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My favourite vintage OS is DOS 6.22(always runs in virtualbox when I'm doing my work ).What's your favourite vintage OS?

DOS, mostly by lack of choice. That is, unless you count Windows '98 as vintage.

Acorn MOS 3.20 for the BBC master 128. It had a neat and tidy simplicity and a well documented api like you simply don't see these days, plus they no longer give you printed instruction manuals with your system that document every assembler opcode and memory location and every hardware timing... ahh, those were the days... </NOSTALGIA>

Acorn RiscOS

AmigaOS. I've never felt that combination of control and easiness again.

OS/2, I was deeply impressed by their progress bar with pixmap, at that time not much OS has pay attention on beatifying their UI, that was the first eye-candy I saw.

cxzuk wrote:Acorn RiscOS

This. Subpixel-accurate anti aliasing in 1989, two years before Apple and Microsoft would even have scalable fonts (TrueType dates to 1991!)

Sure, most of the interface was still rendered with a (horribly blocky, IMO) bitmap font for performance, but things like the text editor were years ahead of the competition. And this operating system was running on a brand-new self designed(!) processor architecture.

There are still quite a few interesting UI ideas there I think. The way the menus and file saving worked was quite different; whether it was better or worse is up for debate.

Owen wrote:

cxzuk wrote:Acorn RiscOS

There are still quite a few interesting UI ideas there I think. The way the menus and file saving worked was quite different; whether it was better or worse is up for debate.

Yeah, as an ex-RISC OS user, it took a bit getting used to the Windows and Mac way of using applications. The active window didn't have to be the top window, so you could position a PDF to the front, have your source code editor underneath, partially obscured, and type away into it from information in the PDF above, without having to resize windows or have the editor's window sudden jump to the front over the PDF viewer. Then there was the menu system that was entirely context sensitive and drag'n'drop saving of documents from menus to filer windows - none of these clunky dialogue boxes.

It was also very modular - you had a kernel start up and initialise support modules - from the disk drivers to the desktop GUI - from ROM chips. Newer versions of modules could be softloaded from disk, allowing users to customise their OSes completely by unloading and reloading modules (designed into the system since the 80s). I wrote a swap memory manager for it as an extension module, for instance. Booting off chips and running in a very small RAM footprint made it very fast in many cases.

Sadly, the underlying OS was very primitive. It was essentially a 32-bit ARM port of the 8-bit 6502 Mostek-targeted Acorn MOS (which someone else mentioned). And while a lot of effort has gone into reorganising the kernel, and it's had drivers for newer hardware (USB, NICs, GFX cards etc), to implement modern OS features would break so much existing software. There are pre-ARMv4 and v4-7 builds available.

So yes, RISC OS is my favourite vintage OS.

I would have to say the BASIC ROM in the contemporary machines of the late 70's early 80's and second place is Amiga OS 2.06.

I leave it up to debate if you even want to call such a ROM a OS in itself but i found it the easiest interface to get done what i wanted done.

berkus wrote:Another good OS is OS/2 WARP. Been using it in a few BBS installations - tremendously stable for unmanned operations.

I would say OS/2 WARP or AmigaOS but both are still alive so i don't knew if they really count as Vintage.

diodesign wrote:Yeah, as an ex-RISC OS user, it took a bit getting used to the Windows and Mac way of using applications. The active window didn't have to be the top window, so you could position a PDF to the front, have your source code editor underneath, partially obscured, and type away into it from information in the PDF above, without having to resize windows or have the editor's window sudden jump to the front over the PDF viewer.

Just for the record, AmigaOS was similar in that regard, a very useful feature once you get used to it. (Just like the top-of-screen menu bar that AmigaOS shared with MacOS, or the multiple GUI screens.)

As for "being alive"... as much as I would love to believe different, an OS with a potential hardware target base that can be expressed in a four-digit number is not "alive" in my book. Amiga was always a hardy community, but you don't even have to compare the situation today with the late 80's / early 90's heydays to realize that Amiga is dead. They just didn't admit as much yet.

Windows for Workgroups 3.11 running on top of MS-DOS 6.22. Most stable configuration I ever had. Never crashed. Never.

By the way, I liked Office 4 too.

There are little features that I use today that weren't already available then, other than internet and media related things.

Hobbes wrote:Windows for Workgroups 3.11 running on top of MS-DOS 6.22. Most stable configuration I ever had. Never crashed. Never.

That's my favourite vintage os shell.And that's the configuration that runs on my VM.

amd64pager, I'm a geezer. What's your excuse?

The older OSes are always simpler(in user and programmer(system or application) interfaces).