carlsson Posted September 22, 2017 Share Posted September 22, 2017 Microsoft seems to think they have a better use for my RAM than I do. I saw this t-shirt today. Perhaps it is available with other logotypes as well. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+poobah Posted September 23, 2017 Share Posted September 23, 2017 In the 'classic era': OS/2: Easily the best OS of its time, what Windows should have been (literally) MacOS 9 Windows 2000: Stable and solid, a little weak in the driver department 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
butterburp Posted September 23, 2017 Share Posted September 23, 2017 For me it's a tossup between 98SE and XP SP3. Both were rock solid, (almost) everything ran on them, layouts were near perfect...and I definitely miss having startup/shutdown sounds. Much more than an honorable mention: DOS and Win3.1 are my close personal companions, and will be till I join Kermit the Frog in the croaked bin. So many great games. So many memories. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
butterburp Posted September 23, 2017 Share Posted September 23, 2017 Also, not my favorites but a few comments... Dare I say it? I don't hate Windows 10. I did at first, but I've managed to cobble together a half-working, not-terrible setup with a few tools: - Shut Up 10, so I can update when *I* want to, not when Windows forces me to - DSEO and DGVoodoo to run seemingly incompatible games - Dosbox. Nuff said. I have a love/meh relationship with Linux Mint, Cinnamon flavor. I can't get anything later than 17.3 to work with my TV, but the concept of a complete, free, evil-empire-free OS is sheer awesomeness. Minty! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Omega-TI Posted September 25, 2017 Share Posted September 25, 2017 In order of appearance... TRS-80 (Pre-PC era) 1) TRSDOS 2.3 2) DOSPLUS Various PC's 3) MSDOS 3.11 (Never upgraded higher before Windoze era) 4) Windows XP 5) Windows 7 (still using it and plan to for as long as possible) 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Goochman Posted September 29, 2017 Share Posted September 29, 2017 OS/2 Warp was actually a good solid OS, but never given the time of day TOS+Neodesk was a good combo also. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gozar Posted September 30, 2017 Share Posted September 30, 2017 Mac OS X 10.6.8 was the pinnacle of modern OS's for me, though, and worked great on PPC and Intel Macs. I could be happy with that for the rest of my life. Fast, stable, just enough features but not overloaded. They've completely abandoned their user interface guidelines since. 10.5 was the last version that ran on the PPC macs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheTIGuy Posted September 30, 2017 Share Posted September 30, 2017 OS/2 Warp was actually a good solid OS, but never given the time of day TOS+Neodesk was a good combo also. YES! I actually use OS/2 as my backup OS when windows fails... so, every few months. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BydoEmpire Posted September 30, 2017 Share Posted September 30, 2017 (edited) 10.5 was the last version that ran on the PPC macs. Hm, you're right, I thought I remembered having Snow Leopard (and the App Store) on my G5 but I guess it wasn't. Either way, 10.6.8 is still great - it runs faster on my old, slow mac mini than El Capitan does on my newer, faster, quadruple-the-membory-and-fusion-drive iMac. Edited September 30, 2017 by BydoEmpire 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Casey Posted October 1, 2017 Share Posted October 1, 2017 (edited) GEOS by far was one of the most amazing achievements in software development, given the hardware it was designed to run on. For classic OSes, it ranks way up there. The Commodore 128 version, with a 1581 and an REU, was easily just as usable as a Mac of the same era, and cost significantly less. Edited October 1, 2017 by Casey 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Turbo-Torch Posted October 2, 2017 Share Posted October 2, 2017 I remember getting a copy of LDOS for my Model III and being blown away by all the things it was capable of compared to TRSDOS. I was finally able to take advantage of the double sided drives in my machine. Very user friendly and I still use it today. NEWDOS/80 is more powerful but a cryptic nightmare. For my PC, MS-DOS 3.x and 5.0 pretty much had everything covered. If one program wouldn't run under one, it would run under the other. Despised Windows 95 and 98 and still kick myself for spending $100 on 95. Always booted to DOS and only used Windows when needed. ME was the first Windows that impressed me...everyone hated it but I never had an issue with it. XP, 7 and 10 have been nice. Vista and 8 not so much. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shawn Posted October 5, 2017 Share Posted October 5, 2017 DOS & Windows XP 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Omega-TI Posted October 5, 2017 Share Posted October 5, 2017 There was one DOS for the TI-99/4A that showed a lot of promise, but did not really get much traction and died on the vine and that was: 4A/DOS also known as Command DOS. It did not have many commands, but it was still quite useful. Still, I could die a happy man IF the TI ever gets a true DOS. With the new FinalGROM 99 it is VERY POSSIBLE to make a full featured and useful DOS environment for the TI that could be of great use to people, but sadly the user base is so small that it will probably never happen. But still... it's worth talking about. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Skippy B. Coyote Posted October 7, 2017 Share Posted October 7, 2017 My personal favorites over the years have been... Windows 3.1 Mac OS 10.4.11 I grew up with MS-DOS and Windows 3.1, and while I did upgrade to Windows 98 SE when it came along I found it to be really buggy and fraught with problems for me. Windows 3.1 just worked for me and taught all the basics of a GUI. In my late teens and 20's though I branched out to Macs, and OS 10.4 Tiger just blew my mind with it's stability, visual appeal, and ease of learning. I still use Macs to this day but I feel like the OS has been a lot less stable and reliable since Apple switched over from PPC to Intel architecture. