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So, Atariage, what is your favorite "classic" OS?


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What is your favorite classic OS? My personal favorites are MS-DOS and the classic Mac OS.

 

Aside from the OS from the 8bit Atari computers, I'm partial to MS-DOS too. Spent a solid decade on it until Windows 95 came out. I liked Mac OS but it always felt you were getting more done under the hood in DOS with all the autoexec.bat and config.sys stuff. As a bonus it was always an adventure getting sound cards and games working in DOS too :)

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What is your favorite classic OS? My personal favorites are MS-DOS and the classic Mac OS.

 

Aside from the OS from the 8bit Atari computers, I'm partial to MS-DOS too. Spent a solid decade on it until Windows 95 came out. I liked Mac OS but it always felt you were getting more done under the hood in DOS with all the autoexec.bat and config.sys stuff. As a bonus it was always an adventure getting sound cards and games working in DOS too :)

I agree with you 100% on that.

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If I had to go with an 8-bit OS, I'd have to say GEOS for the C64. 8/16-bit, Apple GS/OS 6.0.1. 16/32-bit, NeXTSTEP. NeXT is considered "classic", isn't it? It first came out in the 80's, after all!

 

Although to be honest I didn't use NeXTSTEP until the mid-90's. Until then I thought the Amiga OS was the best.

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MS-DOS is all that I know pre-Windows... first on a 8088XT and then on a 486 DX2-50. Today's computers are amazing, but one thing that DOS machines had was consistency. How your DOS PC is functioning today is most likely how it will function tomorrow. No sporadic slowdowns from Windows services or whatever, no constant updates of drivers, no convoluted registry that becomes increasingly messier every day, no headaches installing/uninstalling software due to said registry, no dozens of background processes that might slow everything down or crash your computer, etc., etc. Booting and shutting down usually took no time at all. Other people get nostalgic over the Commodore 64, Apple or Atari computer they played with as a kid. I always had a PC. I did love those machines even though they weren't always the best for gaming.

 

 

Now my 1994 self would cream his pants seeing all the PC gaming I can do now just with emulators... not to mention sites like Youtube, etc. I don't know how I managed to surf the web using only a 486 DX2-50, DOS and Windows 3.

Edited by mbd30
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Just it's native kernel AFAIK. But didn't earlier PETs offer CP/M-compatability...or did that enter only after the arrival of the C64?

 

Topic:

MS-DOS. Many hours spent customizing boot files to squeeze every last resource out of 640k machines :)

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128 OS on the 128k Sinclair Spectrum machines. So easy to use and wonderful for helping you debug and edit basic programs. Even better on the disk machines with +3 DOS added and a very handy 32k ramdisk for storing data temoprarily in.

Edited by The_Laird
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oh no...NOT DOS 3 (who ever said they like DOS 3 needs to see a shrink)

Agreed. Of the Atari OSes, DOS 2.5 wins hands down. Menus were easy to use, there was a lot of functionality, and it was compatible with everything.

 

 

I wasn't serious with the DOS 3 comment, btw. :)

(It was my first experience with a disk drive, though)

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Another vote for AmigaOS.

 

I cut my teeth on various 8-bits where I just wrote stupid BASIC programs or used a DOS just long enough to get games started (when I was lucky enough to have a disk drive). So I never really got into the details of the Atari or Apple II OS.

 

Later I got a PCjr and started doing some (slightly) more serious things. I did well enough with PC DOS 2 but didn't have any affection for it. Then I got an Atari 520ST in 1987ish and thought GEM and TOS were neat, but as soon as I could save up my pennies I bought an Amiga 500. I immediately saw the light. True multitasking and a nice CLI and usable (if a bit ugly) GUI.

 

I participated in the stupid ST vs Amiga flame wars on the local BBSs and even had an ST-owning board buddy come over to my house to see just what kind of dumbass liked the Amiga so much--I fired up a couple of programs and switched between them, then showed him Deluxe Music and Deluxe Paint and he was converted.

 

Learning how to use the AmigaOS effectively set me up very well for college where we used Unix machines mainly.

 

On the other end of the scale, a friend's family had a Heathkit computer his dad built. It used 8" floppies and we had to type in the bootstrap code every time the machine was powered on in order to get the disk working (no autoboot!). I can't rememeber if it used CP/M or what, but we played around with it long enough to get confused and bored. :)

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