It was something from Mostek, running on a Z80 processor. We developed assembly language firmware with it. The I/O was an ASR33 teletype machine, high speed paper tape reader, and paper tape punch. There were no hard drives. From that we graduated to Mostek's FLP80/DOS and MOS80 which ran on an upgrade of the system that included two single sided 8" floppies. FLP80DOS was proprietary, MOS80 was their version of CP/M. We also got a monochrome text only screen. And with 16K of RAM we were smokin!! (This was 1979 BTW).
My first OS would be unknown...while in high school circa 1976, we had a printer terminal that used an acoustic telephone coupling to connect to something at the state university about 10 miles up the road. My second would be the first Radio Shack TRS-80 model, but I guess technically it didn't have an OS. After that came some unremembered OS on a GE mainframe in college and whatever a PDP-11 used. (Yes, GE made computers.) The college then installed a DEC VAX and whatever OS they used. Then some NCR OS's. (Yes, NCR made computers.) Don't remember the first one...maybe didn't even have a OS as you'd think of it. Toggle some switches and keep the card-reader fed...had magnetic core memory (google it). The next NCR computer had an OS called ITX and then we finally ended up with an NCR variant of AT&T Unix (System-V?) which had an alternate shell that mimic'd ITX. Very nice for COBOL applications. Then there would be CP/M that came on my first personal computer...an Osborne-I. Then DOS. I skipped Windows until Win95. I'm trying to retire before Vista is forced on me.
Maybe you won't have to. XP lifespan was just extended until 2014, and Win7 is expected on January 2010. And of course you could try other OS's.
I saw that. Dell is still letting us order machines with XP installed using the downgrade rights. It would really be interesting to know the statistics of how new machines are shipped when there's a choice of XP or Vista. Playing with OS's is for younger people...I have work to do.
Not nessesarily, being flooded with homework is enough, trying out new beta's every week doesn't leave me any time to play with OS's...
TRS-80 Model I..........started with BASIC on it and tapes it later progressed to TR-DOS, way before PC-DOS CP/M really started DOS
The Radio Shack PC did have an OS program, but the Tandy corporation never gave a name to it. CP/M (AKA Computer Program for Microcomputers). That was one of the first OS programs back in the early 1980's.
CP/M started in 1973 by a lazy man, Gary Kildall. The lazy being just a bit of a joke, he was a very smart man and it's interesting why he made CP/M to begin with. CP/M was then stolen by the QDOS author (he cloned it and altered it), which then Bill Gates bought him out. Bill sold this QDOS to IBM and all IBM clone makers. From there you know what happens, IBM-DOS, MS-DOS, then the series of Windows, etc. So in all reality, where we are now, Bill Gates and many other people really owe Gary Kildall. Yes Radio shack had an operating system name, as I mention above, it is TRS-DOS (made typo above, sorry, but later there was even more alterations, TR-DOS, TRISS-DOS, L-DOS, and more.). I got the Model I in 1977 when it was first sold. It at the time had no operating system, but a few months later in 1978 the floppy disk drives came out and then there was TRS-DOS. Of coures Unix really rules, it started back in 1969 by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Laboratories. As we all see, Unix took its route, and Windows it's route. Now they work together. Unix controlls the true networking world, and Windows just accesses it...lol
DOS: It has been so long ago and my first real machine was an Amstrand (an English made affordable IBM copy). 5 1/4 inch floppies was the recordable media on this machine and it was wonderful at word processing and printing (printing was the rage back then). This was in the mid 70's!!! Before this I had a Mattel "Intellivision" computer with a chip based "OS" which did very little programing. Trajectories of cannons (game calculations) stand out in my mind as it's forte. It did a lot less than the "Commador" which excelled at X,Y and Z axises, which incredibly are still used in some factories today for machine shop operations of milling machines ect,.
That was a name from past. Kildall. Thanks for the memories. LOL Good summarization of Unix and Windows.
A friend's Windows 98 was my first internet experience.So I'm a late-comer compared to some of the members here.
The first OS that I started using seriously was Win95, but now that I think of it, I´ve also used crappy a$$ MS DOS when I was a kid. I have never used Win 3.1/3.11, and I have only used Windows 2000/NT at school. I must say that Win98 SE was quite an improvement, until you started to put too much crap on it, and Win XP is by far the best OS ever produced by MS. I´m not sure about Vista, some think it sucks, some love it. But I guess I will wait for Win 7.
The fantastic DOS in 1990. It sure got me over being intimidated by computers! Used 98SE until 2006 but am now on the fabulous XP. Where's that Linux ISO?
Eumel. It does sound funny in German too and means something like nincompoop but actually is an OS. Well, it was the 80ies...
BASIC....ahh....tape drives! Around same time...class I was taking in college....WATFIV/Fortran77...on PUNCH CARDS! Computer punch cards....pain in the butt. http://celebrating200years.noaa.gov/magazine/tsunami_database/NOAApunchcard_576.jpg Stack them up and feed them into a dinosaur computer like this... http://ralphsmole.com/images/univac.gif
Hi, great threads My first OS it was smth called Amiga Workbench i dont remember which version cause i really dont like this OS . It was working on my Amiga 600 with 2 MB RAM memory... Yeah it was something :-D On PC my first OS it was DOS/Windows 3.11 - pretty cool on these time.
One of them old tape jobbies cant remember which one though. Then an Amiga 500. My first desktop computer had Windows ME installed. It did me a huge favour though as it was so buggy and unreliable i quickly learned about reinstalling and backing up my system.
