Operating Systems

I needed to take a mental break today so I went researching operating systems that I had used before. I started by Googling for HP NewWave, which technically wasn't an OS but actually a replacement shell for Windows 3.x. It brought several key Mac concepts to Windows for the first time.

Prior to that, I had also played around with Geoworks, which was a competitor with Windows. Like Windows, Geoworks ran right on top of DOS. It also came with an America Online client, which was my first exposure to the service. This was years before anybody actually knew what AOL was.



I next looked at OS/2. I don't remember how I first found out about it, but OS/2 became something of a hobby of mine for a while. Installation involved plugging in about 22 floppies and the OS took a lot more memory than Windows, but I had fun figuring out how it all worked. It was, however, fairly challenging getting it running on my no-name PC.



OS/2 had a interesting element that is often overlooked: culture. It had a certain feel about it. I actually remember this ad (and this one) quite vividly for whatever reason.

OS/2 1.x was a joint project between IBM and Microsoft, but they split at some point and Microsoft went off to go work on Windows NT and 95. IBM continued on with OS/2 2.x. In retrospect, I can see how there was NeXT UI influence in OS/2, though nowhere near as blantant as in Windows 95.                                                                    

Years later, I started working at XBAND/Catapult and was introduced to SunOS and Solaris. This was the first unix variant I had used so it was a totally new world to me. With the aide of a Sparc 5 on my desk, I dove headfirst into unix. At one point, my cube had a Windows machine, a Sparc 5 and a Mac. Catapult was also my first interaction with SQL databases, as the entire billing system was run on Oracle.

Linux started getting reasonable somewhere in the same time frame. People around the office had started playing with Slackware, though Linux was largely overshadowed by the brand new Windows 95.

BeOS came out a little bit later. One guy at work had actually purchased a BeBox and I had picked up a developer release of BeOS for PowerMac. I suddenly had multiple 3D and video windows open side-by-side on something that was used to running Mac OS 7.



Somewhere between OS/2 and SunOS is when I got my first Mac, a Performa 460. I was raised on Windows but was absolutely enamored by the Mac experience. Ever since then, a Mac is the only thing I've been interested in as my primary machine.

One thing that occurred to me on this little journey today is that Linux lacks what, in my mind, is one of the defining elements of a platform: a signature look. Linux UI is sort of all over the board, though a lot of it is designed to look as much like Windows as possible. In practical terms, Red Hat is probably the closest thing Linux has to a defining experience.

The other thing I realized is how good we have it as Mac OS X users and developers. I really feel that there's no platform that can even come close in terms of overall refinement and sheer enjoyment of experience. I knew this the first time I installed the Mac OS X public beta.

I imagine they way I've talked about software nostaligically here must seem pretty stange to the average person, but an OS is a like a car or a musical instrument. When you get right down to it, a guitar is just an object with some strings attached to it. But to somebody who plays every single day, a guitar becomes an entity that has a life of its own. It's not the guitar itself but what you do with it. You form memories around it.

Even though software is fundamentally an abstract idea, it still represents experiences and thoughts that one has as a result of a particular tool being put within your reach.

One final thing: GUIdebook is a fantastic site for this type of thing. Beautifully designed, great content, good stuff. I dropped the author a note to say thank you.

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