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@@ShamrockParticle I loved OS/2 Warp. Still have the last BETA that came out in a fancy binder. I have a 20 year old computer that is still running the last Beta. Too bad IBM didn't release a Y2K fix for it. A job that had on 1/1/2000 had a data center of 250 with one OS/2 Warp server and it was the only server that was reporting the wrong date. We manually set the date for the first year 1900's that matched the year 2000 so that the day of the week was right and the 2 programs that was running only used the day of the week, day of month and the month were correct. Hard coded the year.
I used it too. Excellent, and my obsession for 6 months or so. But it live and died. It failed to get enough traction to fight Windows. It certainly would deserve to be an "honourable mention".
@@theursulus Yes! It was great. And it did proper folder windows too. Better in every way. But then I ended up running most things in Windows 3 mode, because that was the software I need to run. So... I went back to Windows because that's better than Window Emulation.
Absolutely spot on with Linux at number 1. Just imagine where we would be if Linux never was. It's played a massive part in the evoloution of the IT world.
I think we'd be vastly better off had Linux never been. What Linux managed to do, because it was free, was kill innovation in the OS space. There used to be loads of options as to which OS to use, but then Linux came along and demonstrated that "cheap and good enough" beats "paid for and good" and so it is.
@@PaulMJohnson Pretty sure that's not the case. Plenty of OSes were bought by other companies, incorporated some elements into their own OSes or just left to die.
@@bobmcbob4399 Well, the system is fairly sophisticated; there are datatypes for datatypes. In this case there is picture.datatype which is referenced by png.datatype; the DT aware but graphically incapable text editor checks the file type, sees that the file uses a class of datatype it doesn't support, throws an error, and continues doing it's assigned task. Note that this is WAY simplified. 👍😀 😎
I'm a little late to the game here, but... Every file has some sort of identifier in it that indicates what it is. The OS reads the identifier, and searches a list of file identifier types to find that identifier. If it finds it, there is a corresponding entry that indicates the correct kind of application to use for that type of file. To "register" the file type just means adding that identifier to the list and a corresponding entry that indicates what kind of application to use for that type of file. If a file is a png, gif, tiff, jpg, etc, the OS will read that the appropriate application for these are image viewers and image editors. Other file types will be set to open with applications appropriate for their particular file type as well. The Amiga was definitely ahead its time with this and many other things. With much greater color depth, full multitasking, full multimedia with both audio and video capabilities on an 8 MHz cpu, and more that Window and Mac couldn't do on a 500MHz machine without expensive extra hardware.
@@haplozetetic9519 The Amiga sounds like an incredible piece of computing history that I wish I got to experience. Hard to believe something with specifications like that could do so much!
PC/GEOS was the most impressive OS technical achievement, IMO. It was a pre-emptive multithreaded multitasking OS that ran on 8088 interrupt codes! It ran OK on an 8088, ran well on an 8086, and was blazing fast on a 286. Nothing else has got anything close to that much oomph out of silicon that inexpensive.
It wasn't until Win 7 that Windows caught up. 10+ years later. Anyone who ran Warp 3 through Warp 4 spent half their time trying to figure out why everyone else WASN'T. I still don't get it.
I would even put OS/2 2.0 in the list as the first version of OS/2 that was actually good. But the problem was that OS/2 was underrated by IBM itself. Remember that this was the time when they had Louis Gerstner (that they got from RJR Nabisco, of all places), who said "the last thing IBM needs right now is a vision", as chairman and CEO. IBM didn't even bundle OS/2 with many of their computers of the time, instead bundling them with MS-DOS. Naturally, most other PC makers did the same or even worse. So the downfall of OS/2 was sad but not surprising.
It just never achieved sufficient market share. The turf war between IBM and MS was the main reason it did not thrive. From everything I have heard it was fantastic. Window 3.1 was a kludge, but that is what most people got instead.
My first home pc was an Amiga 500 I bought at the Post Exchange when I was in the Army way back in 1988. I still remember going to shareware parties with a stack of 3.5" disks. I miss it.
The first time I heard a sound card was in a PX at Fort Shafter. I never heard high quality orchestral music or a human voice from a computer before. It was really amazing.
I remember doing something similar only it was a Tandy 1000TX, 5 1/4" & 3.5" disks (no HDD) ... I still have that machine along with a TI-99/A, both in working order. I miss those days with friends.
I bought my first computer in 85 in the Navy Exchange, a C128, (I was "One Upping" my older brother who was also in the Navy with a C64), it was life changing! A few years later I got my first Credit Card.... I melted it to buy an A2000. The Amiga is always my favorite, it was pure magic. We saw what a computer could do and knew it was only going to get better! Now days, everyone has a computer or two, (Game Consoles and Cell Phone are computers too), they grew up with them so they think of them more like a home appliance. Yes, I bought hundreds of blank 5.25 in floppies, I did pirate on the C64/128 but not on the Amiga.
You forgot about OS/2... Literally everyone hosting a mailbox ran it, due to multitasking done right. ...heck, you could even play Mahjong while its still being installed. It was pretty amazing. Also, "DR/Novell DOS". *cough* If MS-DOS 5 makes the list, DR definitely deserves a spot too.
