Windows 95 VMs in OS/2.
Re:MacOS 9 (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, as recently as last year I encountered a user who had OS 9 at home, running some ancient version of the mac version of IE (5.x), he was having issues with some third party websites and software but refused to accept that the problem was on his end, kind of like your average Win95/98/ME user...
/Mikael
Re:Palm (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:RSX-11, RT-11 and RSTS/E (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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:DOS and OS 9 (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why is OS/2 mentioned twice in the article? (Score:1, Interesting)
I still have a OS2/Warp system running. It is the box that runs our corporate voice mail system. It has been chugging along since the 90's, and if it aint broke don't fix it. I can not think of any features a new system would provide that would make it worth the investment to replace. Except maybe going to a VoIP system.
Re:ME (Score:3, Interesting)
For you youngsters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob [wikipedia.org]
For the record I am aware that BOB ran on top of Windows, which ran on top of DOS, but then WinME runs on top of DOS it is just that DOS is more hidden in WinME.
Re:VMS? (Score:3, Interesting)
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
What about Pick? (Score:5, Interesting)
My father used to be a programmer, and he first told me about Pick [wikipedia.org]. 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.
FORTRAN 77 (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Never understood the fanaticism about OS/2 (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:MacOS 9 (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
A/UX is gone (Score:4, Interesting)
How about A/UX [applefritter.com] - 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.
Re:Win 3.1 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Quarterdeck QEMM Etc. (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
Re:Why is OS/2 mentioned twice in the article? (Score:4, Interesting)
I worked at several computer stores back then and it was the exact opposite actually. Windows 95 would not run very well on a 486 unless you had at least 16MB RAM (where 4 and 8 was the standard back then) especially if you started adding more applications or device drivers.
The original Windows 95 release was quite usable in 8MB of RAM. It wasn't until IE4 beefed up the shell that 16MB+ became necessary.
At the same time, OS/2 basically required 16MB (you could limp by in 12MB), and NT4 20MB.
OS/2 Warp 4 had some wonderful applications and did very well on both 386 and 486, never crashed (it was more stable than most workstation UNIX back then) [...]
Sounds like you didn't actually use it much. The SIQ was a notorious OS/2 problem and would usually lock it up at least every couple of days (and that's if you weren't doing anything particularly interesting).
Between OS/2 and a properly setup Windows 95 system, without any 16-bit drivers or (to a lesser degree) programs, the stability difference was negligible - but Windows 95 ran equally well on 1/2 to 2/3 the hardware and had _vastly_ better compatibility.
PRIME ? (Score:2, Interesting)
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?
Re:Why is OS/2 mentioned twice in the article? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yup. I would love a WPS on linux. Elegant. Consistent. Extensible objects. Also, when you moved a file that something on your desktop pointed to, it knew about it and changed the desktop object accordingly. Nothing else does that as well to this day.
GEC OS4000 (Score:3, Interesting)
The operating system which practically powered the core of the British pre-Internet academic network was (SERCnet/JANET) GEC OS4000 [wikipedia.org],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.
Re:Why is OS/2 mentioned twice in the article? (Score:3, Interesting)
I might have to install it in a VM one of these days just to play with it again. :)
It's so difficult it's almost impossible (and I say 'almost' from hearsay as I remember reading that a vmware special beta version could do it, never tried myself). The problem is OS/2 needs to use the ring-1 of the processor, for device drivers, while almost every other OS only use ring-0 (system) and ring-2 (userland). Most emulators / virtual machines cut corners, either by not implementing ring-1, or by requesting ring-1 for themselves. As a result, OS/2 cannot run virtually.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm surprised... (Score:4, Interesting)
nobody's mentioned the Apollo boxes..
Domain OS was... well, weird.
Re:MacOS 9 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:RSX-11, RT-11 and RSTS/E (Score:3, Interesting)
Has there ever been a major OS that simply went away, period?
