Your favorite Old School OS

BeOS or NeXTSTEP.

Although not my favorite by any means, I have a copy of IBM AIX 1.3 that runs on PC. Completely useless and nearly nothing in common with modern AIX but it’s still neat to see it running on PC.
 
Although it could be argued that BeOS and NeXTSTEP were not exactly ever old school. They were pioneers.
 
XP's the first OS that combined the stability of NT with being able to game at full speed sans issues. I ran the same install of XP for the life of that OS, including a whole bunch of betas. NT and 2000 were messy for gaming if you didn't run multiple OS's.

Going back a bit, I liked OS/Warp. I worked for a bank that used it for very specific imaging software (IBM borderline required it) and I found it to be easy to use and very quick.
 
OS/2 Warp! Good uptime, all of the time slice granularity to get every last drop of performance out of your PC and the extra 3.11 WFWG stack you could install, to still play Kings Quest 3, Doom, err I mean test native Windows and DOS software and the like while the support BBS was up. I liked HPFS quite a bit more than NTFS back in the day, too. Better ACL, better disk management tools for recovery built in compared to having to rely on a combination of Norton Utilities and SpinRite in DOS/Windows environments because even Novell/DRDOS chkdsk was awful. Even better still, Norton Desktop, Norton Utilities, all of that worked in the Windows emulation for FAT based recovery from other PC you had to unbreak and recover WordStar/WordPerfect documents for the office people too stupid to properly shut down their computers. Having 730k conventional memory for said Windows/DOS subsystem also made me feel wrapped in a warm blanket after having to deal with DOS, wrestle with QEMM (or EMM386), network stack TSR, mouse TSR and DesqView for years prior. I even loved things like the built in CTRL-ALT-NUMLOCK key combination and OS2Dump/TrapDump for when something went terribly wrong, no hand holding, stick a disk in the box to grab the dump, then contact software or hardware driver vendors directly. Overall though, I think my favorite thing as a feature was everyone at work was afraid to touch my workstation because they were silly Windows 95 plebs thinking they could break something critical without grabbing me first. IRIX also afforded me some protection in this fashion, with it's weird directory layouts compared to other *NIX at the time, but Indigo Magic Desktop can go to straight back to the hell in which it came from.

FreeBSD 2.2+ was also pretty nice, maybe even tied for my favorite; I ended up migrating to it from OS/2 Warp on my workstations rather than the Windows route as soon as ELF support came along so I could run all of that delicious Walnut Creek CD-ROM software for Linux I "missed out on" without actually having to burden myself with the woes of early Linux every day. I had to support various operating systems (Windows, RedHat, Slackware, SuSE, SunOS, BSDI, AIX, HP-UX, IRIX), so I didn't want to live in it. I also took joy in routing syslog output to lpr, so when co-workers would touch my machine I could hear that ancient Panasonic dot matrix printer scream from down the hall to know when someone was molesting one of my precious boxen and react passive aggressively with a bunch of big disappointed sighs. If it were up to me, I would have used the office dividers to erect a fort around myself to preserve my uptime, and beat my chest at people who suggested I reboot or shutdown when I went home. The migration to Windows 95 OSR2 because of our support model structure changes gutted me, and I don't think I've recovered since -- as I don't give a crap what OS I am in now from a workstation perspective, as long as it has a working modern C++ compiler environment, a disassembler/debugger, vim, a web browser, an SSH client and a PERL binary installed. Blue screen? Grey screen? Updates that require a reboot that aren't drivers or security errata? I just stopped caring :drowning:
 