@@acalthu - exactly. I ran OS/2 Warp and I remember being able to format Drive A & B at the same time as I ran a check on Drive C, with only the one IO card. Ten diskettes to install...first O/S I bought 😆
In a fair world, OS/2 would have been where Windows is now. OS/2 Warp 3 and 4 totally destroyed Windows 95/NT in terms of multitasking, speed and stability, not to mention being truly object oriented and having a far superior file system (HPFS). But, 1. IBM couldn't market their way out of a wet paper bag, and lacked the foresight that by 2000 most homes would have a computer. They marketed poorly, and mostly to a limited audience. True to their name I suppose, International Business Machines. 2. The bugs that were in OS/2, IBM's hands were tied to fix because of legal rights to portions of the code due to the partnership with Microsoft. Ironically a good portion of the bugs in the system were Microsoft contributions. I'm not sure how common knowledge it is, but what Microsoft released as Windows 3.0 was essentially a reworked version of what was supposed to be released as OS/2 1.3 (I think I have the version numbers right, it's been awhile).
Surprised I've got so little to gripe about here. OS X Snow Leopard was far and away the best version of OS X, though. WIn 95 only deserves to be on the list because it was the first version of Windows not to suck balls.
@@MrLondonGo What about SunOS 4.1.4, which everyone used until the SVR4 system stabilized? What about Minix? For without Minix there likely would have been no Linux. Which reminds me, without Gnu Hurd there wouldn't have been all of the userspace Unix tools which also went into Linux. (Gnu Hurd was on the list of worst operating systems.) It's just so hard to get behind Solaris in the Oracle era. DTrace and ZFS are awesome, but they can be had elsewhere these days.
@@rockets4kids yeah .. Solaris 2.5.1 /x86 version + Developmet kit . '95 as I remember , that was something . plus QNX and yes , OS2 at the same time on IBM PS2 ( remember running Delphi 1 on OS2 with windows 3.11 in the window , been more stable than running native on 3.11 )
My all time favourite was Windows 7. It was a proper Desktop OS, looked incredibly pretty, was absolutely stable and rock solid. Win 7 was the only OS that I installed when it came out in 2009 and never had to reinstall once in over 7 years of usage, including exchanging hardware. I then switched to Win 10 which has it's upsides but is a horrible flat and ugly half-mobile mess that likes killing the whole system with an update. Loved Windows 7, it was the best user experience out of all the ones I ever had to work with.
I still run 7 on an Intel i3-based laptop for web browsing and file management.. solid as a rock. Boots quick even off an old hard drive, and like you I've never had to re-install the OS.
I missed out on Windows 7, because the first internet connected device I owned was a 2nd hand laptop that came with Windows Vista and I hated it so much, I ended up installing Ubuntu on it and that improved my user experience so much I never went back to using Windows. At the time I had very little experience of using computers in any form and I believe this decision to switch to a Linux based OS so early on was critical to me eventually going on to learn how to build and publish websites including server management.
I still have a laptop running Win 7. It regularly had uptimes in the range of "a couple of months to a year". Stable as a rock indeed. My newish laptop runs Win 10 which is fine, but it has a nasty habit of rebooting every now and then when Im not around. Taking a bunch of unsaved changes to documents and the like with it. Plus rebooting it is a pain since there is always a hard to skip tutorial or some attempt to get me to switch to Win 11.
I find it increadible how they were able to make a GUI run on the C64. That is real developers. Now with resource opulence, they can created bloated ineffcicient code and get away with it!
My first contact with "computers" was a Microsoft MSX, an 8 bit computer like the C64 which booted into basic and had a cassette tape recorder for storing programs. Good old days.
absolutely, it's the main reason why I stopped using Windows10. Horribly bloated with a huge amount of processes running in the background and slowing down a machine with 16gb of RAM. Using Pop! OS ever since.
@@frankov_83 Is it possible to use this type if trick like they did to create a web browser for instance that would run well on very old hardware and yet allow internet usage somehow modern?
Back in the Motorola M6809 era I wrote my own (limited) OS, including word processor and simple database for my hand-soldered machine. These were good ol'e times. Today for me nothing else counts but Linux, partly due the possibility to change parts of it on the source code level.
@@LawsForever I had a Color Computer that I eventually ran OS/9 on and got actual multi-user/multi-processing. I had no real reason or application other than it was cool to log in from a terminal while being logged in on the console.
@@joegee2815 You mean OS/9 by Microware? Amazing to hear from someone else's experiences. Ever heard of EFFO (European Forum for OS/9) back in the 80ties (I think)? I was one of their trimestrial newspaper's authors. Among other things I published drivers and modules I wrote for OS/9 in C and Motorola assembler. That was (or is?) a really powerful real time OS!
@@LawsForever Yep, that's the one, at the time I was working at Bellcore (previously Bell Labs) and was learning Unix. The idea of having a modern OS like Unix at home was appealing to me. I was going to attach modems and start up a timeshare BBS but had to move to a new place and the project got scuttled forever apparently...
I loved the Windows 2000 OS. It brought back “Append” which had been ditched by Windows 95 and 98. I remember Windows 95 breaking my Sort Program, written using the Compact Memory Model in Borland Turbo C. I had to rewrite it using the small memory model, which required a lot more temporary files. I think Microsoft peaked with MSDOS 6.22
I have a soft spot in my heart for CP/M. I started my programming career in early 80's writing insurance policy calculation programs for independent insurance agencies using CP/M in BASIC on early PCs such as Xerox, TRS80, and the IBM PC. I still have a hardback book from that era with dust cover, a classic which apparently is fetching a nice price on the collectibles market, I recently did a search as we were downsizing our library of thousands of books by more than 60%. I decided to keep it for now. Fond memories of my entrance into a career in programming and IT.
cp/m was pretty good, I also used Concurrent CP/M which allowed 4 virtual work spaces so you could run edit and compile code in three separate windows . Was a touch slow but certainly my long term favourite.
