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?"
MacOS 9 (Score:5, Funny)
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:MacOS 9 (Score:5, Informative)
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 [floodgap.com] browser might have changed all that. I'll have to dig out the iMac and see how it does.
Re:MacOS 9 (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The user should look up the Mozilla Firefox ports to OS 9.
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)
Re:MacOS 9 (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:MacOS 9 (Score:5, Funny)
Did you receive the fax about the IE6 users?
Why is OS/2 mentioned twice in the article? (Score:5, Funny)
Was it THAT good, or is it doubly obsolete? ;)
Re:Why is OS/2 mentioned twice in the article? (Score:5, Funny)
OS/2 is clearly half an OS. So OS/2 + OS/2 = OS.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
See, that's why IBM lost and Microsoft won. IBM was stupid enough to divide their OS in two while Microsoft started with a multiple of 95. The problem is, though, that Microsoft lost their train of thought and are back at OS * 7, but still.
Re:Why is OS/2 mentioned twice in the article? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Back then yes, was THAT good.
If by "good" you mean "a lot of advanced features" then you probably would be right. If "good" however includes enough performance to be useful, OS/2 never was a very good OS. Windows 95 would scream (to quote Steve Jobs) on my 486 DX in the day, while OS/2 Warp 3 would present me with an hourglass mouse pointer most of the time.
Re:Why is OS/2 mentioned twice in the article? (Score:5, Funny)
Windows in any form has always been a PIG on any machine that didn't have enough memory to run a proper Unix.
This includes Windows 95.
Windows wins no awards in the "slim OS" category. At best, it might have a slight edge (molasses in january vs. amber).
Re:Why is OS/2 mentioned twice in the article? (Score:5, Informative)
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. Some 486 processors (IBM's Blue Lightning) actually had issues because they were based on the 386's with added instructions and would BSOD no matter what. A Pentium did actually much better.
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) and could run Windows' 16-bit programs. The great thing is that IBM kept support around for a long, long time so many banks were running it in their offices even until very recently.
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.
Re:Why is OS/2 mentioned twice in the article? (Score:4, Funny)
once installed, didn't really run though.
Re:Why is OS/2 mentioned twice in the article? (Score:5, Insightful)
If by "good" you mean "a lot of advanced features" then you probably would be right. If "good" however includes enough performance to be useful, OS/2 never was a very good OS. Windows 95 would scream (to quote Steve Jobs) on my 486 DX in the day, while OS/2 Warp 3 would present me with an hourglass mouse pointer most of the time.
OS/2 wasn't in the same category as Windows 95 - it was in the same category as Windows NT. OS/2 and Windows NT required much more memory than Windows 9x. Once you got an OS/2 machine up to >= 16Meg of memory, it was just fine.
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: (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 g
OS/2 is now eComStation (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Why is OS/2 mentioned twice in the article? (Score:5, Insightful)
(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)
While this might be a decent idea if the whole system knew about it, introducing it to modern Linux would be a catastrophe at best. Fill an ext3/ext4 up to 50% with typical desktop usage patterns (download-delete-move-copy-edit-etc), turn this feature on, and try to torrent a 4Gb file. You'll have plenty of time to think about the merits of your idea, I promise.
Now, think about all the programs that were written with the knowledge that renames are fast. Go no further: the standard toolchain is more than enough to demonstrate this. Is it absolutely necessary that temporary files, however big, are contiguous?
Now, add in SSD's and realize the whole debate is getting pointless.
In a modern pc, with current memory/clock speeds, if you manage that it work with all the hardware, would fly.
Nope. In a modern PC, we're taught to optimize for development speed. Make it run, make it right, and then make it fast. Which means programs get bloated, and nobody cares because computers can keep up. Note how the choice of OS does not affect this process. This is why it's still considered acceptable for a desktop computer to boot in more than 5 seconds.
Re: (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.
Re:Why is OS/2 mentioned twice in the article? (Score:4, Funny)
Hedley Lamarr: Qualifications?
Applicant: Rape, murder, arson, and rape.
Hedley Lamarr: You said rape twice.
Applicant: I like rape.
Re:Why is OS/2 mentioned twice in the article? (Score:5, Funny)
At 1920 screen resolution...
Weren't screens made up of a 10x10 array of clay tablets back then?
ME (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think anyone willingly uses Windows ME for any useful task anymore.
Re:ME (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think anyone willingly uses Windows ME for any useful task anymore.
Were they ever able to? ;)
Re:ME (Score:5, Funny)
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think anyone willingly uses Windows ME for any useful task anymore.
willingly?
ANYMORE?
Dear God, you live in a happy place.
Re:ME (Score:4, Funny)
I'm using ME for a useful task - I have it on a PC in the garage that I'm using to prop up a pile of lumber.
Re: (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.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:ME (Score:5, Funny)
If only the same could be said of the users of said medical computers...
Re:ME (Score:4, Funny)
Re:ME (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Atari (Score:3)
Re:Atari (Score:5, Funny)
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.
What about the Abacus? (Score:4, Funny)
The operating systems behind many abacuses have since passed away. May they rest in peace.
Re:What about the Abacus? (Score:4, Informative)
It is a very easy way to visualize numbers when you are trained to use one.