Farkle said:
OS/2 Warp! Good uptime, all of the time slice granularity to get every last drop of performance out of your PC and the extra 3.11 WFWG stack you could install, to still play Kings Quest 3, Doom, err I mean test native Windows and DOS software and the like while the support BBS was up. I liked HPFS quite a bit more than NTFS back in the day, too. Better ACL, better disk management tools for recovery built in compared to having to rely on a combination of Norton Utilities and SpinRite in DOS/Windows environments because even Novell/DRDOS chkdsk was awful. Even better still, Norton Desktop, Norton Utilities, all of that worked in the Windows emulation for FAT based recovery from other PC you had to unbreak and recover WordStar/WordPerfect documents for the office people too stupid to properly shut down their computers. Having 730k conventional memory for said Windows/DOS subsystem also made me feel wrapped in a warm blanket after having to deal with DOS, wrestle with QEMM (or EMM386), network stack TSR, mouse TSR and DesqView for years prior. I even loved things like the built in CTRL-ALT-NUMLOCK key combination and OS2Dump/TrapDump for when something went terribly wrong, no hand holding, stick a disk in the box to grab the dump, then contact software or hardware driver vendors directly. Overall though, I think my favorite thing as a feature was everyone at work was afraid to touch my workstation because they were silly Windows 95 plebs thinking they could break something critical without grabbing me first. IRIX also afforded me some protection in this fashion, with it's weird directory layouts compared to other *NIX at the time, but Indigo Magic Desktop can go to straight back to the hell in which it came from.

FreeBSD 2.2+ was also pretty nice, maybe even tied for my favorite; I ended up migrating to it from OS/2 Warp on my workstations rather than the Windows route as soon as ELF support came along so I could run all of that delicious Walnut Creek CD-ROM software for Linux I "missed out on" without actually having to burden myself with the woes of early Linux every day. I had to support various operating systems (Windows, RedHat, Slackware, SuSE, SunOS, BSDI, AIX, HP-UX, IRIX), so I didn't want to live in it. I also took joy in routing syslog output to lpr, so when co-workers would touch my machine I could hear that ancient Panasonic dot matrix printer scream from down the hall to know when someone was molesting one of my precious boxen and react passive aggressively with a bunch of big disappointed sighs. If it were up to me, I would have used the office dividers to erect a fort around myself to preserve my uptime, and beat my chest at people who suggested I reboot or shutdown when I went home. The migration to Windows 95 OSR2 because of our support model structure changes gutted me, and I don't think I've recovered since -- as I don't give a crap what OS I am in now from a workstation perspective, as long as it has a working modern C++ compiler environment, a disassembler/debugger, vim, a web browser, an SSH client and a PERL binary installed. Blue screen? Grey screen? Updates that require a reboot that aren't drivers or security errata? I just stopped caring :drowning:
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You sound like you were a real tech, quite rare these days. Expose many generation 'X'ers to anything but Windows and they're totally lost - Even macOS boggles their tiny little brains.

Generation Y is even worse.
 
Farkle said:
OS/2 Warp! Good uptime, all of the time slice granularity to get every last drop of performance out of your PC and the extra 3.11 WFWG stack you could install, to still play Kings Quest 3, Doom, err I mean test native Windows and DOS software and the like while the support BBS was up. I liked HPFS quite a bit more than NTFS back in the day, too. Better ACL, better disk management tools for recovery built in compared to having to rely on a combination of Norton Utilities and SpinRite in DOS/Windows environments because even Novell/DRDOS chkdsk was awful. Even better still, Norton Desktop, Norton Utilities, all of that worked in the Windows emulation for FAT based recovery from other PC you had to unbreak and recover WordStar/WordPerfect documents for the office people too stupid to properly shut down their computers. Having 730k conventional memory for said Windows/DOS subsystem also made me feel wrapped in a warm blanket after having to deal with DOS, wrestle with QEMM (or EMM386), network stack TSR, mouse TSR and DesqView for years prior. I even loved things like the built in CTRL-ALT-NUMLOCK key combination and OS2Dump/TrapDump for when something went terribly wrong, no hand holding, stick a disk in the box to grab the dump, then contact software or hardware driver vendors directly. Overall though, I think my favorite thing as a feature was everyone at work was afraid to touch my workstation because they were silly Windows 95 plebs thinking they could break something critical without grabbing me first. IRIX also afforded me some protection in this fashion, with it's weird directory layouts compared to other *NIX at the time, but Indigo Magic Desktop can go to straight back to the hell in which it came from.