The datatypes feature was one of the reasons why I used my A1200 until 2005. Because I had to professionally juggle with so many different types of files, and the file format converters available for Windows and MacOS that could convert the various files were costly and unreliable, whilst on the Amiga you could load everything ( aside of Cheesecakes ) and then export it to the format you needed. Right away, no hassle. Also, the Amiga OS 3.1 UI was smoother and more responsive on a 25/50MHz MC68040 machine than Windows 98 on a 366MHz Pentium 2 and about equal to XP on a 600MHz P3.
Data Types seemed more powerful and more featured than MIME Types, which seemed like a bad imitation of a good idea better implemented on the Amiga than the WWW.
For me, if I would do a "top X" operating systems I would do two lists, one for operating systems which have historical value and made things that moved the industry forward and one list for the operating systems that I actually like (to use today or have used earlier). It feels very strange to compile a list where the different systems are based on different values.
That is a very rounded opinion to have. However the OP clearly stated those are his personal favorites and nothing more. Nevertheless a video based on your suggestion would be neat. How about it Dan?
Linux is the best overall because of availability. The one that even beats Linux is QNX. It is everywhere, hidden, reliable even runs heart machines, airplanes. If your life depends on it... use QNX.
@@gyrcom Yes QNX is great. It's also an RTOS. No quite the same things as a general purpose OS. I once worked on project to migrate Wind River to QNX. WR was faster but terrible driver support at the time. QNX with Photon micro GUI was very fast and slick.
Finally Linux getting the love it deserves - I agree fully with it being number 1. I have been using it as my main OS since 1996 (back before it was easy to use) and only Windows 2000 challenged it for reliability. The only OS I see missing is Solaris. That short lived OS was a game changer for graphic design and for $10000 you would get the OS and then a free Solaris box, But it never really made it into the personal operating space until the end so I guess I can understand its absence. Good list.
Irix was brilliant. But not mainstream and definitely not cheap (hardware+OS). But if you got to make Jurassic Park in 1992, it was your go-to! Digital UNIX (for DEC) was shite.
Yeah I think the cheapest of the UNIX workstations I ever personally saw was an SGI O2, they had gotten it down to like $5,000. But by then a PC with a 3D accelerator was under $2,000, and of course a few years after that, you had 3DFX, ATI, and Nvidia all producing nice 3D accelerators for a few hundred bucks that you could drop into pretty much any PC. That really killed off SGI's lower-end sales entirely. Linux didn't help things at all in that regard -- the HP PA-RISC and DEC Alpha were taking turns at being the fastest machines on the planet, and they were like 3-5x the speed of a Intel (or AMD) CPU -- but at over 10x the cost. So already in the late 1990s when I was in college, the computer science lab had HP PA-RISC UNIX workstations (about 1/3rd computers and 2/3rds x terminals, which HP used the same chassis for so you couldn't tell which you were sitting at unless you looked at the model number.) And SGIs. But they were replacing these with PCs with Linux as time went on, a healthy PA-RISC had 3-5x the performance but at 10-15x the cost, and we were learning programming on these systems, not doing heavy-duty engineering and numerical processing, so the extra speed was not useful for what the comp sci department used them for.
I have to agree and expected a DEC product to be in the list. At the risk of dating myself I used micro-rsx on a pdp11 and saw what i thought were innovative features. Then VMS on an alpha lol was awesome. If i had an error it would unwind the stack and show me the problem quickly.
Windows95 was a huge step up from 3.1, it was nice not having to deal with IRQs, DMA and memory addresses. I still have a warm place in my heart for DOS, I run 3.3 on my AT and 6.2 on a few other machines. Your list was very good
IRQs and DMA was really ni different with windows 95 than before it the thing is hardware designs evolved at the same time, making it possible for software to do more to configure the interrupts and memory addressesing instead of making it fully manual by the user. Windows 95 - Windows ME were all still just additional software running on top is DOS. DOS was more obscured and crippled in ME, but still there. Config.sys and autorun.bat where still very important and in place for many years.
Wonderful video Dan, and actually pretty close to the mark. OS/2 was actually a really great OS that was so far ahead of MS DOS and Windows 2.x and 3.x. it took advantage of the 286 chip and 386 chip, where DOS just kind of tacked on lame support for it. It is also amazing still to see Mac OS X, Windows 95 and Be OS finally catch up to what we were doing on out Amiga's 10 years earlier...
We used OS/2 Warp for a Windows dial-up remote access server. Each user had their own Windows 3.11 environment in a VM. That OS was rock solid and hardly ever crashed!
For me Linux is the best! However I did miss Windows for Workgroups 3.11, the system that for the first time combined networking, internet browsing with cooperative multi tasking and a nice proven GUI. Basically the hyped Windows 95 only added 32-bits and the start button to that :) Real multi tasking (preemptive) was available for NT based systems only. For most home users real multitasking only has been introduced with Windows XP. Based on technical quality and innovation and not looks, I promote Windows for Workgroups 3.11 (networking) and Windows XP (its long life 12.5 years). Microsoft had to force users to leave Windows XP.
Absolutely loved the Commodore 64 t-shirt. Learned assembly on it. Including raster interrupts. Also built my own line drawing and region fill routines around age 16. My students today can't believe that the total system memory available was sometimes less than the memory needed to store the app icon image of today's computers.
I always tell people that I did more on that 64k of RAM than I ever had on 32gigs of RAM. The Commodore 64 encouraged people to explore and experiment. I didn't develop any interesting software, but I did write some simple programs and became a MODEM master.
win2k is definitely a worthy achievement. I had my box running with plenty of bells and whistles at 38mb RAM occupied, thanks in part to using an alt shell and going through BlackViper's services list. The individual has lists of services that are safe to have set to off or by request instead of how they typically end up being set, freeing up tens of MB in RAM.