Of Course, they get to the point where they create an imaginary one in there heads,
hence you see them scratching on the table to solve equations.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You've obviously never been down to your local Chinatown (assuming you have one). The abacus is still alive and well in a lot of places. Somebody who really knows how to use one can beat out most people with a calculator, simply because the calculator-user can't punch the keys fast enough.
Hard to find though... (Score:3, Informative)
TRS-DOS for a TRS80 model 12
Holy crap that's a PITA to find even an image of a disk to find online.
Multics (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Multics (Score:5, Informative)
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:Multics (Score:5, Funny)
I've been officially dead before, twice actually. So that's no guarantee it's not around.
Long ago (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Long ago (Score:4, Informative)
They call it "z/OS" now.
ITS? (Score:3, Informative)
The Incompatible TimeShare system of MIT yore, as I understand it, is truly no more, unless somebody's been *extra* *careful* to keep their PDP-6 in working order all these years.
Oh well, at least we got the Jargon file out of it.
Bob (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Microsoft had one that never made it.
I'm pretty sure Bob was reincarnated as Clippy.
RSX-11, RT-11 and RSTS/E (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (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: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!
What has anyone Hird of the Hurd? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is it still being developed?
IIRC Linux was supposed to be a temporary stand-in until the Hurd was ready to go.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Still no 1.0 release [gnu.org]
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What has anyone Hird of the Hurd? (Score:5, Informative)
Hurd got to a state where it was actually usable - there was a Debian distro of it, you could run X, you could run various applications, it was *real*. But that version was based on the Mach microkernel. Since then they went down the route of porting to the L4 microkernel (generally considered faster but I suspect YMMV depending on design & implementation of what you run on top of it). That work had some interesting ideas but last rumour I'd heard was that they'd stopped *that* port and that someone was working on a new microkernel that better fit their needs.
Hurd's design had nice features. For instance, it's fundamental to the design that users can replace OS components with their own, so custom userspace filesystems were easily supported. Linux gained this capability through FUSE but Hurd had it baked naturally into the design AFAIK.
I'd be quite interested in playing with Hurd but my main issue is that I don't perceive there being a very cohesive effort around it now, so I wouldn't know how to contribute or whether it would help at all. That might *just* be my perception, however the project has manifestly been "on the way" for a very long time.
I'm not even angry... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I'm not even angry... (Score:4, Funny)
Nope. Still Alive.
ITS (Score:3, Informative)
The English version of the ITS wikipedia entry claims that there are still a couple of machines running ITS.... ;-)
Anybody knows where ? I miss my MIT-AI ITS account
It not, ... check out http://www.poppyfields.net/filks/00117.html [poppyfields.net]
Cheers :-)
PRIMOS? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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.
Re:What about Pick? (Score:5, Funny)
was going to say Plan 9, but (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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...
Apple II (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Yes (Score:3, Funny)
I was there man... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I was there man... (Score:4, Insightful)
You can't blame Microsoft for BeOS. That company made so many strategic mistakes, I wouldn't be able to even list them all.
Microsoft's best tactic is doing very little and letting their competitors fail through their own mistakes, that's how they've gained most of their market share.
NOS (Score:3, Funny)
My freshman year at CSU the CS department retired their Cyber Mainframe running NOS. We joked that it stood for "No OS".
You can find an emulator for the Cyber - even so it doesn't come with the OS (in this case it is truely "No OS"):
http://members.iinet.net.au/~tom-hunter/ [iinet.net.au]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_Cyber [wikipedia.org]
-CF
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.
I'm surprised... (Score:4, Interesting)
nobody's mentioned the Apollo boxes..
Domain OS was... well, weird.
Re:Yes, there is (Score:4, Funny)
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...
Re:Yes, there is (Score:4, Funny)
It's Peter Noone, of Herman's Hermits. Like his performing career, it's still chugging along.
Re:Yes, there is (Score:4, Funny)
s/this afternoon//
Re:VMS? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:VMS? (Score:5, Informative)
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: (Score:3, Informative)
Well, that seriously depends on who you ask. :)
The FSF, for example:
would not agree with you it seems. [opensource.org]
In any case, OpenVMS still has nothing to do with being "Open Source". This goes over the source of the 'Open' buzzword (now largely disused) and its relationship to POSIX as opposed to this new fangled F/OSS stuff. [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
VMS is not dead. Most of the products you use today are in part of a production system build on VMS. They have trying to get rid of it for decades. However the cost of moving off of it is still cheaper then paying the remaining VMS developers full 1990's consulting fees to keep it going.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And somebody open-sourced CP/M.
Not to mention the millions of machines running WinME, which still has the DOS kernel under it, which is derived from a cheap CP/M clone...
Yes, VMS (Score:3, Informative)
VMS is very much still in production:
- ported to Itanium
- fully supported by HP
- IPv6 compliant
- java, apache, etc. available
Re: (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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
MSDOS still has its place in many commercial/industrial applications. If you bought a giant 100k machine that uses a weirdo controller card that's only supported under DOS, you're probably still using it today. If you don't need multitasking, DOS is really not that bad.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:DOS and OS 9 (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:OS newbie (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re: (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: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: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.
Re:Amiga OS is dead (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Amiga died, and a cynic was born (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You can't fade away properly when you only have 16 colors, you insensitive clod!
Re: (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 bare