I think RSX-11 [wikipedia.org], RT-11 [wikipedia.org] and RSTS/E [wikipedia.org] 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.
Well, I think the problem is in the question. Would you call it major if it did go away, period? I'd argue it wasn't major, at least not enough.
Re:Why is OS/2 mentioned twice in the article? (Score:5, Interesting)
NT was substantially more advanced than OS/2. Multiuser, SMP capable, fully 32 bit, almost-a-microkernel, etc.
This is the thing I never quite got. NT4 ran fine in 32 MB of ram, and it made 128 MB of ram seem infinite. And it did in fact multitask very well. I never understood why it was that XP had to be SO much heavier than NT, while still doing essentially the same stuff. I've always had this nagging feeling that the team that built NT4 really knew what they were doing, and that the guys that came after just weren't as good at their game.
Re:A/UX is gone (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:RSX-11, RT-11 and RSTS/E (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:RSX-11, RT-11 and RSTS/E (Score:1, Interesting)
Oddly enough, my first "personal" computer was a PDP-11/34 running RT-11 (it was a lab system). The source code (for all 3 OS's) was Macro-11. The source code for RT was marvelous - the epitome of literate code tho not in Knuth's since. The comments were filled with relevant passages from Milton's "Paradise Lost". The others, tho not quite is "literate" were beautiful in their eligancel. I miss working with them (I was a DEC Software Services consultant working with RT/RSX/VMS/Elan systems).
Re:NOS (Score:3, Interesting)
As a freshman at ULowell in 1984-85, I had to use the Cyber running NOS for programming assignments. The main terminal room was all print terminals, except for 3 video terminals that were, for obvious reasons, in great demand. I found a manual to the terminals and learned how to lock them with a password. So, henceforth, I always got a video terminal. To to this day, I still feel bad about doing that. It's probably the most anti-social thing I've ever done in my life. But at least I got to use VSE (the visual screen editor) to write my code...
I believe that year was the last for the Cyber. It got replaced with a high end VAX/VMS machine for the general student body, and a Sequent (I believe) multiple-CPU Unix machine for the CS students.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Multics (Score:3, Interesting)
VMS stable? How about an uptime of 18 years (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:MacOS 9 (Score:2, Interesting)
No way. I even mentioned iCab in my master's thesis.
Data General (Score:2, Interesting)
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_General [wikipedia.org]:
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
Re:RSX-11, RT-11 and RSTS/E (Score:3, Interesting)
All I meant was, as closed-source systems go, it sure was easy for mere mortals to get ahold of the sources. So it seems like there should be different levels of "closed" instead of just a black-and-white label (especially one which tends to carry so much anger with it, at least when certain people say it). DEC was always *way* cooler about throwing sources around than other companies I've dealt with -- you could even get the source to the microcode for some of their CPUs.
Re:I was there man... (Score:3, Interesting)
"I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense - I deserve it."
-- Jean-Louis Gassée, CEO Be, Inc.
Re:Why is OS/2 mentioned twice in the article? (Score:3, Interesting)
Um..... NT was born from OS/2 and Dave Cutler.
MS did a lot of the development of OS/2 in the early days up until 1.1 and then had a falling out with IBM. Windows was seen by IBM as a cheesy interim solution until OS/2 was perfected. MS and IBM really didn't see eye to eye on a lot of things and MS decided to walk. MS developed NT with their bits of the project and knowledge gained and IBM giggled and continued with OS/2. It's a pity IBM couldn't market it for shit and priced it out of the market for mere mortals to afford for their cheap home machines. It was also ahead of it's time and a resource hog initially.
NT wasn't built to replace OS/2, it was to spite IBM and cut IBM off at the pass and dominate not only home desktops but the business desktops as well. In some ways you could consider NT a fork of OS/2. NT still runs OS/2 1.1 binaries (at least Server 2003 does).
Amiga[tm] died, and I'm O.K. with that, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.