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

[+save2600]

AmigaOS (any flavor), MS-DOS, TI-99's Extended Basic, C64 (including GEOS) and any of the TRS-80's.

[+wood_jl]

I'll admit that I don't know, as my Amiga experience is EXTREMELY limited. Amiga graphics and sound are what are attractive to me, and the games that were impressive - at least for the time in the early years of the Amiga. But all the ballyhooing about the multitasking.... Is it true there was no memory protection? I'm imagining things crashing like a wayward win98 machine. Did they not? You could run ANY 2 (or 4 or 5) programs, or they had to be compatible and stay out of each other's way?

[JamesD]

I'll admit that I don't know, as my Amiga experience is EXTREMELY limited. Amiga graphics and sound are what are attractive to me, and the games that were impressive - at least for the time in the early years of the Amiga. But all the ballyhooing about the multitasking.... Is it true there was no memory protection? I'm imagining things crashing like a wayward win98 machine. Did they not? You could run ANY 2 (or 4 or 5) programs, or they had to be compatible and stay out of each other's way?

Programmers had to worry about memory leaks, uninitialized pointers and such but there were very good tools for tracking those down. People don't seem to care these days... just let the OS handle it. Funny how memory protection doesn't always keep one program from crashing another on Windows. (I hate Adobe Reader)

 

I used to build software I was working on, download from an ftp site, and edit stuff at the same time. I never had problems with the software I was using for that unless I had too much in memory and then the compile would just fail with an error. The built in serial port doesn't have a FIFO so you have to give the download the highest priority.

Doing all that involves running compiler, linker, assorted development utilities, terminal program, editor, assorted desktop utilities, etc... at the same time without programs getting in each others way.

 

Now that I think about it, I miss using PopCLI to bring up a command line at any time just by hitting a couple keys. Anyone know if there is something like it for windows? I want to pop a cygwin command line at any time just by hitting a couple keys.

Edited June 10, 2010 by JamesD

[atarian63]

AmigaOS was awesome. The one thing I loved on it that I have still not seen to this day is two screens, with different resolutions, being pulled up and down so you could use them both. That to me is still amazing and was something I used all the time. I would love to be able to do that today on a PC.

zzzz ( a play on Amiga GUI Ha Ha)

[Tr3vor]

I tried the does within Windows 98se, and I found it confusing, but if I found some dos programs, I could probably get the hang of it. My favorite classic OS is windows 98 (second is windows ME, I found it about the same as windows98, with more usb support)

[Herbarius]

Yes, Windows ME is the same as 98SE with updated drivers (hence the "more usb support"), crippled DOS mode and the icons taken from Windows 2000.

[Cebus Capucinis]

I am liking AmigaOS so far! You can really see where the influence for later OS systems came from in it and it's easy to master!

[+save2600]

But all the ballyhooing about the multitasking.... Is it true there was no memory protection? I'm imagining things crashing like a wayward win98 machine. Did they not? You could run ANY 2 (or 4 or 5) programs, or they had to be compatible and stay out of each other's way?

That preemptive multi-tasking bit ain't ballyhoo. It's real and once you've used it a few times, you realize just how much you'd rather not live without it. Same with Mac OSX. Being able to toss windows/programs out of your way to do or check on something else has become a computing staple for me. I guess I take it all for granted now. Being PeeCee free will do that to you. Funny how M$ is touting their 'snap' feature as if it's something truly innovative. For them it is I guess. Going on 25 years for us Amiga users though. Drag and dropping is also another incredibly powerful feature I expect out of an OS too. Not having used an M$ OS since WindowsME, have they finally adopted that feature yet? In other words, say you have your mail program open, writing someone a letter and a photo editing program open on your desktop at the same time. Can you simply drag a picture over to your E-mail message and resize it there?

 

And no way does an Amiga crash that often. If/when it does, you're almost always treated to a dialogue box that asks what you'd like to do: continue or restart? Choosing to continue allows you to do just that (usually quite safely), but at the very least, allows you to save any data or whatever before restarting. Depending on which AmigaOS you're using, a HD based Amiga can only take anywhere from 8 to 40 seconds to reset. So not a terribly big deal. lol No scandisk crap to contend with, corrupt files or any of that typical M$ malarky.

