# The Nostalgic Old Operating System Thread



## Mike

[email protected] said:


> 7?


Yea, I know...I live in the stone age. But it works for me...

You should see the free, used iPhone 6 I finally got to replace my flip phone 2.5 years ago...only because my new TM3 works best with a smart phone.

But, it's all paid for...


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## lance.bailey

one of the top IT guys on my team still uses a winXP machine at his house. it just works.


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## iChris93

lance.bailey said:


> one of the top IT guys on my team still uses a winXP machine at his house. it just works.


The best windows OS.


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## ibgeek

lance.bailey said:


> one of the top IT guys on my team still uses a winXP machine at his house. it just works.


So does windows 10. WinXP, Windows 7 work but when MS end of lifes an OS, all of the zero day's (security vulnerabilities) get released so it becomes very dangerous to continue to use them if they are connected to the internet. Some of our clients have imbedded hardware that has to use a legacy OS, but we strip the default gateway from them so that they cannot communicate outside of the internal network.


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## JWardell

iChris93 said:


> The best windows OS.


I would argue the best is OS/2 Warp


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## [email protected]

JWardell said:


> I would argue the best is OS/2 Warp


i liked xenix


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## bwilson4web

Debian build the kernel from source.

Bob Wilson


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## lance.bailey

[email protected] said:


> i liked xenix


xenix was bad. I worked with Altos Xenix in 1984 and summer of IBM xenix in 1985. It self corrupted over time requiring a reinstall every so often. ick.

SunOS. SunOS 4.1.3_U1B to be exact. Last release before the sysV transmorgraphication.

There is no other, although I do now live in sin with Centos.


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## WonkoTheSane

JWardell said:


> I would argue the best is OS/2 Warp


I don't know why this discussion is in this topic, but I did a hell of a lot of programming in OS/2 Warp, even coauthored a book about one of the programming languages.


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## Klaus-rf

JWardell said:


> I would argue the best is OS/2 Warp


 Maybe 25+ years ago.


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## Klaus-rf

lance.bailey said:


> one of the top IT guys on my team still uses a winXP machine at his house. it just works.


 Unfortunately XP is totally worthless in today's SSL/TLS-enabled world. It can't go beyond RC4, which is not supported by any [current] browser or TLS-enabled website today.

I still have a couple laptops running XP but they're only used to run specific applications and never connect to the net.

Additionally XP only supports up to SMB 1.0. WInXP and Win10/SVR 2016/2019 (1709+) cannot communicate with each other via SMB as 1709 dropped support for SMB 1.0.

25 years is more than long enough for a highly insecure protocol to exist.


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## JWardell

Klaus-rf said:


> Maybe 25+ years ago.


That was a very sarcastic joke that I thought no one would get...but I underestimated the geekiness here


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## Klaus-rf

JWardell said:


> That was a very sarcastic joke that I thought no one would get...but I underestimated the geekiness here


Fair enough.

The geekiness is strong here.


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## Malaromane

JWardell said:


> I would argue the best is OS/2 Warp


Testify brother! It was a sad day for me the day I turned off my OS/2 machine for the last time.


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## bwilson4web

Hey! Hey! Debian Linux is still current!

Bob Wilson


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## lance.bailey

thanks for moving this Mods!


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## ibgeek

Just posted new threats to windows 7: 
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/7013545/Windows-7-End-of-Life-PIN-20200803-002-BC.pdf


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## JWardell

Oh we have a dedicated thread for this now?? Well, you asked for it.

Did anyone else get a ton of giddy enjoyment running dozens of multiple simultaneous video and audio streams in BeOS?
That had to be one of my favorites. Of course I was instantly sucked in by the Be Box processor LEDs


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## victor

I still have one 25 years old computer running OS/2 Warp. It's a production server.


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## JWardell

My college roommate had an SGI 02...in fact we both had the same widescreen SGI monitor that they were selling off cheap-ish.
I was so jealous of IRIX's vector-based GUI...but a few months later I had betas of OS X in all their vector glory!


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## lance.bailey

NeXTstep.

I still have an install kit for Sparc workstations.


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## garsh

JWardell said:


> Did anyone else get a ton of giddy enjoyment running dozens of multiple simultaneous video and audio streams in BeOS?


I installed BeOS once on a commodity PC. I think I played with it or an hour or so just to see what it was like.


victor said:


> I still have one 25 years old computer running OS/2 Warp. It's a production server.


I still have my OS/2 Warp box set. IBM was giving it to college recruits for free at the time. It has a couple dozen installation floppies. 

I have it sitting at my desk at work. All the youngens act like I've brought in the Rosetta Stone.</getoffmylawn>


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## ibgeek

I remember seeing the adds for OSX and how they always only showed people reactions to what they were supposedly seeing on their screen, but they never showed the screen. We had a copy in our shop but never installed it. Kind of with I had now.


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## [email protected]

should we throw in DEC? i was irked no end when they went away.
when it comes to operating systems and computer companies it isn't always nostalgia that causes me to think the good ones died young.


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## lance.bailey

ahhh the DEC-1090... *real* core memory. 35 bit word (not a typo - thirty five) and a good fairy extension if i remember correctly. Had to write an assembler for that beast in undergrad. Great great machine. 