I have been in the computer field as a hobbyist since I started as a teenager in 1977 (I did three years college SC course in the mid 1990s and computer electronics courses in 2000-2001) . This is by far one of the best 10 ten lists of best OSs I have ever seen. You're on point with what each one has contributed to the industry we know today. Now I have fun learning Blender and 3D modeling and animation and video editing with DaVinci Resolve, along with some simple Linux script writing.
Actually, Windows 95 went on to be a truly stable, full-featured, operating system. I stuck with Windows 95 for quite some time, avoiding Vista and similar.
It was Win95 that converted me to Linux. My home PC was running Windows 3.1 and when I connected to the Internet and started having difficulty with filenames > 8.3, I figured I had to upgrade and I sure wasn't paying $$$ for the crashing-several-times-a-day nightmare (W95) that I was used to at my work. So I bought a Red Hat CD (not having a clue about Linux) and never looked back...
LOL I always wondered, why they did not use Iron Maiden's song "Moonchild" for any Windows 7 ad, which starts like "Seven deadly sins, seven ways to win, seven holy paths to hell and your trip begins". Fits perfectly.
One of my favorite things about BeOS was install time. I was doing deskside support at the time, having to do a lot of Windows installs, which always took forever and required a lot of babysitting. BeOS was up and fully functional in 15 minutes every time, even if I was installing a multi boot system. Just so much better on the same hardware.
Certainly the best look 'n feel of any version of Windows, IMO. Which is why my Debian is configured to look broadly similar to XP (not 'cos I love XP specifically, just 'cos I like that look).
@@abhabh6896 you're right win7 was no replacement. but linux was not mature enough. because the poor acpi support it wasn't good for laptops: they were overheating because the cpu fans didn't work properly, which was ignored for years.
Thumbs up for putting AmigaOS so high in the list. That put a smile on my face. :) Even you listing the features it had in 1985 just gave me goosebumps. It was the first OS I had ever experienced and my most satisfying one to use. Too bad they were "run" by Commodore...
Understand it's not normally considered a Desktop OS but I really enjoyed Solaris, both on 86 and Sparc. Rock solid which is my most important criteria. I used to look after a Uni cluster of the machines and they just did the job. Sun Microsystems RIP :-(
I think you left out that Amiga OS had its own version of plug-and-play years before Bill gates announced it like it was something new. The AmigaOS is my favorite operating system as well. I have an old Amiga 3000 Tower and several 4000s still, and they are much more fun to use then even my Macintosh computers.
ProDOS (1983) had Plug-n-Play before AmigaOS (1985). Software would scan the first few bytes of firmware to determine what slot the card was in. Technically, the Apple 2 had the first version with the Disk Drive firmware being slot agnostic. But yeah MS was always ripping off others.
My favorite OS of all time is Windows XP, specifically service pack 2 and later. Back when it was supported, it was reliable and just worked. It wasn't bloated and you actually had much more customization options, compared to newer Windows versions. It was also the first operating system I used and it took a while before I moved to Windows 7 in 2014 (yes, I skipped Vista, don't hate)
In my opinion the biggest drawback to XP was the lack of proper 64-bit driver and software support. The 64-bit edition just wasn't fleshed out. Edit: I'm sorry of course I meant Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, NOT 64-bit edition (which was exclusive to IA64)
Vista was good. If you had the hardware for it to run well. Same story with WinME. You had to have powerfull hardware, that was build for it. WinXP was ok. Win7 was just created for the user, with the help of the user. Hence 7 being better than XP. However. I too have switched to Linux exclusively. I tested tons of Linux distro's between 1995 and 2016. I finally decided to switch fully in 2016, because they had announced Win7 end of life. Actually I had the idea for a year or something. Because of that EOL announcement. I must have had like 50 different flavour tested through the years. Personally I am a Debian guy. I just want my Linux to be Debian or Debian based. Then I am good and happy enough.
@@brostenen In fact, I had a custom PC on which the only pre-NT Windows that would be stable (actually *very* stable) was WinME. And then along came XP, which was excellent.
I literally only disagree with some of the ordering. This list rounds out my exact feelings on operating systems across the board objectively. Now, I have my "guilty pleasure" OSes. I know I shouldn't like Windows Me. Nostalgia is a hell of a thing though. I remember sitting with my grandfather, on Black Friday, eagerly awaiting the install to complete, just to then spend a total of seven hours and hundreds of dollars on phone support to get it up and running. I think I primarily have Me to thank for me being in the IT support industry, because I remember the absolute nightmare we went through, and never wanted anyone else to go through that. That's why I love it.
So cool to have BeOS on the list! Such a totally AMAZING system. Supported petabyte file storage. I demo'ed it for my mom (a developer) on a PII-266, running 9 simultaneous AVI files with audio, no glitches, no drops, flawless (Windows on that same PC (setup as dual-boot), couldn't run 2 without dropouts). Really hoped it would go somewhere (I still have my copy), I actually ran my personal website on it for a few years off a Pentium MMX 166 NEC Laptop. I think besides the business decisions, one other issue against it, was it was very "single-user" oriented when both Mac and Windows were clearly moving into networked, centralized user managed compatible environments. I know BeOS could sort of manage things in that area, but it was more of an after-thought on the last boxed copy of BeOS, more of a super-powered workstation type OS for completing powerful projects for a given user, IMO. Still was so slick.
