Your favorite Old School OS

Speaking of old CPUs, and Gaming. Used to play original DOOM FPS game on Windows 3.1, with Intel 486SX CPU inside.
 
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Speaking of GEOS:

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I never really liked GEOS, to me it felt like a GUI on top of an OS?!
 
I never really liked GEOS, to me it felt like a GUI on top of an OS?!

You mean like the first 6 or 7 versions of windows. :)

Of course that is pretty much waht geos was.... I remember doing school assignments with geowrite and an old colour dot matrix printer. It may not have been the most ground breaking of software but it was pretty cool what they got to run on a c64.
 
You mean like the first 6 or 7 versions of windows. :)

Of course that is pretty much waht geos was.... I remember doing school assignments with geowrite and an old colour dot matrix printer. It may not have been the most ground breaking of software but it was pretty cool what they got to run on a c64.

I was actually thinking that as I was typing that reply!
 
if i had to select a single one i would say windows XP 64. for its time. but i enjoyed
DOS
Windows 95 osr2
Win98se
Win2k
WinXP
WinXP 64
Windows 7
 
I wonder why we even bothered with the C64 when we could have just used a raspberry pi or a Rock64 board. No wait...

Blasphemy!

Hiss!

ChadD got me curious about GEOS, as a result I've been fiddling with it most of the day. One thing I never had in the day was an REU (Ram Expansion Unit), with the advent of the 1541 UII+ I've got a monster of an REU with 16MB at my disposal. Once you load the OS into the REU via DMA it's actually quite snappy and useable.

Quite impressive for an 8 bit machine.
 
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Blasphemy!

Hiss!

ChadD got me curious about GEOS, as a result I've been fiddling with it most of the day. One thing I never had in the day was an REU (Ram Expansion Unit), with the advent of the 1541 UII+ I've got a monster of an REU with 16MB at my disposal. Once you load the OS into the REU via DMA it's actually quite snappy and useable.

Quite impressive for an 8 bit machine.

Your pics brought back memories. I forgot how much of a MacOS knock of it was... well honestly I forgot all about geos really. I guess it would have been the first GUI I every used though. Kids today never got the pleasure of really messing with comptuers the way the C64 let us. My first working program, my first demo, my first tracked chip tune... pirating your software via bbs before the word pirate was used to describe kids sharing software. I had a couple c64s at one point, the first one my parents bought and a garage sale special. I sold them between ex wives and I always regretted it. :)

From what I remember of geos it had to have been some pretty lean and mean code to even run on that hardware. Gotta respect the guys that built that, even if they where cribbing Apples interface.
 
I never really liked GEOS, to me it felt like a GUI on top of an OS?!

What do you think Windows 1.x, 2.x, and 3.x were? They were GUIs that sat on top of DOS more than anything else, and it wasn't until Windows 95 came about that it really dumped that base to work upon but kept "MS-DOS 7.0" around for compatibility purposes.

(and yes I saw that ChadD made the reference to all the old 16-bit versions of Windows being the same) :D
 
What do you think Windows 1.x, 2.x, and 3.x were? They were GUIs that sat on top of DOS more than anything else, and it wasn't until Windows 95 came about that it really dumped that base to work upon but kept "MS-DOS 7.0" around for compatibility purposes.

(and yes I saw that ChadD made the reference to all the old 16-bit versions of Windows being the same) :D

Actually, as a result of my day's fiddling with GEOS, it is possible to load the entire OS into the REU - Which was convenient in the day as there were battery backed up REU's available (no flash memory at that time) that booted GEOS before Basic V2.

So in many instances GEOS was, in fact, able to be run as an OS on it's own.
 
BeOS fans - check out project Haiku. It's pretty responsive and supports USB 3 and stuff.
 
AmigaOS fans check out MorphOS.

Runs identically to AmigaOS 3.1 with a modern interface and all the mod cons you'd expect out of a modern OS. It's even compatible with old software that doesn't hit the custom chipset directly, anything that hits the chipset directly requires the use of UAC - But it's conveniently integrated into the OS.

To keep with tradition it only runs on PPC hardware.
 
At it's peak, GEOS was the third most popular operating system globally! Trailing only MS-DOS and MacOS.

Well there you go!
 
AmigaOS fans check out MorphOS.

Runs identically to AmigaOS 3.1 with a modern interface and all the mod cons you'd expect out of a modern OS. It's even compatible with old software that doesn't hit the custom chipset directly, anything that hits the chipset directly requires the use of UAC - But it's conveniently integrated into the OS.