Edited June 22, 2010 by save2600

[Herbarius]

Drag and dropping is also another incredibly powerful feature I expect out of an OS too. Not having used an M$ OS since WindowsME, have they finally adopted that feature yet? In other words, say you have your mail program open, writing someone a letter and a photo editing program open on your desktop at the same time. Can you simply drag a picture over to your E-mail message and resize it there?

 

That feature has been in there at least since Windows 3.1. Of course, the applications involved have to permit it. It didn't work too well in the beginning, but it got better continuously from version to version. Today I think it works quite reasonable.

[potatohead]

Re: Real multi-tasking.

 

Yep. The non-preemptive stuff was always kind of a curio for me. It would work, until it didn't, unless the environment was a controlled one, like serial terminals, or something like that. Mixing graphics into the mix just begs for trouble. Unix machines all had real multi-tasking, and were multi-user as well. PC machines were not multi-tasking until they got some OS support. OS2, and later NT were the first "real" operating systems for the PC that were not just toys in the multi-tasking department.

 

Of course, with that happening, the hardware abstraction happened as well, ending the "to the metal" days on the PC. Nice trade-off though. I wouldn't trade modern desktops for anything. All of them, X, Aqua, Win32/64 are fast, potent, and flexible enough for people to get shit done. Love it.

 

On classic computers, I think FLEX / OS9 on Color Computer is quite powerful for it's time. For computing, not gaming, it packs a nice punch, and is just kind of fun to see the upper end of 8 bits pushed like that. Never did get deeper into Amiga / ST machines. One of these days, I'll probably do it, just because the older, smaller environments are just kind of fun.

 

I'm just now getting to seriously check it out on my drivepak. (bootable cart with SD card)

[Inky]

CP/M!

[oracle_jedi]

VMS!

 

Seriously. Rock solid reliability and true clustering!

 

You type "HELP" you get... HELP!

 

You press backspace - the cursor backspaces!!

 

Amazing isn't it!, because on most NIX's, help gives you nothing, backspace gives you garbage and don't even get me started on VI.

[JamesD]

On classic computers, I think FLEX / OS9 on Color Computer is quite powerful for it's time. For computing, not gaming, it packs a nice punch, and is just kind of fun to see the upper end of 8 bits pushed like that.

FLEX was kinda the CP/M for 6800 machines. There were a lot of apps for it, even Sargon made it to FLEX.

OS-9 was more like Unix.

[JamesD]

On classic computers, I think FLEX / OS9 on Color Computer is quite powerful for it's time. For computing, not gaming, it packs a nice punch, and is just kind of fun to see the upper end of 8 bits pushed like that.

FLEX was kinda the CP/M for 6800 machines. There were a lot of apps for it, even Sargon made it to FLEX.

OS-9 was more like Unix.

[edweird13]

MS-DOS for sure. Trying to get Doom II running on a 486DX2-50 was quite an adventure. No HAL to deal with.

[jeremysart]

MS-DOS 6 on a Heathkit with two 5 1/4 drives.

 

Also had a lot of fun with Windows 3.1 on my IBM PS2.

 

Or how about CP/M on the Coleco Adam, while surfing the BBS on your baud modem?

[Seob]

AmigaOS was awesome. The one thing I loved on it that I have still not seen to this day is two screens, with different resolutions, being pulled up and down so you could use them both. That to me is still amazing and was something I used all the time. I would love to be able to do that today on a PC.

I use 2 different screenresolutions on my pc for more then 2 years now. It all comes to drivers and a graphics card with 2 ramdacs.

 

My favorit classic Os would be BeOS. Power on and it was running within 10 seconds (after the bios routines), change hardware settings or network settings? No reboot needed, just restart the application or service and it was done. Run a multitude of videos at once with sound, BeOS could do it. Where windows struggled to handle 2 movies without sound.

 

A sweet memories on Dos, trying to get as much stuff into himem, to free as much of the 640k as possible to run a game. Using vga-copy to format disks to 1.7Mb, that could only be read with a driver in memory.

 

Loved Os/2 to, but never really worked with it. Did get a old ibm that came with Os/2 warp. Did have some nice futures.

 

Don't know to much of Amiga Os or Atari Os, so i can't really say anything about that.

 

Love to work with Mac Os to. But sometimes things are just to easy, that i overlook the future, spending hour to find a way to get it done.