@@danielhilton7623 No matter how much you hate it, you have to appreciate that a single man built it all by himself: the kernel, the games, the programming language, etc
OS/2 was my first full preemptive multitasking OS, so it had a special place in my heart. Such a difference from Windows95 where basically { halt; jmp $-1 } was all you needed to 99% hang the OS. But I never got a hang of which OS/2 settings interacted with DOS performance, so I reverted back to Windows 95 to make my BBS users happy. Windows 2000 was the first Windows OS that seemed to truly be able to multitask for real and have a good user interface, which probably killed off OS/2. And better application compatibility. So since Windows 2000 I’ve considered windows pretty mature.
Excellent voice and cadence for narrating a Y-T Vid , and a fairly light hearted take on the subject, with virtually no hint of pretentiousness whatsoever . WELL done ! A more professional approach to screen presence might _help_ , but overall the PRESENTATION is _excellent_ .
XP used the basis of 2k with some upgrades to the ui to make it more end user friendly and much cheaper ($300 for a win2k professional license, vs $99 for an upgrade license to xp). The big milestone was Win 2k which made the whole system so much more stable compared to the old windows versions that were still based on ms dos.
@@Psi-Storm "All roads lead to Cairo" was the quote I remember and Cairo was the universal kernal for all Windows PCs. DOS, 3.1, W95, W98, WME on one stream and the various iterations of WNT followed by W2000 on the other. XP was when they came together and the one I stuck with for the longest time.
Windows 2000 = Windows 5.0 while Windows XP = Windows 5.1 and it is a further development and multiple versions of Windows 9x not being seperately listed. I truly loved Windows 2000 and I used it the longest ever. But in the early beginnings it was difficult because of lacking device drivers (developers could no longer do their dirty tricks under water). In the Final service pack 2000 was virtually the same as the back then XP. For me missing in this list is Android. The importance being that IT truly unfolded portable computing and most users no longer need a pc at home any more.
I agree with XP, not because it was innovative, but because it ironed the bugs out of Win 2000. Finally, PnP worked reliably. BSOD almost never occurs. XP is such a pleasure to use, that most customers refused to "upgrade" until Microsoft provided a cheap slide across to Win 8 (and then a free slide to Win 10). Everything from Win 7 has been a downgrade. Win 10 is bloated like Vista was - old laptops are slowed to a crawl. I still keep a Win XP desktop system handy for using my old HP scanner, because HP refused to provide any updated drivers.
Ok, that data type feature of amiga os is possibly the most fascinating and useful feature I've ever heard of in my life, and I'm disappointed that Windows doesn't have a similar feature built in. Windows has something similar, kind of. You can install codes to allow playback of new video and audio files, but that only works for certain container formats.
My favorite thing about Amiga OS was that if it detected the system was going to crash, it would be kind enough to let you know to save your work first. How the hell it did that, I don't know, but I've always been miffed that Windows never did that.
@@captbloodbeard Amiga has had the "Guru Meditation" that tells you what had happen. So when I'm programming in Asembler, I alwasy know what had happen. I loved programming the 68000 processor. It was easy to do. The 86x processors are bullshit.
My top 15: 15. Commodore 64 14. Windows 1995 13. Windows 4 12. Windows 1998 11. Windows 2000 10. Windows Millennium Edition 9. Windows XP 8. Windows Vista 7. Windows 7 6. Windows 8 5. Windows 10 4. Solaris 3. Linux 2. Operating System X 1. Windows 11
Before viewing it I was thinking that it would be mission impossible to make such a list and properly sustain it with real content, but you did... bravo!
I think your list is pretty accurate - I especially agree with you about Amiga OS being miles ahead of the competition with preemptive multitasking... such a pitty Commodore management at the time couldn't organise a pissup at a brewery.
Commodore USA was the one who couldn't get anything right, and Europe was the one who ran the company well. If Commodore Europe were the ones in charge, Commodore might still be around today, but they were not. I still like the story that Commodore brass said at the CES or some other show that the 128 was going to have a memory expansion unit, without telling the Engineers who worked at Commodore about the announcement. They found out at the same time as the public did.
@@jeremypnet Shut the fuck up. I run gnu/linux on my pc and it's good. In fact, lots of people run gnu/linux on their pcs. Gnu/linux IS on pcs and it wouldn't take long to search for desktop linux-based oses.
The greatness of Linux is that it has changed the culture of computing from all perspectives. But,to be fair, we have to give a very big chuck of the credit to the founder of GNU project, namely Richard M. Stallman
I'm surprised you didn't include Windows XP, which I think was the most robust version of Windows. It was the only Windows version that gave non-admin users the ability to remap the keyboard. If that feature had survived into Windows Vista, 7, 8 and 10, people in restricted jobs that don't allow admin access or personal software like AutoHotKey would be able to type on the keyboard layout of their choice. Of course, you can do the same thing on Linux.
It crashed a lot and had to be fully reinstalled or repaired. After it had been on the system for a while it would slow down by at least 70%. Memory manager could not use more than 3.5gb of ram so on systems with 8gb of ram it would not see it and it would loose stuff in the ram it did not see crashing the system. This is just one of the issues it had of many main crashing very unstable on some systems.
@@WidowUK It was earlier in the evolution of Windows and had a lot of those kinds of problems. It also had very poor security and could be hacked easily. I was talking more about some of its features that unfortunately didn't make it into Windows Vista - 11.
NeXT and Amiga were 10 years ahead of its time, its a tragedy they had lost and MS won setting back technological progress a whole decade back if not more
I recently got NT4 running in VirtualBox and was trying to remember why it didn't replace Win95 for me back in the day. NT4 was a great OS, but then I recalled that it couldn't run games because I think it didn't support DirectX. Couldn't run DOS games at all like, Quake. But I did just reinstall Win7 on my home server and used Prairie Wind.bmp for the wallpaper :) Brings back great memories of winter 96/97.