To keep with tradition it only runs on PPC hardware.

VM-able?
 
Wipeout used to be one of my favorite racers. That, and ATR.
I remember at age 14 I repaired a bug in that game. All of the copies I had available would freeze in the first space level at a certain moment. The music track file was iffy. Copied it to a fresh floppy, hex-edited the file and zeroed the faulty 'frame' (checksum was bad). Was the only guy in town able to finish that game thanks to this lol
 
Wipeout used to be one of my favorite racers. That, and ATR.
I remember at age 14 I repaired a bug in that game. All of the copies I had available would freeze in the first space level at a certain moment. The music track file was iffy. Copied it to a fresh floppy, hex-edited the file and zeroed the faulty 'frame' (checksum was bad). Was the only guy in town able to finish that game thanks to this lol

Wipeout plays better on this machine than any other machine I've ever run it on.
 
Wipeout used to be one of my favorite racers. That, and ATR.
I remember at age 14 I repaired a bug in that game. All of the copies I had available would freeze in the first space level at a certain moment. The music track file was iffy. Copied it to a fresh floppy, hex-edited the file and zeroed the faulty 'frame' (checksum was bad). Was the only guy in town able to finish that game thanks to this lol

Lol I borrowed a friends copy of Friday the 13th and hex edited the start narrative to include his name instead of Jason with some nasty poop comments. He was not happy :D
 
Lol I borrowed a friends copy of Friday the 13th and hex edited the start narrative to include his name instead of Jason with some nasty poop comments. He was not happy :D

Did similar things with Cannon Fodder and actually tried to polonize Dune II. Cygnus editor was what I was using at that time.
That was impressive to my pals.
And when I used debug.exe to directly write and read text to floppy drives - I was hailed hacker extraordinare. Fun times.
 
windows 2000 was amazing for me.. then forced to upgrade to xp. then I started fixing pc with windows 7 so I figured might as well install it too.
 
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Windows 95 was really impressive. Nothing since then was as awesome as that video from Weezer, or Hover.



 
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

Guy at work had an Amiga and he called it a door stop. By 1993 Dos PC was were it was at for gaming. PC had X-Com, not Amiga.
 
PCs were pitifully behind their times always with gaming. Imagine what technological advances we would have if Amiga had been developed at the same speed as PCs later did. We'd probably have quantum holodisplays and intra-brain VR.
 
Guy at work had an Amiga and he called it a door stop. By 1993 Dos PC was were it was at for gaming. PC had X-Com, not Amiga.

Well, the guy was rather clueless then but hey, that is also about the time that Commodore was having issues, as far as I can remember.
 
Guy at work had an Amiga and he called it a door stop. By 1993 Dos PC was were it was at for gaming. PC had X-Com, not Amiga.

The advent of Doom in 1993 was where PC gaming began to take off, I wouldn't go as far as to claim it's where PC gaming was at. Compared to the Amiga the PC was still just too expensive and way out of reach for most.

Twelve months later the PS1 was released, that's 'where it was at' for gaming.
 
The advent of Doom in 1993 was where PC gaming began to take off, I wouldn't go as far as to claim it's where PC gaming was at. Compared to the Amiga the PC was still just too expensive and way out of reach for most.

Twelve months later the PS1 was released, that's 'where it was at' for gaming.

Well, I am talking computers and not consoles. I had a PS1 I got from my brother and the graphics were horrible compared to PC. Compare NHL hockey between PC and PS1, night and day.

I had Doom2 but I got into PC gaming for flight simulators, deep strat games etc. I sold my console stuff and went PC.
 
Well, I am talking computers and not consoles. I had a PS1 I got from my brother and the graphics were horrible compared to PC. Compare NHL hockey between PC and PS1, night and day.

I had Doom2 but I got into PC gaming for flight simulators, deep strat games etc. I sold my console stuff and went PC.

I'm aware of this, but the fact is that PC gaming took time to become great, it didn't just happen overnight in 1992. PC's were comparably expensive and even with Windows 3.1/95, scarey to most individuals, and the people that were gaming on computers were still largely doing so on platforms other than x86.

The PC may have had a technical edge, but it was easier for most just to buy a PS1 or even rent one overnight when they felt the urge to play a game. It wasn't until at least Direct X 6 that PC gaming began to show real promise, and that was in 1998.
 
Speaking of consoles. Used to play Super Mario Bros. on NES. The best NES game ever.
 