 

Did work with linux, but never really could get into it.

[Ze_ro]

AmigaOS hands down. I remember using it on my brother's Amiga 500, and it was doing things that made Windows 3.1 (and sometimes even Win95) look like an absolute joke, even though the 500 was pretty long in the tooth at the time. Hell, even the Amiga's CLI had some amazing features that have no equal outside the Unix world.

 

--Zero

[Cliff Friedel]

AmigaOS was awesome. The one thing I loved on it that I have still not seen to this day is two screens, with different resolutions, being pulled up and down so you could use them both. That to me is still amazing and was something I used all the time. I would love to be able to do that today on a PC.

I use 2 different screenresolutions on my pc for more then 2 years now. It all comes to drivers and a graphics card with 2 ramdacs.

No, you are reading this wrong. I am saying you could have 2 screens on the same monitor with different resoultions and flip between them by simply grabbing the top of the screen and pulling it down. It would pause the running program and then let you go right into the other. To this day, I have never seen that on any other OS. Think of it as a graphical version of the screen command in linux. It was amazing for 25 years. It is still amazing today.

[JamesD]

AmigaOS was awesome. The one thing I loved on it that I have still not seen to this day is two screens, with different resolutions, being pulled up and down so you could use them both. That to me is still amazing and was something I used all the time. I would love to be able to do that today on a PC.

I use 2 different screenresolutions on my pc for more then 2 years now. It all comes to drivers and a graphics card with 2 ramdacs.

No, you are reading this wrong. I am saying you could have 2 screens on the same monitor with different resoultions and flip between them by simply grabbing the top of the screen and pulling it down. It would pause the running program and then let you go right into the other. To this day, I have never seen that on any other OS. Think of it as a graphical version of the screen command in linux. It was amazing for 25 years. It is still amazing today.

And all this time I thought it didn't pause the program.

[roland p]

I used AmigaOS until I got a 486 PC to browse the internet.

Directory Opus was really cool too. It enabled you to browse in archives.

Having multiple resolutions at the same time was nice, but today, I don't know why I would run any resolution but the highest.

 

Today, I still find it annoying that following commandline from cmd doesn't work:

C:\>cd D:\work

Edited June 28, 2010 by roland p

[icbrkr]

AmigaOS (currently using 3.9). Much of the time, I forget I'm using a computer from 1993 and not something a heck of a lot newer.

[Shawn]

DOS 2.1 as it was the OS I had on my first PC compatible computer (TRS-80 PC 2000).

[Cliff Friedel]

AmigaOS was awesome. The one thing I loved on it that I have still not seen to this day is two screens, with different resolutions, being pulled up and down so you could use them both. That to me is still amazing and was something I used all the time. I would love to be able to do that today on a PC.

I use 2 different screenresolutions on my pc for more then 2 years now. It all comes to drivers and a graphics card with 2 ramdacs.

No, you are reading this wrong. I am saying you could have 2 screens on the same monitor with different resoultions and flip between them by simply grabbing the top of the screen and pulling it down. It would pause the running program and then let you go right into the other. To this day, I have never seen that on any other OS. Think of it as a graphical version of the screen command in linux. It was amazing for 25 years. It is still amazing today.

And all this time I thought it didn't pause the program.

I think it depended on the program you were using on each screen to be honest. The instance I am thinking of was using DPaint and the workbench and I think it paused when you pulled screens on it. To be honest though, it was quite a long time ago =). I have it on the 4000 though, I should try it out.

[JamesD]

And all this time I thought it didn't pause the program.

I think it depended on the program you were using on each screen to be honest. The instance I am thinking of was using DPaint and the workbench and I think it paused when you pulled screens on it. To be honest though, it was quite a long time ago =). I have it on the 4000 though, I should try it out.

Actually, I was implying it didn't pause the program. If you were to run the old robot city demo where the robots are walking across a city background you could pull it's screen down or send it to the back and it kept going. Same for the Boing demo.

 

What pauses a program is waiting for input through the OS APIs. If there's no input the program is basically asleep until an I/O even takes place that the program watches for. The program checks the event to see if it's something it's currently looking for and if not, goes back and waits. Trust me... I've programmed the Amiga. That's a bit of a simplification but that's pretty much what happens. In the case of DPaint, there's no input when you are on a different screen so it pretty much goes to sleep.