Saturday, September 12, 2009

As the Operating Systems turn...

The operating systems I've actually worked or played on, not just logged on and poked around, in chronological order:
  1. IBM OS360 / OS/MVT (school*)
  2. CV4X (bundled with Computervision CADDS 4X) (work)
  3. Intergraph CLIX (VDS, EMS, PDU/PDM) (work)
  4. DOS 3.0 (work)
  5. DOS 4.22 (work)
  6. DOS 5 (work)
  7. DOS 6.0 (work)
  8. DOS 6.1 (work)
  9. DOS 6.2 (work/home)
  10. DOS 6.22 (work/home)
  11. Windows 3.1 (home)
  12. Windows 3.11 "WFWG" (work)
  13. Novell Netware 3.12 (work)
  14. Novell Netware 4.1 (work)
  15. Sun OS (college CS lab)
  16. Sun Solaris 2 (college CS lab)
  17. Mac OS 7 (college math lab)
  18. Mac OS 8 (college math lab)
  19. Mac OS 8.5 (college math lab)
  20. Mac OS 9 (friend's computer)
  21. Mac "Rhapsody" (college beta trial prior to OSX)
  22. IBM OS/2 Warp 3 (home, I still miss it)
  23. Windows 95 (college English lab)
  24. Windows NT 3.51 (work)
  25. Windows 98 (work)
  26. Windows NT 4.0 (work)
  27. Windows 2000 Pro/Server (work)
  28. Windows XP Pro (work/home)
  29. Windows Server 2003 (work/home)
  30. Mac OSX 10.1, 10.4 (apple store, many many many visits)
  31. RedHat Linux 6, 7, 8 (work)
  32. Suse Linux 8, 9 (work)
  33. Windows Vista (work/home)
  34. Windows Server 2008 (work/home)
  35. Ubuntu Linux 5.04, 5.10, 6.04, 6.10, 7.04, 7.10, 8.04, 8.10, 9.04 (home)
  36. Windows 7 (home)
Of all of these, I have several I still like, but Windows 7 is my all-time favorite. It finally just "works" and "feels right" for me. I love it.

The asterisk (*) was a weird story. In the 5th grade, NASA (located nearby) came to our school and asked for four kids to be bused over to a training classroom to do a study on how kids work with computers. They had us program dot-matrix picture print-outs of Pink Panther, Fred Flintstone, George Jetson and the Road Runner. All to see how well we followed instructions to enter simple programming code to print "x" chars to make the pictures. We were bused over one day per week for about two months.

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