Your favorite Old School OS

I was running Windows before it was even public knowledge (about the time Steve Jobs was introducing the 1st Macintosh) and I've been with pretty much every version since that time long ago. If I had to pick a favorite for pre-XP days, I suppose Windows 2000 Professional was it: lean, mean, incredibly fast, almost no bloat, got the job done quick and efficient no matter what I was working on, still a fantastic piece of code to this day. Long before that I was a fan of Windows for Workgroups 3.11 which introduced 32-bit file access which dramatically sped up hard disk reads and writes even in those pre-DMA PIO days.

Windows 98SE was nice - it was incredibly fast, used some code borrowed from Norton Utilities to speed up disk based activity when it came to loading programs (this was basically the first use of a 'prefetch' kind of thing that profiled apps as they loaded to see how the executable elements were pulled from the disk and when a defrag happened it would restructure the data on the platters to load much faster in sequence). And boy oh boy could that make a huge difference in terms of loading applications/games/etc, a big noticeable one.

XP of course ruled the roost for a long time and I did use XP up till the very day that Windows XP Pro x64 Edition (not 64-bit Edition, that was for Itanium processors exclusively, hence the different names) and to this day - regardless of what hardware I've owned - that OS is still the single fastest most efficient OS I've ever used on any platform, period (that's my personal experience with it). I had framerates in Quake 3 that were literally 30% faster just because of using that OS - and Quake 3 was 32-bit code, being executed on a 64-bit OS, but because of the better 64-bit video drivers I got that rather substantial boost in framerates and that was on the same exact hardware that was tested using XP Pro 32-bit with the same version of the video drivers in 32-bit form.

Insanely fast OS, I can only imagine how fast it would be nowadays with an SSD - I still have a Dell Windows XP Pro x64 Edition installation ISO around here someplace, I might just have to see how that would work (by putting the SATA controller in ATA mode for backwards compatibility). Will be a nice project to tackle sometime. ;)

Windows 7 remains my fave version of Windows however, it does everything I require, it does nothing I don't, it is still lean and mean even in spite of Microsoft's constant attempts to fuck it up beyond recognition and push people towards Windows 10. In my own testing it's faster than Windows 10 is on this same hardware (Dell Latitude E6420 with a Core i7-2640m dual core (2 cores/4 threads) with 8GB of RAM. Windows 10 offers me nothing at all, not even the fact that it was free of monetary cost, that would sway me to using it, nothing at all.

EDIT:
Errr, slight booboo on my part so I edited the post - I had mentioned Windows 98SE OSR 2.5 but then realized that was Windows 95 days which OSR 2.5 added USB 1.0 support for, my bad my bad, I'm getting older by the second and the memory just ain't what it once was. :D
 
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Oh yes. Windows 7 for sure.. Windows 8, and Windows 10, is a mess. Support for windows 7 will end on January 14, 2020. some people will quit using 7, because they are not going to get new Updates from Micosoft for this OS anymore. As-far as drivers go. they are not going to be any for new boards?. Well, we have to see it first.
 
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Oleg said:
some people will quit using 7, because they are not going to get new Updates from Micosoft for this OS anymore
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Don't believe the hype, I can practically guarantee you that we'll see Windows 7 and 8/8.1 updates through at least 2022, perhaps even 2023. Windows 10 isn't being adopted nearly as fast as Microsoft had hoped and that's not going to suddenly change. Doesn't matter to me, of course, as I'll continue using Windows 7 for years to come regardless of what they attempt to do to destroy it.
 
CBM DOS... cause instant on was invented in 82. :) load "*",8,1 RUN does it get any more user friendly then that.
 
Oleg said:
Oh yes. Windows 7 for sure.. Windows 8, and Windows 10, is a mess. Support for windows 7 will end on January 14, 2020. some people will quit using 7, because they are not going to get new Updates from Micosoft for this OS anymore. As-far as drivers go. they are not going to be any for new boards?. Well, we have to see it first.
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Windows 7 is not an old school OS, try again please. :D
 
ManofGod said:
Windows 7 is not an old school OS, try again please. :D
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Wait now... aren't you and Mr. heatless always saying its dead use 10 like your told. ;) I'm joking, happy day before Friday MOG. :>
 
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Win 2K. But Win XP x64 was amazing. If only it received the driver support it deserved.
 
