Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 18 submissions in the queue.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
How many operating systems have you used (comment with your favorite) | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 108 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by requerdanos on Monday February 05 2018, @09:55PM (11 children)

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 05 2018, @09:55PM (#633476) Journal

    Off the top of my head, I recall using, installing, and/or getting work or play done with these operating systems:

    • Something at Eastern Carolina University that was timesharing and had terminals (to play console/text games, early 80s)
    • TRS-DOS (TRS-80 Model I/III, early 80s)
    • Disk Extended Color Basic (TRS-80 Color Computer's DOS, early 80s)
    • VMS (Vax, early 80s)
    • CP/M (DEC Rainbow, early 80s)
    • Apple's DOS for the "II+", "][e" and "//c" (they were hipster-annoying even then, early 80s)
    • Something at the University of South Carolina that used punch cards. (For a Pascal class, mid-80s)
    • Unix System III: On Arbornet.m-net.org back when it was just called m-net (mid-80s)
    • OS/9 (TRS-80 Color Computer's unixlike OS)
    • System+Finder (original 1984 Macintosh OS)
    • DOS (Late 80s)
    • Windows 3.0 (on a 286 with LIM expanded memory)
    • Windows 3.1/3.11
    • Windows 95, 97 (beta), 98, ME
    • Windows NT 3.1, NT4, 2K, XP, Vista, 7~, 8
    • Windows 10 preview (for less than a day)
    • Various early slackware linuces
    • Various early Red Hat (Not RHEL) (I remember they were testing i18n and one of the install languages was "Redneck." Red Hat is in my home state of North Carolina. Very funny guys.)
    • Mandrake (not Mandriva)
    • PalmOS (I actually used the handwriting recognition to take notes and help my memory. Otherwise the Palm devices for me were e-readers.)
    • Windows CE
    • Open Solaris
    • FreeBSD~
    • Reactos~
    • Debian GNU/Hurd~
    • Debian potato, woody, sarge, etch, lenny, squeeze, wheezy, jessie~*, stretch~*, buster/sid~*
    • Ubuntu (various early)
    • Mint
    • Devuan~*
    • OSX
    • Android~*

    So that's at least a few dozen. ~ Means that I still have it installed and usable on a real or virtual machine. * means I use it on a day to day basis for a workstation or server (or phone/tablet) OS.

    Reading over this, it looks like I've been spending my life preparing for this one sidebar survey. And this is what I *remember*. No telling what all I've forgotten.

    Favorite: Debian. Thanks guys, Debian is excellent.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Interesting=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   3  

  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 05 2018, @10:50PM (3 children)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Monday February 05 2018, @10:50PM (#633505) Homepage Journal

    Yup, I'm to the point that I could probably take the same choices for "How many OSes have you used this week?" and be safe hitting 20+ without thinking about it.

    Right off hand I can think of thirteen that are installed on something in my house right now. Add three more for the SN servers and one for The Roomie's truck and I really don't have to get out much at all to break twenty for the week.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.

    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 05 2018, @10:59PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 05 2018, @10:59PM (#633513)

      I really don't have to get out much at all

      Of course you don't have to get out much when you're satisfied to stick your dick in the robotic vacuum cleaner. Right, Uzzard?

  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday February 05 2018, @10:55PM (2 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Monday February 05 2018, @10:55PM (#633508) Homepage
    Dang, I'd forgotten Palm (had a V). And Psion's EPIC. And a few BSD variants. And of course, I used some mainframe OS at one school, and a TRS/80 at another, and BBCs at another. Yeah, even folding versions into 1, 20 is easy.
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves

    • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday February 27 2018, @01:12PM (1 child)

      by TheRaven (270) on Tuesday February 27 2018, @01:12PM (#644599) Journal

      And Psion's EPIC.

      I note that hardly anyone has answered the 'favourite' part of the question, but that one (or, rather, EPOC, it's correct name) is mine - specifically EPOC16 (a.k.a. SIBO). It ran on a 4MHz 16-bit CPU with 256KB of RAM, ran a useable (though not WYSIWYG) word processor, a spreadsheet that's still probably my favourite (I actually still use it in a Psion emulator in DOSBox sometimes, because it's the only one I've used where keyboard navigation was easy), and came with a reasonable programming language (with support for structured programming). In spite of the tiny amount of RAM, it was a multitasking environment and still had RAM left over to use a RAM drive as the machine's primary storage (though I got a 128KB Flash SSD for mine as well - I remember not being able to fit the H2G2 text adventure on it).

      I'm almost tempted to buy a 3a or 3c now that they're so cheap on eBay, but for the fact that even emulating an x86, DOSBox would probably run the emulator fast on my cheap mobile phone than the real hardware would run. And, in the emulator, you can easily set the screen resolution to 640x480 (and the built-in apps scale to that resolution, so you can see a lot more without scrolling).

      --
      sudo mod me up

      • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday February 28 2018, @08:02AM

        by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Wednesday February 28 2018, @08:02AM (#645027) Homepage
        Yeah, that's the one. I'm *desperate* for a simple spreadsheet on this linux machine, and the Psion one would do perfectly. The only shit that seems available seems (a) dependent on gigabytes of modern gui libraries, or part of an even bigger "suite", that I don't want to install; or (b) unsupported, and so old it won't even build on a C99 compiler.
        --
        Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves

  • (Score: 2) by black6host on Tuesday February 06 2018, @06:50PM (2 children)

    by black6host (3827) on Tuesday February 06 2018, @06:50PM (#634019) Journal

    By the way OS-9 is written with a dash instead of a slash. But the real reason I'm commenting is OS-9 is definitely one of my most favorite operating systems. It has a much larger range of machines it runs on than the Tandy CoCo. It's still in use today in embedded systems, etc. Multitasking, real-time, multi-user, reentrant code, etc. Quite a decent OS. I learned a lot playing with it.

    By the way, for those that don't know, this isn't the mac os 9. This was designed back in the 80's and ran on 6809 chips. And still runs today.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by requerdanos on Tuesday February 06 2018, @08:58PM (1 child)

      by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 06 2018, @08:58PM (#634091) Journal

      OS-9

      Right you are. Sorry about the MacSlash.

      The command "DOS" was added to Disk Extended Color Basic specifically to be able to boot OS-9.

      • (Score: 2) by black6host on Tuesday February 06 2018, @09:29PM

        by black6host (3827) on Tuesday February 06 2018, @09:29PM (#634104) Journal

        And boy was I glad it was! :) Have a good day fellow old-timer!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 25 2018, @04:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 25 2018, @04:18PM (#643472)

    Yup, same here. I reached 20 so quickly I stopped counting. Most of those I have touched on my day job too, I didn't even start to include all those custom Linux derivatives on media players or NAS devices that I've modded, or the microkernels I've toyed with.

    I did group different Linux distro's from the same vendor together (so Red Hat, Fedora and RHEL == 1; SuSE, SLES, SLED and OES == 1), and counted Microsoft OSes as five different families: Dos (non-graphical), Windows 3.x (16-bit x86), Windows 9x (32-bit x86), Windows NT (entire kernel lineage), and Windows CE (handheld devices).

    Here's some that I haven't seen mentioned yet:
    - Apple iOS
    - Cisco IOS
    - Juniper JunOS
    - VMWare
    - Novell Netware
    - HP-UX
    - IBM AIX
    - Sun Solaris
    - Illumos
    - OS/400 (IBM iSeries)