2K was the first version of Windows I used that didn’t crash. I’ll always have a spot in my heart for 2K.

98SE is a close second but it still had problems from time to time and did crash.
 
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I always loved 2k. It was lean, mean and did pretty much everything I needed to do. I held off on XP for quite a long time simply because I found 2k to be the overall superior OS. It was also quite easy to have a dual boot 98/2k machine and I kept that up for a while until I realized that I practically never booted into 98. At that point I dropped 98 and went 2k full time.

I'll also give NT4 an honorable mention. For various reasons I didn't use it as my main OS for long but it was nice while I did. The resource management was so much better than 95/98 and the multitasking was heaven compared to 95/98. On my old Pentium 100 system the difference was night and day. I could run three or four resource heavy programs on NT4 simultaneously without a hiccup. If I tried to do the same on 95/98 the OS would basically shit the bed. With the exact same hardware and setup 95/98 would have crashes, stuttering and it was slow as shit even if it did work while NT4 was butter smooth. Besides drivers and software compatibility there was one major issue with NT4. Messing around with the OS was a no no. It did not take much to FUBAR the OS if you went tinkering with it like I always had a habit of doing.
 
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I always loved 2k. It was lean, mean and did pretty much everything I needed to do. I held off on XP for quite a long time simply because I found 2k to be the overall superior OS. It was also quite easy to have a dual boot 98/2k machine and I kept that up for a while until I realized that I practically never booted into 98. At that point I dropped 98 and went 2k full time.

I'll also give NT4 an honorable mention. For various reasons I didn't use it as my main OS for long but it was nice while I did. The resource management was so much better than 95/98 and the multitasking was heaven compared to 95/98. On my old Pentium 100 system the difference was night and day. I could run three or four resource heavy programs on NT4 simultaneously without a hiccup. If I tried to do the same on 95/98 the OS would basically shit the bed. With the exact same hardware and setup 95/98 would have crashes, stuttering and it was slow as shit even if it did work while NT4 was butter smooth. Besides drivers and software compatibility there was one major issue with NT4. Messing around with the OS was a no no. It did not take much to FUBAR the OS if you went tinkering with it like I always had a habit of doing.

NT4 was very stripped down. We had a nickname NT 'Windows entee' which means 'I won't do it' in Finnish :D
 
I guess I'm the only one who didn't like Windows 2000.

I don't know, maybe I was unlucky. Around 2009 I got a job maintaining some machines. About 15 of them were running Win2k despite having legal XP Pro licenses.

All of them were bluescreening every few hours. The natives were at the brink of mentally shutting down.

My predecessor was clueless; he would change mobos around, HDDs, RAM, he failed to see the friggin pattern in front of him. He would 'diagnose' each machine with one of the three - HDD/RAM/Mobo. Prescott Celerons on all of them... "hey they're only running office software!".

It was a beautiful shitstorm. Day one I put 2 and 2 together - they were using NOD32 and it simply wasn't playing nicely with 2k. Literally nothing else was wrong.
I was hailed the new digital technology overlord master extreme as I was taking my sweet time upgrading one machine daily to (the then already mature) XP.
 
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NT4 was very stripped down. We had a nickname NT 'Windows entee' which means 'I won't do it' in Finnish :D

It was 'very' stripped down.

I reckon I've still got a copy of it somewhere here....
 
I guess I'm the only one who didn't like Windows 2000.

I don't know, maybe I was unlucky. Around 2009 I got a job maintaining some machines. About 15 of them were running Win2k despite having legal XP Pro licenses.

All of them were bluescreening every few hours. The natives were at the brink of mentally shutting down.

My predecessor was clueless; he would change mobos around, HDDs, RAM, he failed to see the friggin pattern in front of him. He would 'diagnose' each machine with one of the three - HDD/RAM/Mobo. Prescott Celerons on all of them... "hey they're only running office software!".

It was a beautiful shitstorm. Day one I put 2 and 2 together - they were using NOD32 and it simply wasn't playing nicely with 2k. Literally nothing else was wrong.
I was hailed the new digital technology overlord master extreme as I was taking my sweet time upgrading one machine daily to (the then already mature) XP.

It's a god damn crime to sell Celeron CPU:s. For any purpose except for ship ballast.
 
When I started college, I was doing music and cool shit on Amiga. Loved that machine.
 
Before "modern" OS's, Win 2000. But there will always be a spot in my heart for the Amiga OS, and TOS on the Atari ST.
 
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