@@AeroModuleThe main reason that NT4 didn't run games well, if at all, was that MS were pushing a split between a professional/business operating system and a home/student one. Perhaps the other reason that NT4 wasn't so popular was that it could be a bit tricky to configure. I ran NT4 systems at work, but Win95/98 at home and found both best suited the environment. As the system manager/administrator in a large scientific research organization I had to provide a lot more hands-on support for NT4 and 2000 than for previous OS's - and my users were all PhDs or graduate engineers and scientists. So no dummies.
Allen Jenkins Yep - it was horrible to configure. It was pretty much under construction, though, and Win95, 98...2000 then XP evolved the GUI features until the point where it was polished. NT had the stability, but the UI/UX wasn’t quite there yet.
Windows NT was developed by developer that left Digital VMS, and there are jokes about the name selection what comes after V in VMS -> W what comes after M in VMS -> N what comes after S in VMS -> T what would that be Windows NT hahaha
@@londongaz2 I loved GEM. Well, on the Atari ST. DRI's GEM on x86 was so weak in comparison. I'm not sure that was due to DRI not being as clever as Atari Corp's ex-Atari Inc programmers who improved their version of GEM or it being due to the crippling legal settlement DRI signed with Apple.
I used to run an independent computer shop in the Midlands and can tell you that you missed one. Sort of. Twenty odd years ago we would load Win 98 SE then load the Win Me upgrade disc onto our machines. That gave the basic half decent core of Win 98 SE but with the extras of Win Me like System Restore. Worked for us!
@@lsorense today isn't April 1st, MacOS X is a souped up FreeBSD with bits of NEXT instead. Which is still good but BeOS as MacOS X would have been truly fantastic.
Been following for years, glad to see you're finally almost at that 50k mark! Keep up the great work Dan, as a former Amiga owner - I've loved your videos over the years.
Absolutely! Unix (still around) is the grandfather of all the -ix and -ux OSs. I used Unix before Windows (and the Xerox Alto) existed. It is extremely clean and compact, designed to run in less than 64KB. That is KB, not MB or GB! And fast on a 1uS cycle minicomputer. Modern software is languid mega-bloatware in comparison.
@@BigMacIIx Not picking on you, Etienne ;^). It's amazing how few folks know anything that predates Steve, Bill and Linus. And the products Xerox PARC produced are still monumental (WYSIWYG, Ethernet, Postscript, Smalltalk). I was lucky to be a Xerox STAR beta tester.
@@zf4hp24 Wow I envy you, I never got the chance to use a Xerox computer. Xerox Parc pretty much "invent" all the tech we still use today, to bad Steves Jobs got away with this ;-)
Once upon a time, a friend of mine came over to show me his Commodore 64 system and the game he was playing. He set it up in my kitchen, booted it up, connected to the floppy disk system, and started the game loading, and we waited, and waited,... After a little bit I said "Hey, let me show you the game I am playing on my Apple II." So we went to the next room, and I booted my Apple II, loaded Autoduel, and demonstrated the game for a little while. Then we went back to the kitchen to check the Commodore: Still booting. Soon after that my friend bought an Apple II and was never sorry about it.
I'll add to the list of people who say that OS/2 should have been on this list. OS/2 ushered in the era of Client-Server software where the desktop PC wasn't used just for word processing and spreadsheets. It allowed businesses to harness their back-end servers and present it in a user-friendly, powerful and stable interface. Many bank machines ran OS/2 as did in-branch banking applications. It allowed Enterprise-grade software applications on a personal computer for the first time - not just sharing files in a workgroup.
My vote for best after nearly 30 years in the computer engineering business: IBM's OS2 and a distance second placer Windows 7.....worse is any version of Linux! Linux takes a computer nerd to use.....sit down the average non technical user and ask them to copy a file from one drive to a different one....good luck!!
I worked in an air force unit that used Windows 3.11 on one of their systems right up till early 2015. It was a stand alone used to run some DAT voice recorders and the only place I could still play Mine Sweeper and Solitaire anywhere on base.
I don't know if I have a top 10 but my favorites are Windows 7 and XP, Mac OS Mojave and Snow Leopard and Linux Mint and Peppermint Linux. Thats just me. Thanks.
I agree with your choice of AmigaOS. For me the top OS is OS/2 which at the time was leaps and bounds beyond anything available from Microsoft at the time (there was no Linux). Both for development as well as rock solid stability and versatility it was a game changer. With version 3.0 it ran 32-bit applications before Windows NT was available. It's presentqaion manager was a pleasure to develop code for. The failing grace of OS/2 was the Enterprise-oriented marketing by IBM - something IBM was very strong in. They had no idea how to market their product to the home consumer, while Microsoft had huge experience selling to the home user with it's DOS and Windows 3.x platforms. They managed to out-hype IBM when marketing Windows 95 even though OS/2 was superior to Windows 95 in every way. While IBM was busy courting the banks and industries of the time, Microsoft was busy encouraging developers to create Win-95 applications which left OS/2 with very little commercial software in the various Brick & Mortar stores (internet-based stores didn't exist). Had IBM been a little more consumer-conscious the OS tapestry would look very different today - but they dropped the ball and Microsoft was swift in picking it up. The biggest laugh over the whole thing is that the kernel of OS/2 was co-developed between Microsoft and IBM, and was used as the basis of Windows NT. Where they diverged of course is with the GUI system - IBM had Presentation Manager, Microsoft had it Windows.
I used to use that on my 286. Although, not really an OS as it was more of a file manager on top of MS-DOS. But, you probably knew that and were just being funny.