FreeBSD 2.2+ was also pretty nice, maybe even tied for my favorite; I ended up migrating to it from OS/2 Warp on my workstations rather than the Windows route as soon as ELF support came along so I could run all of that delicious Walnut Creek CD-ROM software for Linux I "missed out on" without actually having to burden myself with the woes of early Linux every day. I had to support various operating systems (Windows, RedHat, Slackware, SuSE, SunOS, BSDI, AIX, HP-UX, IRIX), so I didn't want to live in it. I also took joy in routing syslog output to lpr, so when co-workers would touch my machine I could hear that ancient Panasonic dot matrix printer scream from down the hall to know when someone was molesting one of my precious boxen and react passive aggressively with a bunch of big disappointed sighs. If it were up to me, I would have used the office dividers to erect a fort around myself to preserve my uptime, and beat my chest at people who suggested I reboot or shutdown when I went home. The migration to Windows 95 OSR2 because of our support model structure changes gutted me, and I don't think I've recovered since -- as I don't give a crap what OS I am in now from a workstation perspective, as long as it has a working modern C++ compiler environment, a disassembler/debugger, vim, a web browser, an SSH client and a PERL binary installed. Blue screen? Grey screen? Updates that require a reboot that aren't drivers or security errata? I just stopped caring :drowning:
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Yeah, I did love OS/2 Warp but, IBM killed it, unfortunately. I then started using Windows 98SE since I loved to game. I enjoyed using Linux but, it was definitely not ready for prime time on the desktop but, it did work.
 
I never had any issues with Windows ME. I did a clean install on launch day and never looked back. I stuck with it until the Windows XP betas and RC's became stable enough to run as a primary OS.
Reformatting Win95 and 98 was at least a once per year thing, but I never did have to start over with ME.
 
ManofGod said:
OS/2 Warp, of course. I had version 3 but never was able to purchase version 4. Also, I used Stardock's Object Desktop with it, which is where Stardock started. :)
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I had OS/2 Warp 4 and loved it. The voice recognition was better than what I have now on my Android phone which, despite having 4 cores to work with, offloads it to a server. Get in the hills, can't use it . :mad: Too good at times; the TV would set it off! But having REXX and being able to move back and forth from the GUI to the console, much like the Amiga Workbench, was awesome. It also wouldn't crash like 95/98 did when someone ping-bombed you!
 
Windows 2000 SP4 for me. I used it as my daily driver for years, and outside of some compatibility issues with some older Win 9x games, it was great. Rock solid stable, fast, and was just all around a great OS. In my humble opinion anyway.
 
b5peworkspace.png BeOS was a fun fantastic trip that I had a lot of good times with. It died before its time. I was sad. But I'm going to get a lot of hate mail for this one. I loved ME. It was stable as a rock because it didn't allow different programs to modify windows DLL's. Many programs didn't work because of that and that gave it a bad wrap. But that wasn't the problem. It was a ton of bad code from many many companies going omg it didn't work let me modify this in Windows and hey look it works now. But when 7 other programs do that to the same file then every time you install something something else breaks. That was Windows 95/98 for me. Endless wars of installing programs in certain orders trying to get them to work. ME it just worked or it didnt.
 
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Bird222 said:
You must be the only person that had luck with that thing. It used to lock up all the time for me.
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I worked as a service technician back when that came out. I had fantastic luck with it on my personal computer. As you can imagine, I had the latest and greatest hardware. However, upgrade installs and customer machines were another story. Windows ME was a fucking nightmare on those systems.
 
I never had an issue with ME, having said that it wasn't long after the release of ME that XP was released and the difference there was like night and day.
 
I don't know how popular they were in the States, but did anyone actually use BBC Model B's in school with Econet?

For the day, the operating system and networking capability were fantastic.
 
Old school OS, would have to be Win 3.1. I learned how to hack games on Win 3.1, programmed a lot on Qbasic for fun, and Freeware/ shareware floppies were $1 at the dollar store in those days. I grew up with a C64, and also GEOS. I remember that paint program was pretty cool.. Too young to remember everything, although I do now have a full working C64 setup. I just don't use it

FWIW, with the original Jack Nicholas Golf, DOS version. Rename random bitmap images as the hole files, and it gets trippy. As I recall .wav files work too, but not nearly as cool.. It will still work like that running in dosbox
 
BulletDust said:
I don't know how popular they were in the States, but did anyone actually use BBC Model B's in school with Econet?