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted October 7, 2017 Share Posted October 7, 2017 My personal favorites over the years have been... Windows 3.1 Mac OS 10.4.11 I grew up with MS-DOS and Windows 3.1, and while I did upgrade to Windows 98 SE when it came along I found it to be really buggy and fraught with problems for me. Windows 3.1 just worked for me and taught all the basics of a GUI. In my late teens and 20's though I branched out to Macs, and OS 10.4 Tiger just blew my mind with it's stability, visual appeal, and ease of learning. I still use Macs to this day but I feel like the OS has been a lot less stable and reliable since Apple switched over from PPC to Intel architecture. Hear Hear on Windows 3.1. It was THE perfect introduction to professional operating systems. I learned all the then "advanced" GUI functionality I needed. Things I struggled with on the Amiga just simply happened on Windows. When I got my Gateway 486 DX2/50 I had a choice of OS'es, I forget what exactly they were. But the salesman made me feel like a million bucks as he extolled the features of each. I settled on Windows after some debate overnite and over the weekend. So when I picked that, I was flabbergasted and amazed that I could get Word 2.0 for "free" with my new rig. I had the choice of 1 free application. Ohh I'm sure the price was rolled into the rig, but I was in heaven, because that was one of the reasons I was buying the system. It was like a surprise. When I got the system and plugged it in. Everything just worked. I was typing my first journal entry within moments of power up. Less than 15 minutes. I remember jumping up and swirling around! I got real manuals, real disks, real everything. I even got a nicely printed 3 ring mini-binder that had all sorts of semi-technical reference. No spyware, no shovelware. No nagging for passwords or accounts. Power on, and the system booted right into the desktop. The next weeks ahead I got a 14.4 modem and it, too, worked instantly. The aura and feeling was intoxicating. Packing a math-coprocessor on board a state-of-the-art clock-doubled CPU was almost too much. Eventually I'd go on to add a 2nd parallel port, a Zip Drive 100, a SoundBlaster 16, with ASP chip and WaveBlaster wavetable daughtercard, Snappy digitizer, extra joystick ports, 2 more hard drives, a CD-ROM. And other little things. It even came with MS-DOS 5.0! That's two operating systems! I learned Autoexec.bat and Config.sys, EMS, XMS, and Upper Memory. This was serious computing now. I had 4megs straight away, I couldn't afford more at that moment. But it was all good. I would later upgrade to more. Along with my Apple II stuff, I was happy this rig survived all the craziness and ridiculousness of the time. And all of it "just worked" compared to the lurching and farting around I did with the 16-bit machines of then-recent times. Do I like Windows today, not so much. Not without all the extraneous bullshit that caters to people whom shouldn't have a computer in the first place. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RetroElectroDad Posted October 7, 2017 Share Posted October 7, 2017 My Amiga with Workbench Amiga 1.3 was outstanding for it's time (haven't used subsequent releases). I was using MS-DOS 3 at work and wondering why everybody didn't go Amiga. Somebody at work had a Mac 128K to evaluate and it seemed primitive in comparison. MS-DOS 6 was, for me, the best DOS I worked with. Windows 3.1 was OK but 98 seemed more capable and solid to me. Then I moved into the Windows NT world and wasn't greatly impressed until XP which seemed great until I sampled Mac OSX Tiger. These days Windows 7 seems even better now that I've had to 'upgrade' to Windows 10 for work. OSX Snow Leopard was the peak of that line for me, luckily as it's the highest my vintage Macs will reach. If I had to choose two, it would be Snow leopard and Win 7. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flojomojo Posted October 7, 2017 Share Posted October 7, 2017 Windows 3.1 is NOT. a favorite, because I was so used to Mac stuff ...but there's no denying there was a great batch of casual games for it. Solitaire and Freecell are legendary of course. I thought Jezzball and Microsoft Arcade were amazing -- possibly because I didn't have them for myself. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ToddUGA Posted October 9, 2017 Share Posted October 9, 2017 AmigaOS 3.1 got me through college back in the 90s. Still love it to this day. Windows 98 was probably my favorite Windows operating system due to the sheer amount of gaming I did on it. Still remember the first time I installed a 3DFX graphics card and an AWE64 Gold sound card. Magical time. My media server runs on Debian and it's rock solid. But my favorite OS of all time is OS X. Ease of use plus power under the hood makes it my favorite. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mr_me Posted October 12, 2017 Share Posted October 12, 2017 (edited) Desqview 386 Desqview was an add-on to ms-dos and added taskswitching, multitasking, cut and paste and macro capability to any DOS program. It worked really well; I used the macro feature to do mailmerge between wordperfect and a database program. Eventhough Windows 3 later became available, it and the windows software ate up expensive drive space. I kept using Desqview until I got the larger drives needed for Windows95. Edited October 12, 2017 by mr_me Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CGQuarterly Posted October 12, 2017 Share Posted October 12, 2017 DOS and Windows XP. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flojomojo Posted October 12, 2017 Share Posted October 12, 2017 I like Windows 93. Try it out! (in my experience, this works best in Chrome) 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Usotsuki Posted October 14, 2017 Share Posted October 14, 2017 GS/OS. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
warpman Posted October 19, 2017 Share Posted October 19, 2017 DOS 6.2 Windows 3.x OS/2 Warp 3 Mac OS 7.5 Use all of them almost everyday. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted October 19, 2017 Share Posted October 19, 2017 Out of curiosity, what are you doing with Windows 3.1? My own usages are for certain vintage games and hardware and remembrances of "early" PC telecom and word processing. With "early" being a relative term here. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tschak909 Posted October 19, 2017 Share Posted October 19, 2017 Best OS? I've been in Utopia, and have used truly futuristic operating systems: * Smalltalk-80 on Xerox Alto * Genera on a Symbolics 3600 (Essentially LISP on the bare metal) What do both of these operating systems have in common? Essentially, they allowed real time modification of every single aspect of the system, while it was running. Fantastic for research work. Something I deeply miss today. -Thom I guess my choices are a bit too esoteric for this crowd -Thom 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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