What LInux needs for it to become more widespread in its adoption is for "the Bourne shell to be given the 'bum's rush', C-Shell to exiled to the C-shore", and the Korn cut, and a replacement that is far more intuitive and free of cryptic mixed case notation, but support all of the ingenious innovations like pipes and filters, as well as rework of utilities like Grep and Awk to reflect the rework. BTW, maybe Microsoft's Powershell could be adapted to be an alternative.
No love for us Tandy kids? The kids whose parents bought a computer for their home office (TRS-80) instead of something the kids would love (Commodore), and the kids just had to learn how to use the business box to pass the time in 1983. I still dream in TRSDOS.
I was so scared that there wouldn't be Linux in the top 1. Though I could have accepted AmigaOS for Nr.1 as in many ways that's the most impressive OS of it's time. I could still be really happy with it. But nothing beats Linux. I first saw it in 1994 Assembly demo party, couple months after 1.0 release. I remember thinking it looked great, but was really slow. And I thought it has no change of getting anywhere.
I installed 1.0, downloaded it onto floppy disks. It was the Slackware distribution. Was a pain to get the graphics sorted, today it's one of the easiest installs of any operating system out there.
I first started using Linux when it was beta kernels. You'd almost always have to recompile the kernel to support the hardware you had in the machine and that would take a good amount of time.
@@shanehebert396 ugh I don't miss that! Still occasionally have to compile a kernel mod, but mostly they're abstracted away with DKMS doing the hard work.
Although I have worked on ALL of the OSes mentioned(and associated hardware), I purchased the AmigaOS(with Amiga 3000 and 3000T) in 1990 and it will forever be my favorite OS..I still have the working hardware packed somewhere in my garage...unfortunately, it will not survive my next move...
@@khathmandu I had gotten rid of my old, trusty A500 when I moved, but have since bought an A600 and A1200 that I will upgrade and never give away again. Back in the 90s I learned how to program on the Amiga, first in GFA Basic and then in C. The OS was really nice and had pretty cool features for its time.
While not my "favorite" Win 95 was the most influential OS of all time. It was such a huge cultural phenomenon, people were camping outside, the TV adverts were exciting, etc.. Most importantly, it gave us true plug-and-play from any vendor and the Start Menu.
I would say it's unfair to call what MS did to Digital Research as underhanded. Bill Gates himself recommended them to IBM and Gary Kidalls wife refused to sign and NDA with IBM. IBM turned to them because they had little choice at the time and Gates had to find a DOS quickly.
Great video! I am surprised you did not include MVS or IBM VM. They ran the world until 1980s. I agree Linux as #1. I was a mainframe developer for IBM for 10 yrs and moved over to Linux in the Embedded Systems group. I ran and developed Linux kernels and drivers on Mainframes, Rs6000s, and PowerPC embedded systems, like set-top boxes. It is the most flexible OS I ever saw. I even had my hard drive copied and all my emails impounded because of that stupid SCO law suite. Good times!
Instead of Windows 95 you have had OS/2. Windows 95 was just another GUI addon to DOS. OS/2 was a full Object Oriented OS. It used PostScript fonts on the GUI. It supported different fonts in each window, different colours, different backgrounds and it was all drag'n'drop. And it had the option of making a folder a Workplace, which meant that when you opened that folder everything in it opened as well. And when you closed that folder everything that was opened from that folder was closed again. So if you had a folder with software development tools you didn't need to start all the tools separately, you just made the containing folder a Workplace. The Task list was a bit special too. You could multiselect running tasks with the mouse or the keyboard and terminate them with the 'Delete'-key.
Linux is even easier to install than Windows for the most part (such as Mint as he showed in video). No serial number to enter. Surprised to not hear Windows 7 at all
The fact you can put someone in front of it today, and they can use it without too much difficulty shows you how advanced it was for its time. Also, speaking as someone who has had to put together a lot of Sysadmin scripts recently, there are times over the last month, i would have Loved to have AmigaDos ASSIGN command's ability to add folders together and remove them again at a whim.
@@spodula assign is a beast of a command and it makes it possible to check a drives structure on hd before you write it on a media.in reverse you can copy a media to hd and assign the correct drive letters. in the 90s i copied all ADos floppies to hd and used a script on demand to assign the disks to the folders.
GEOS is amazing, I still remember the first time I loaded it up as a primary school kid in the 80s and thinking it was an amazing operating system, I think I compared it to apples latest GUI at the time and infact it was arguably better than windows of the time and came with its own office apps that rivaled ms Office of the time as well.. all this on a 1mhz 64kb ram system.. infact I find GEOS makes a Commodore 64 just as useable if not more so than a 286 with Windows 3.1 and early MS Office... amazing programming from those at Berkeley software.. As far as my favourite OS nowadays is Windows.. yes I've tried and played with Linux but day to day Windows 10 works for me and they have brought across the best of both worlds now with WSL, windows snap to corners and multiple desktops along with fastboot.. Windows just works and looks nice with the default themes and colours
As happy as I am that you’ve included CP/M I think you undersell its impact. While it was the BIOS/BDOS architecture which made it possible to port CP/M to so many hardware platforms (prior to CP/M every system required its own custom OS), it also made it possible for the first time to write software that was truly platform agnostic. At a time when Bill Gates was running around custom producing BASIC for each hardware platform, one could now write software to the OS, not the platform. In short, CP/M birthed the microcomputer software industry. Even as late as 1985 there was still more software for CP/M than for any other operating system ever.