For the day, the operating system and networking capability were fantastic.
Click to expand...
I don't think the BBC computers ever made their way to the states. When I was growing up it was all Apple II's, then 68k or PPC Mac's, and then in high school we had PC's running Windows ME.
 
I liked Windows 2000, used it in one variation or another over 9 years, it was always stable. XtremeSystems (XSOS) eventually had a pretty solid build by nn_step which I used since it had DX10 support. Once Windows 7 came out I just stuck the general MS versions ever since.
 
Todd Walter said:
When I was in school, we had PETs, Apple IIe (later, a gs), a Lisa and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisys_ICON
Made for a varied learning environment.
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The BBC's has a great operating system, very clever and well thought out, especially with their Econet networking implementation. Quite an understated machine in the day, with it's 'tube' interface it was possible to run dual 6502's for a nice performance boost.

I'd restore one if I could just get hold of one.
 
Talking about old school OS's.

I recently got hold of my second favorite S370 motherboard (first is the Abit BE6-II) complete with 1.4Ghz Pentium 3 Tualatin as well as a Pentium 3-S 1.266Ghz Tualatin, what OS does everyone think suits the era of this machine? 98SE, 2000 or XP?

JbvMuGxh.jpg
 
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BulletDust said:
Talking about old school OS's.

I recently got hold of my second favorite S370 motherboard (first is the Abit BE6-II) complete with 1.4Ghz Pentium 3 Tualatin as well as a Pentium 3-S 1.266Ghz Tualatin, what OS does everyone think suits the era of this machine? 98SE, 2000 or XP?

JbvMuGxh.jpg
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I personally think I'd go with 2000 on it. That's what I used to run on my old Tualatin legacy gaming build with a Voodoo 5 5500.
 
As far as S370 goes, I have the following on hand:
- P3 800 MHz 256kB 1.7V - 2 of them
- P3 933 MHz 256kB 1.7V - 2 of them
- P3 1000 MHz 256kB - 1.75V - 1 of them
- Celeron 400MHz mendocino

They are in working order AFAIK. If anyone needs them, I can give them away for the cost of shipping. I'm in PL though :(
 
Lunar said:
I personally think I'd go with 2000 on it. That's what I used to run on my old Tualatin legacy gaming build with a Voodoo 5 5500.
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I'm thinking the same thing re: 2000. Voodoo cards are worth a fortune now.
 
First PC I saw in my life was galaga or something similar being played on an amber monitor like that. I could have been six at the time.
 
Got the Pentium 3 Tualatin @ 1.4Ghz up and running. Started installing Windows Me because everyone hates it so much and ran into a little hitch - It appears that my CD key doesn't work, so it might end up getting 98SE.

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Any9Pmih.jpg
 
Bird222 said:
It's already giving you trouble. ;)
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No shit!

Eventually I gave up on Me, ended up installing 98SE. Dug up an old Ethernet adapter (no on board Ethernet), installed the card and couldn't work out why the supplied drivers on CD wouldn't install. Pulled the card out and looked at it, it's a completely different model to what's on the box! Gawddamnit!
 
I forgot just how fragile Windows 98 is, stuff up the installation of a driver and you bring the whole OS to its knees!

As in reinstall time.

Still enjoying fiddling with this OS though, it's all coming back to me pretty quick and I can honestly say that AmigaOS was better. I also find the Windows 98SE UI more conformative across the entire OS and overall more intuitive than Windows 10.

It's also faster than some Windows 10 systems I've had the displeasure of using in modern times!
 
BulletDust said:
I forgot just how fragile Windows 98 is, stuff up the installation of a driver and you bring the whole OS to its knees!

As in reinstall time.

Still enjoying fiddling with this OS though, it's all coming back to me pretty quick and I can honestly say that AmigaOS was better. I also find the Windows 98SE UI more conformative across the entire OS and overall more intuitive than Windows 10.

It's also faster than some Windows 10 systems I've had the displeasure of using in modern times!
Click to expand...

No, the ASD, or skip driver agent, worked very well in Windows 98. However, that also made installing the driver more difficult if there was not another one available.
 
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