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Nobody in here talking about BeOS, QDos, Geos (like windows for the C64!), AIX, or OS2 Warp? For shame!
QNX fucking rocked, I wish it had been useable as a day-to-day system. If I had to pick one it would be that sighs wistfully
I liked BeOS. Rock solid.
Yeah, BeOS looked, for about 5 minutes, like it might be the future!
And then it wasn't :-(
I wanted to like BeOS so much. I even have a VM with Haiku on it. I occasionally spin it up, gawk at how retro-cool the UI is, look around at everything I'd like to be able to do, realize I can't seem to find any usable software for it, close it and try again in six months.
My experience with AIX was very early, on first generation RS/6000s. AIX 3? I had a Powerserver-930 at home. SMIT was weird.
I want to say my exposure was 5.something? On a PPC server used for a production management database. I liked SMIT from what I can remember (the documentation was good), but everything went well silky smooth once I managed to track down bash for it and basically automated half my job with basic scripts, lol
Also fun fact, I once took the server offline by tripping over a SCSI 3 cable to the raid array (while sorting out the bird's nest of a comms room) and it took me 3 days to restore everything from backup.
That was my first steady IT job.
Setting up the server I had involved booting & installing from (8mm) tape! Slowwwwwww.
Oh fantastic! I was one of those young whipper-snappers with the technology of the future for OS installations - floppy disks. I can't remember what sort of tape was being used during my "learning the value of backups the hard way" experience above, but they were chonky and took about 8 hours to parse each full one so I could pop home and eat between feeding them into the machine.
It all worked like a charm though, no lost data or anything :-)
The first "real hardware" (ie: not a "personal computer") I had at home was a 3B2/300 (mid-80s AT&T 32 bit WE32000). Installing Unix on that was about a dozen floppies. (I still have them!)
Full Unix (SVR3) on a system with 2 meg of ram & a 40 meg hard drive...
lol, I never had anything like that at home (though I did end up with a 68K based VME system at one point). That AIX server was outgoing tech for SMEs even then, and I never worked for anywhere big enough to have anything Unix-y on it after that :-/
Still, it used to be cool how much oddly mixed hardware there used to be, whereas now there's a slick VM solution for any size of business.
Oh, I've always liked VME. A lot of big computers (low-end supercomputers, exotic high-end servers) had a proprietary system bus, but multiple VME busses for IO. Very nice arrangement.
Yeah, I use a VME setup at work for data capture and it's serviceable and reliable (reliable enough to still be working off a coax network cable, lol).
The one I had at home had a 60K-based motherboard with some custom roms and a load of serial ports ... I never managed to get it to do anything useful, unfortunately