PDP-11 series were legen--- wait for it --- dary. when we got our DEC-8532 it came with an AT sized front computer that let you power on and off the 8532 and some other stuff. that small front computer was a PDP-11/34 in a brief case box. ha!

across the room we had another PDP-11, 78, 74, something, but full sized. had an external A/D that was about the size of a half sheet of plywood and converted an analog feed from the operation room to something digital that the PDP could handle.

and of course we had contractual obligatory VAXen. 

cute story about the VAX architecture. All floating points are stored as a power of 2. the VAX shifted the bits so that first bit in the mantissa was always a 1. they did this by changing the the power of 2 exponent. 

since they knew that the first bit was always a 1, THEY THREW IT AWAY and got another bit in the mantissa.

crazy, brilliant guys over at Maynard. Marketing were pretty sly too, but that's another post.


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## Nautilus

lance.bailey said:


> crazy, brilliant guys over at Maynard. Marketing were pretty sly too, but that's another post.


I worked as a summer intern for Digital at "the Mill" in Maynard, MA in '80 and '81. In the building I worked in, the lanolin was still embedded in the floor boards from when the Mill processed sheep's wool . I remember one payday, driving to work out Route 117, intending to put gas in my car (the original "Nautilus") after getting paid. Alas, I ran out of gas on the way to work. I simply pulled over, stuck out my thumb with my Digital ID cupped in the palm of my hand and I was picked up by another person headed to DEC in less than 5 minutes. Wasn't even late.

The place was flush with $$$. One day we needed to get a package down to one of the plant sites in Puerto Rico urgently. My first helicopter flight ever was taking one of the corporate helos down to Logan Airport to hand deliver the package to the Eastern Airlines flight that was departing for PR that afternoon. I wasn't even the one entrusted with the package. Since there was a spare seat on the helicopter, everyone thought it would be nice for the summer intern to go along for the ride. Crazy.

AND it seemed that DEC had a facility in just about every suburb of Boston.


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## msjulie

@Nautilus wow that's cool (about the Mill) - I was there long after it had been sold and was housing other companies and startups.

Sorry - not an OS specific thing but DEC was a force and the Mill was (is?) legendary I think.


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## lance.bailey

30 years old, still going strong


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## TomT

MS-Dos 6.22 on floppies...


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## AutopilotFan

Nautilus said:


> I worked as a summer intern for Digital at "the Mill" in Maynard, MA in '80 and '81. In the building I worked in, the lanolin was still embedded in the floor boards from when the Mill processed sheep's wool .


By the time I did my internship at The Mill in '88 - '89, things were getting tougher. Our office was up front, it was actually a shorter walk to a sandwich shop in town than to the company cafeteria somewhere in that 3D maze.

Spent my days testing keyboards, watching people assemble mini-computers in the usability lab, and reading net news. Oh the life of an intern.


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## pyjamasam

https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js

It works surprisingly well! Even comes with Photoshop 3.0.

chris.


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## walnotr

I have a soft spot in my heart for CPM! 😊


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## garsh

I first learned to program on a PR1ME minicomputer at the local community college in the early 80's.


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## lance.bailey

we had a PR1ME computer at the University of Western Ontario in the early 80's. used it to run matlab problems for our stats course. one of the assignments had the suggestion in it to get a cup of coffee for the run because it was going to take 30 minutes or so to finish.


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## Nautilus

During the internship at Digital, they taught me how to program in COBOL. Then at university, I had a job my freshman (first) year where on Sundays I'd man the customer service desk at one of the computing centers where grad students would check in their 12" tapes, and I would run them upstairs so they could get mounted on the computer (an IBM, I think) for them to do their work. There were punch card readers there, but I had no direct experience with them.

I think it was my junior (third) year when the first person in our dormitory got a personal computer - an Apple Lisa, if I recall. The rest of us did our computer science projects in Pascal at LOTS - Low Overhead Timesharing - that used a DecSystem 2020.

At about the same time, my dad had a COMPAQ "Portable", which I'm pretty sure he bought at Sears, of all places. He would carry the darn thing down to the train station (a 20 minute walk) for his commute to downtown Boston! All 28 pounds (13kg) of it.








I then used it in the late 80s with WordStar and Multiplan (spreadsheet program).


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## AutopilotFan

Nautilus said:


> At about the same time, my dad had a COMPAQ "Portable", which I'm pretty sure he bought at Sears, of all places. He would carry the darn thing down to the train station (a 20 minute walk) for his commute to downtown Boston! All 28 pounds (13kg) of it.
> View attachment 35203


That looks really familiar... I think they had one at Digital during my internship that they let me play with. I was there for 9 months and had all kinds of little side projects like this.

Back then, "portable" was anything with a handle on it. It was just as portable as my Fat Mac.


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## lance.bailey

Speaking as an audiophile, I remember thinking back in 1994 when I did a field recording with my 37 lb reVox B77 reel to reel that "just because it has a handle does NOT mean it is portable."


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## SalisburySam

Still have my Revox, still works, still plays some 10-½” tapes made decades ago. Hard-wired remote works great as well. And yes indeed, the handle made it portable...for someone very much stronger than me.


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## serpico007

I still have a Coleco Adam running Elementary Operating System (EOS) OS kernel and the 8kB OS-7 ColecoVision operating system. And that isn't the current Elementary OS based haha


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