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With all the talk on Windows Vista, XP, and Mac, I thought this time line of computer operating systems would be interesting. What was the first operating system you remember using?
wow your link surprised me. i thought DOS was the first ever OS.. but to answer your question, i used MS-DOS on a packard bell desktop. no. wait, it has win95 but i can use DOS.. coz some games are DOS based. and i was taking computer class.. we use DOS in school. and so i try to use my brand new PC for my school work(programming).. guess what happened? that's right.. i crashed it! my diskette is FULL of virus. i don't even know what virus is and what damage it cause back then('95). needless to say my parents and my sis was all angry at me for busting the new PC(less than a week old) :/
i was able to restore it though.. coz it came with installation CD. im not sure if it's restore CD coz i remember my sis beetching about how "ya it runs but not the same way" meaning not factory default install.. i doubt there was a factory default install restore CD back in 95.
The first one that I directly interfaced with was the Commodore DOS, but the computers at work had a locked-in program that used the early version of Xenix. Most people go "Huh? Xenix??" but it was a very important part of the industry.
A real short version...
Gay Kindall(sp) worked for Digital Equipment Corp. PDP 8/11 ( I meet him twice) He wrote the 1st op sys for the new micros...CPM and formed Digital Research Corp.
Later when IBM decided the time was right for a PC they started their own internal program for developing a OP SYS. The product launch date got close and they still had nothing. A young kid by the name of Bill Gates approached IBM and promised to deliver an OPO SYS in time for IBM's product roll out..IBM baulked but eventually gave in. Of couse Gates didn't have any such OP SYS ready to go. He went to Gary Kindall, and bought the rights to market an "enhanced" version of CPM under another name. I don't remember the $ amount but he got it real cheap. Kindall may have been a brilliant programmer but he was COMPLETELY clueless as a bussiness person. Gates renamed CPM as DOS, fixed a few spelling errors,a cpl of entry point bugs, and basically delivered it to IBM...and cashed his BIG time check !!
The rest as they say is history....
My 1st was a homebrew S100 bus thing...a hand wirewrapped memory board(6x11 inch !) that with 64K of memory drew 5 Amps just for the memory!. A 8 bit Intel 8080 CPU running at a whopping 2 Mhz !! 8 inch floppy drives with 128 K per side. CPM was the op sys. In the beginning I didn't even have an editor as we now know it. I coded directly in Hex Code!
I got used to staying up till all hours of the night working "magic" on this homebrew rats nest of wires. One of the funniest things I remember from back then was my wife ,looking over my shoulder at a screen full of hex code and me with pencil and paper....she said something like...." Do you mean to tell me you can read and make sense out of that sh-t ??
When I begain to read it and explain what it was doing ..she interupted and said... " You have lost your mind and I doubt you'll ever return" she went to bed and I went back to work.
Location: Mableton, GA USA (NW Atlanta suburb, 4 miles OTP)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Steel Man
With all the talk on Windows Vista, XP, and Mac, I thought this time line of computer operating systems would be interesting. What was the first operating system you remember using?
KRONOS on a CDC Cyber (the University of Minnesota's MERITSS system to start with, and then the MECC Timesharing System).
The best command on MERITSS that I still remember was:
X,TALK
which would take you to a multi-user real-time chat program much like IM clients today, but on teletypes.
MTS (MECC's system) had a lot more multiplayer stuff in MULTI, including various talk programs (MMT, DDT, MTC, XTALK), various games like COMBAT, CCOMBAT, KARNATH, etc. It was fun to fly space ships around and fire lasers and missles at each other in real-time.
MU,CCOMBAT,USMK031
I also started playing with Apple ][ machines around the same time -- our high school was full of them. Original Apple ][ boxes that required PR#6 to boot from diskette, not the newer ][+ and IIe boxes that did so automagically. I think those were mostly running Apple DOS -- the newer ProDOS came later.
Last edited by rcsteiner; 06-12-2008 at 12:05 PM..
MOOSE. EXACTLY what we use in my computer school.. the 5 and 1/4 floppy disk. the 3.5 diskette was the one that is full of virus.
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