End of an era...No I am NOT talking about Bush

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  1. #11

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    Quote Originally Posted by jimbo:
    OS2 Warp?
    And Windows 95 looked nothing like that did it.......

  2. #12

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    >> OS2 Warp?

    Company I worked for did some killer comms stuff with OS/2 ... that shit ran faster and was more stable than anything we put out on Windows platforms. Still running at hundreds of airports.


  3. #13

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    Quote Originally Posted by gilleshk:
    you pay less, you get less...
    Not everyone can by an Audi. Still a KIA gets you from here to there. I love my (5th) mac on which I'm writing this. But I remember how much you would have to pay for a mac in the nineties.... Just the existence of another better system doesn't make WfW crap. It was a nice product. Win ME - that was crap.
    Quote Originally Posted by jimbo:
    OS2 Warp?
    1994.
    Quote Originally Posted by jgl:
    You musn't have been a techie back then.

    AmigaOS. Kicked the living crap out of Windows 3.x, and pretty much anything up to XP.

    Much more stable, better memory management, proper multitasking (you could ray trace and use a full WYSIWYG DTP app with no performance hit).
    No. I was a kid. But generally it helps when you have both a functioning software market as well as a decent hardware provider. AmigaOS might have been very advanced. I honestly don't know. I know what happened on the hardware side, though. And I remember that with WfW you could just buy a few ethernet ISA cards, a coax cable, two terminators and you had a network. that was pretty amazing and easy then. Must have been a reason that AmigaOS quickly faded out of the niche it had in the mid-eighties.

  4. #14

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    Quote Originally Posted by er2:
    No. I was a kid. But generally it helps when you have both a functioning software market as well as a decent hardware provider. AmigaOS might have been very advanced. I honestly don't know. I know what happened on the hardware side, though. And I remember that with WfW you could just buy a few ethernet ISA cards, a coax cable, two terminators and you had a network. that was pretty amazing and easy then. Must have been a reason that AmigaOS quickly faded out of the niche it had in the mid-eighties.
    I was a kid too. But I didn't assume that the one system that I was most familiar with (DOS/Win) was the be-all and end-all of computing. You asked simply if anyone could name OS's that where affordable and "half of what windows was" and there were at least two that were just as affordable and vastly superior. Actually, the Amiga system was cheaper than a decently branded PC option.

    Windows 3.x was shite. It brought task switching and GUI to the masses, but there was not getting around that it was shite. I don't complain too bitterly though- the very crapness of the OS is something that enabled me to land my first couple of jobs.

    If you don't know why the AmigaOS failed, you're demonstrating a complete ignorance of the 90s personal computing market. It certainly wasn't for want of advanced OS or hardware.
    Last edited by jgl; 05-11-2008 at 05:34 PM.

  5. #15

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    Quote Originally Posted by jgl:
    AmigaOS. Kicked the living crap out of Windows 3.x, and pretty much anything up to XP.
    Nothing will ever surpass the Commodore 64.

    That sweet machine had an OS that could load my favourite games in around 45 miniutes. And with a failure rate of only around 50%.

  6. #16

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    woa.. someone that heard of amiga lorraine... 8-P

    ya real multi-tasking environment that died when commodore lost out to apple II...


    gaz > give the C64 a break, the tape recorder was developed for the Vic16 and by the time C64 came into the stream it was 1541 that was doing the 2-3 minutes load of each programme.

    But remember, those guys were going headon against the Apple IIA and Apple IIB/C... pretty much on part and much better graphics/sounds...

    Last edited by freeier; 05-11-2008 at 05:47 PM.

  7. #17

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    Wow... c64 tape-loading games. I remember we'd press "play" on the tape recorder then go for a swim in the pool whilst waiting for it to load.

    I went the Apple II - > Wintel route and was highly envious of the c64-> Amiga crowd. They ended up choosing the dead hardware platform, but AmigaOS was at least a decade ahead of its time.


  8. #18

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    Quote Originally Posted by freeier:
    gaz > give the C64 a break, the tape recorder was developed for the Vic16 and by the time C64 came into the stream it was 1541 that was doing the 2-3 minutes load of each programme.
    I wasn't actually making a serious contribution But I must reiterate that I have nothing but fond memories of my C64. Those were simpler days, when I had pirate software on cheapy audio tapes!!! Wow, how things have changed.

  9. #19

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    Quote Originally Posted by jgl:
    I was a kid too. But I didn't assume that the one system that I was most familiar with (DOS/Win) was the be-all and end-all of computing.
    Well, to reply in your kind language, you demonstrate you're unable to read. I just argued that WfW was not crap for what it was at the time.

    Imho you can call Win ME crap since it was outdated at its time and buggy beyond reach. You could even call XP and 2000 crap since they came to the market in a time when it was obvious that every home computer might be connected to the internet, a hostile environment, and still have all kinds of services listening on open ports. WfW did what it promised, imho. You declare it to be shit without giving an example.

    Quote Originally Posted by jgl:
    You asked simply if anyone could name OS's that where affordable and "half of what windows was" and there were at least two that were just as affordable and vastly superior. Actually, the Amiga system was cheaper than a decently branded PC option.
    . You win here. At these days I was only familiar with Mac and Win/Dos-Systems. You might be right here and have proven my initial statement wrong. I'd still say that WfW was not a crappy system (at least not to the extend of GWB as CIC).

    Quote Originally Posted by jgl:

    If you don't know why the AmigaOS failed, you're demonstrating a complete ignorance of the 90s personal computing market. It certainly wasn't for want of advanced OS or hardware.
    Well. I remember Commodore going out of business, and that it was a one-company show like Apple. Afaik you couldn't run AmigaOS on a non-Commodore, but that might be wrong. I remember that backward compatibility was a big issue on the Amiga as well as on the Mac, if I remember correctly because the Motorola 68040 wasn't backwards compatible? I don't know which of these led to its demise. Maybe that's my ignorance.

    I do, however, remember that you usually could run every piece of software that worked under DOS X under DOS X+\delta, and under Windows as well. I remember that Microsoft even included special routines to make software that called unofficial/unsupported functions work on later OS versions. That was a tremendous effort, and it was something that distinguished Win/Dos from all other OSes these days.

    It is a very cheap statement to call any piece of Microsoft software crap. Invented somewhere else before, buggy, deprecated, yada yada yada. But back then, there was a reason why Microsoft was attracting more and more users and developers, and that was not because it was a giant marketing machine (like today). That was because you - as a simple user - could rely that whatever mediocre task you wanted to use it for, it'd do.

  10. #20

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    I know many ppl on this thread are ardent mac fan and abhor windows. But, Mac and all those OS that you guys are talking about were available only in western world and may be developed asian countries, whereas windows was available to all and sundry in developing countries like India and frankly where I grew up and studied the only operating systems were DOS and windows (and I think that's it was all over the country) and I am grateful that I had access to windows while I was learning.
    Also, I think that mac machines are still very expensive for everyone to buy, they are double the cost of any windows machine.


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