Windows 98...

[Glockster69]

Imagine how TR feels. His first spreadsheet was done with 'rocks in the sand ver1'. Now he sees color pictures of fellas in lederhosen on 2-wheeled motorized bicycles from his craftmatic adjustable bed. He can't eat meat anymore though. Just slurps liquified oatmeal thru a fattie straw.

 

[Angered_Kabar]

I'm kind of a late adopter, but mostly because I don't have money to spend on fancy new stuff.

I used 98 well into 2007. It usually ran fine on older equipment, but I recently tried it out on a newer system and was treated to BSOD every couple minutes. I'm sure it also has more holes than a slice of swiss cheese.

Linux is also not without it's problems, mostly I've had problems with instability coming out of sleep states.

I think the most well thought out and stable OSs I've used are the BSDs. FreeBSD is pretty quick but can get bloated really fast. NetBSD can run on a toaster. OpenBSD is probably the most stable and best configured out of the box. They might not be able to run the newest and coolest hardware like Linux can because the development community isn't as large, but the overall package is thought out and implemented much better than the Linux distro of the month. The biggest thing I like about them and especially OpenBSD is the licence. Where as the GPL acts like a virus to new public projects, the BSD licenses are the way I would want to publish my opensource code under. The main negative I have with the BSDs is that they originated from UC Berkeley :/

 

[Greg_TX]

They replaced the ancient computers in our offices last year, but they held the new ones for so long that Dell no longer carried that model by the time they were installed. Then they stripped Windows 7 off the computers and put in XP. Now they have announced that they plan to (slowly) reinstall Win 7, but mainly so they can get rid of other software. It's an amazing thing to watch. An electronic Fools Parade.

Yep, a lot of big companies do that, especially if they have legacy software to support and they don't want to try to make it work with something newer. They'll take delivery of hundreds or thousands of new machines, blow away the factory OS, then install the OS image they've used for 5 years. The fun begins when you have to hunt down device drivers for new hardware that won't work on the old OS, or try to fix ancient applications that don't understand things like power management or multi-core processors. I miss the good ol' days when we shipped machines with just a bare hard drive and a couple of DOS disks.

 

[Wolfwood]

I'm kind of a late adopter, but mostly because I don't have money to spend on fancy new stuff.

I used 98 well into 2007. It usually ran fine on older equipment, but I recently tried it out on a newer system and was treated to BSOD every couple minutes. I'm sure it also has more holes than a slice of swiss cheese.

Linux is also not without it's problems, mostly I've had problems with instability coming out of sleep states.

I think the most well thought out and stable OSs I've used are the BSDs. FreeBSD is pretty quick but can get bloated really fast. NetBSD can run on a toaster. OpenBSD is probably the most stable and best configured out of the box. They might not be able to run the newest and coolest hardware like Linux can because the development community isn't as large, but the overall package is thought out and implemented much better than the Linux distro of the month. The biggest thing I like about them and especially OpenBSD is the licence. Where as the GPL acts like a virus to new public projects, the BSD licenses are the way I would want to publish my opensource code under. The main negative I have with the BSDs is that they originated from UC Berkeley :/

I like the BSD concept.

 

[jbcalhoun]

I still have my first laptop and it still works (I don't use it though).

It was a Radio Shack with a 8086 processor and a 20 meg hard drive. It has Lotus 123 and Wordperfect, the two staples.

I said (at that time) I would never run out of room with a 20 meg hard drive. LOL

Now all the computers are memory "Hogs".

I still use DOS to tune my race car computer although I do have the tune in Windows format also.

Brad

 

[M. Sage]

20 mb hard drive. LOL, I filled up my 800 mb HD and installed a second HD that holds 2 tb.

Back in 96, I was working at a factory that still used punch tapes to program (most of) their CNC machines (the others took discs). About a year later, I was working in a tool and die shop who had networked computers to load programs in the CNC machines.