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That's like asking about my favorite root canal... They all sucked until Windows 2000.
 
XP on the Windows side - for the snappiness and great hardware sound. Still use it on my home PC. Viruses? I Am the antivirus.
2.6 based distributions with KDE 3.5 on the Linux side. For KDE 3.5.
 
I've never been a real Windows fan - it's more been a necessary evil for the most part. I do miss tinkering with config.sys and autoexec.bat from DOS a bit, but I don't miss any version of Windows.

I always had a soft spot for OS/2. NeXTStep and System 7 were fun to play with as well.

But my favorite was BeOS.It had no real useful purpose but it was fun. May it rest in peace.
 
Hmm... plants and bubble machines. Perhaps that had something to do with the disappearance? :D

It looks like BeOS ran better on Pentium2 than current Windows on i9 lol.
 
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I concur for BeOS.

Programming it was cool, too, though it was badly in need of some kind of layout manager.
 
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I smash my way through this just as well today as I did when it was released in 1989, also got a soft spot for AmigaOS 3.1. I used Windows in the day, still use it - It does the job it's intended to do, in a very soulless fashion.

Windows was never 'amazing', when macOS Classic hit the scene in 1984 - That was amazing.

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I think people's memories of Windows 95 and 98 differ from the reality that was Windows 95 and 98...

...All I remember is reinstalling every six months because the Windows 'rot' was so bad.
 
In 1993 I had a PC and my friend had a Mac. I much preferred the Mac OS over what I had, Dos/Win3.1, but I bought PC just for the games. If it wasn't for the games I would most definitely bought Mac back then. So, Mac OS is my favourite old school OS.

p.s. I took a course in printing back in 1989 and we used Mac there for desktop publishing. We used IBM XT for estimating.
 
rezerekted said:
In 1993 I had a PC and my friend had a Mac. I much preferred the Mac OS over what I had, Dos/Win3.1, but I bought PC just for the games. If it wasn't for the games I would most definitely bought Mac back then. So, Mac OS is my favourite old school OS.

p.s. I took a course in printing back in 1989 and we used Mac there for desktop publishing. We used IBM XT for estimating.
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I remember studying 'computer science' (the term 'IT' hadn't been invented back then), the machines we used were XT's and later on 386's. When the lab next door got these fandangle new little Mac's with their fancy OS I was so envious. Eventually we got to use the Macs and I bought a Powerbook 160, the OS was miles ahead of Windows 95 at that time.
 
W2K, was too much NT, to be good at desktop, and too much desktop to be good as a workstation. Meaning it sucked every witch way. It took ages to boot, driver support was non-existent in the first year, it sealed it's fate.
My favourite OS was Dos 6.22.
Or Windows 98 non-SE. I loved still having the dos prompt, and typing win to start the ui. That was a Win-win, still having compatibility with older DOS games, but also easy access to the GUI.

Also: GEOS
 
M76 said:
W2K, was too much NT, to be good at desktop, and too much desktop to be good as a workstation. Meaning it sucked every witch way. It took ages to boot, driver support was non-existent in the first year, it sealed it's fate.
My favourite OS was Dos 6.22.
Or Windows 98 non-SE. I loved still having the dos prompt, and typing win to start the ui. That was a Win-win, still having compatibility with older DOS games, but also easy access to the GUI.
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I remember playing Quake, I had to run it from DOS as memory was stupidly expensive and I didn't have the memory available to run Quake from Windows - Ahhh, Quake....
 
rezerekted said:
In 1993 I had a PC and my friend had a Mac. I much preferred the Mac OS over what I had, Dos/Win3.1, but I bought PC just for the games. If it wasn't for the games I would most definitely bought Mac back then. So, Mac OS is my favourite old school OS.

p.s. I took a course in printing back in 1989 and we used Mac there for desktop publishing. We used IBM XT for estimating.
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For games at that time, Amiga OS was the best, although DOS was coming along by that point pretty well. However, I loved OS/2 of the PC side of things and the DOS games played very well through DOS mode in OS/2. :) These days are very fun and quite advanced but, those days were the heyday of growth and change. :D
 
If Windows 7 counts then i'm going with that otherwise I'll go with XP. I never used much of Linux or OS X prior to the last few years so I can't speak of their old versions.
 
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