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How many operating systems have you used (comment with your favorite)
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Humor in the Court:
Q. And who is this person you are speaking of?
A. My ex-widow said it.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Wednesday February 07 2018, @12:24PM (5 children)
I mean, no one takes these polls too seriously, but I really don't know how to answer. Heck, I don't even know how to count. Windows 3.1, Win NT 4 and Win 10 are surely different operating systems, but what about Win7/Win10? If those count as different, then so must Xubuntu 16.04/16.10/etc.. In which case I may well be in the hundreds by now: Android since the beginning, Windows since the beginning, Linux since, maybe not the beginning but a long time, etc..
Then there's the question of "used". Being just a pure user of a system, you generally have little contact with the OS. Back in IBM 360 days, I just submitted my jobs, and had no idea (and didn't care) what version of O/S was in use. What about the bank ATM? Maybe it really is still XP, but I actually have no idea.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Wednesday February 07 2018, @05:23PM (2 children)
Heck, I don't even know how to count. [...] Then there's the question of "used".
I used to ask people what the most widely used file system was, to get them to think a little. Mostly they'd try to foist some bullshit answer like VFAT or NTFS. However, I'd respond with either Google File System or ISO-9660. Back then all computers came with several CDs or DVDs, same for most commercial packages. The world was then full of computer CDs and DVDs, so that would be a case for ISO-9660. However, most people connected to the net use Google at least a few times per day, and that's a lot of people, so that was a case for GFS.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 09 2018, @09:08AM (1 child)
But if you connect to Google, you don't use Google's file system. Google does, to provide you the service, but you don't.
It's like saying I'm using the telephone if I go personally to an office, and then the officer makes a phone call in order to serve my request.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Saturday February 17 2018, @03:04PM
Further, just because the world gets mailed an AOL CD which is using ISO 9660, does not mean that everyone in that world is using the CDs as intended. Maybe they use them for coasters (the original ones, under drinks on furniture), or make art out of them...
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:54PM (1 child)
I'd say Vista and Win 7 are "the same" and that 8 and 10 are "the same". I think that because of how the stuff under the hood is lumped together or presented; like how 2000 and 2003 for server are similar, or 2000 and XP are similar. But 95 and 98 are like each other but not like NT. With that logic, 7 and 10 would be different to me as a result. I am sure some people with only MS experience would lump all of Linux under the same category; just changing the name or version number might not count to someone that has no idea what the differences are.
But aside from that, I am also confused. There is used, there is actively used, and there is 'exposed to', 'sort of touched once' and 'locked off behind a session on a dumb terminal because I only accessed the program running on the OS and any of the OS gritty details themselves but knew it was on a mainframe or mini computer or x terminal or...'.
I think for this poll, I'll stick with "devices I had user rights to install stuff onto" as a valid OS. If it was locked in a browser,telnet, ssh or terminal emulator, then that is a gray area -- many CLIs give you access to whats under the hood, yet other ones are no more the OS than dialing into compuserv.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Saturday February 17 2018, @03:29PM
From my vantage point, XP, Vista, Win7, Win8, Win10, and Server 200x are all various presentations of Windows NT. Thus, same operating system, released with different defaults and added/refined features over time.
There was windows 1 and 2 that had no memory management to speak of (relying on DOS for that), that were just programs running on top of DOS, and not operating systems in themselves at all, although DOS+Windows was an operating system (just not a very well-supported one).
Then, there was windows 3.0 and windows 3.1x that had advanced memory management (EMS memory mapping and EMS memory mapping + 386-extended mode memory management, respectively) albeit 16-bit, that made them at least a different thing if not a different operating system, the difference being in the base internals, not so much in the presentation.
Then Windows 95 through Windows ME, which, still being graphical things on top of DOS, were 32-bit foundations with preemptive multitasking, completely different from what came before, and DOS+Windows 9x/ME being again, arguably, a separate OS.
And finally, Windows NT / 2000 / Server / XP / Vista / 7 / 8 / 8.1 / 10, an independent system that does not run "on top of" DOS or anything else, but that other things run on top of--arguably a completely different operating system, similar in appearance (initially, anyway) to those that came before: Windows NT 3.1 looked an awful lot like Windows 3.1x despite having almost nothing in common with same, and NT 4.0 looked almost identical to Windows 95.
Even the *nix people might have trouble with this one, I guess. Again from my vantage point, since Linux proper isn't so much an operating system as it is a kernel that you make operating systems out of, there have been many operating systems made out of Linux, from Slackware to Debian to Android.
I would count distinct (Gnu/) Linux distributions as distinct-but-similar-operating systems based on the word "system" being "one thing from many parts" and the parts being different (packages designed for the Red Hat ecosystem, Debian, and Ubuntu, are frequently three different packages because of differences in the underlying OSes involved).
But the lines here are more fuzzy, sometimes indistinct.