Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Operating Systems

I am an OS enthusiast.  That means while I might be partial to one or two operating systems over others, I see the beauty and elegance in every operating system and enjoy them all.

At home we own all Apple products and Mac OS X is the primary operating system.  At work I use Windows XP and RedHat for development.  In the past I have used OS/2 as well.  My FAVORITE operating systems are VAX/VMS (OpenVMS these days) and BeOS. 

VMS is a mainframe operating system, really, but the DEC Vice President of VMS many years ago is the same person who founded the "Windows NT" operating system group at Microsoft.  While NT/XP/Vista is its own OS, you can understand that it shares some features with my old favorite VMS.  Windows NT is, in effect, VMS for the personal computer.

BeOS was an OS written from scratch by Be, inc. initially to show off their hardware.  The Operating System itself became more popular than the hardware but due to competition with Microsoft and bad executive decisions, Be, inc. went away and the BeOS has languished for years.  There IS a project called Haiku that seeks to faithfully reproduce the BeOS as open source software.  It is in an Alpha state and every BeOS user in the world is on the edge of their seat in the hopes that THIS year a Beta version will be released.  If that comes to pass, Mac OS X will no longer be my primary operating system.

The forums and web logs out in cyberspace are chock full of articles denouncing various operating systems for various reasons.  The biggest target over the past year has been Windows Vista.  I recently found this article on OSNews.com (a site I frequent).  It is an excellent article and I recommend that anyone who has fallen into the trap of repeating the same, tired Vista complaints read it.
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