@@jmc000 I don’t know how any of that negates what I said. *”…a huge pile of messy quirky programs”* In other words, a software industry in its nascency finding its legs. What else would one expect? *”(GSX) arrived too late.”* CP/M ran on 8-bit hardware, which was too primitive to support graphical subsystems of any but the most rudimentary sort. By ‘83 or so Digital Research had early versions of GEM for its 16-bit OSes, but by that time it was, as you said, too late.
I have been using Linux Mint for years, easy to install, easy to convert from a windows user to linux user. No 3 hour time to install and update like older windows, automatic updates in the background, fast running on older machines, ability to run from a USB stick or DVD, many many free applications, and an open office that is compatible with MS office documents, and many more plusses. What more do you need from an OS.
Please, no. The worst CLI I have used that professed to be multi-user and multi-tasking. The "spawn" feature was no where nearly as powerful as a csh job control. Absolutely overpriced trash, which also begat more overpriced trash in the form of Windows NT from the same over privileged dullards.
Here is my additions/modifiacions to your list(although I STILL gave you a massive thumbs up) 1) MP/M coupled with GEM windowing system, in early 1985(almost a year before Windows 1), again by Gary Kildall! A fully preemptive multitaking, fully color windowing system for ther Intel machines. It was a full 10 years ahead of Macintosh and Windows as they did not have preemptive multitasking until 10 years later. What's more GEM was sued into oblivion(where it had to be discontinued from x86), as BOTH Apple and Microsoft saw it as the main and most SERIOUS threat to their dominance 2) DRDOS - Again by Gary Kildall!! Even after Microsoft RIPPED OFF(yes ripped off, and reversedd engineered CP/M) Gary Kildall came back and did DRDOS, which DOMINATED MSDOS and was putting MSDOS out of the market until Microsoft put special code into Windows 3.1 that would detect DRDOS and not start on purpose. The Nostalgia Nerd just a week ago, did a great video on this historic fact. 3) Windows nor MSDOS should NOT be anywhere on the list(although I understand your reasons for win2000,win95,MSDOS) - for the following reasons. These operating systems were forced on to the market with antitrust tactics. Microsoft lost a Federal Investigation, and were found guilty of Antitrust on many accounts. These products, like windows, msdos, replaced other companies SUPERIOR(objectively and documented superior) products. Thus these products did NOT propel the market but rather "rode the wave" the computer revolution and as imposters. Imagine, what MP/M GEM would have been developed into, taking into account it was already 10 years ahead of Mac and Windows in 1985!! Image what Amiga OS what have become,etc.. We were handed inferior products, while superior products were taken away from us. The computer revolution could have been so much more! 4) And youu really cannot mention Linux without giving most credit to GNU. Even though GNU can be replaced nowadays, in the early 90's GNU was the only thing that actually made Linux a usuable "operating system".
I don't think GNU was good enough to make Linux "usable" but my theory is that gcc meant that C applications could be ported to Linux, and given that AT&T decided to sue BSDi, a lot of people who had BSD derived Unix variants (e.g. Silicon Graphics) who also had lots of clients in the DOD/military collectively lost their it.sh thinking that they would have to ditch their operating systems. Thankfully the AT&T vs BSDi lawsuit was settled, in BSDi's favor. BSDi changed a handful of things, kept shipping code, and these days is known as iXSystems.
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I'm already subscribed to NordVPN and they seem good as well for using my Phone in Public Wifi areas that doesnae invade my data as well for Kodi from LibreElec.
nordvpn is NOT highly recommended, at least not by anybody but themselves..
they are shady as hell and have been hacked several times.
What would a VPN help in security? It is just moving your end-point from ISP to another commercial company .. who can then see all your traffic
Jeez more Nord
I don't think I've ever subscribed for a channel introducing poor adds in THE MIDDLE of a video. So sorry but. I'm going away.
Did you know that "Ubuntu" is an ancient African word that translates as "I can't configure Debian".
😂 😂 😂 😂 😂 lol... Dead 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Debian fan boy booooo🤭
I thought "Ubuntu" meant "abuse sudo"?
@@SakuraNyan there's a one liner for that: sudo passwd root 🤣
well i use ubuntu bedrock linux
I'm just surprised OS/2 Warp didn't even place.
I bought it the day Win95 came out. It looked pretty but was a kludge
@@ShamrockParticle I loved OS/2 Warp. Still have the last BETA that came out in a fancy binder. I have a 20 year old computer that is still running the last Beta. Too bad IBM didn't release a Y2K fix for it. A job that had on 1/1/2000 had a data center of 250 with one OS/2 Warp server and it was the only server that was reporting the wrong date. We manually set the date for the first year 1900's that matched the year 2000 so that the day of the week was right and the 2 programs that was running only used the day of the week, day of month and the month were correct. Hard coded the year.
I used it too.
Excellent, and my obsession for 6 months or so.
But it live and died. It failed to get enough traction to fight Windows.
It certainly would deserve to be an "honourable mention".
OS2 was a preemptive multi tasking os when Windows was 3.1! I remember running Windows 3.1 in a window!
@@theursulus
Yes! It was great. And it did proper folder windows too. Better in every way.
But then I ended up running most things in Windows 3 mode, because that was the software I need to run.
So... I went back to Windows because that's better than Window Emulation.
Absolutely spot on with Linux at number 1. Just imagine where we would be if Linux never was. It's played a massive part in the evoloution of the IT world.
The world would not be much different, with BSD in the first place instead.
I think we'd be vastly better off had Linux never been. What Linux managed to do, because it was free, was kill innovation in the OS space. There used to be loads of options as to which OS to use, but then Linux came along and demonstrated that "cheap and good enough" beats "paid for and good" and so it is.
@@PaulMJohnson Pretty sure that's not the case. Plenty of OSes were bought by other companies, incorporated some elements into their own OSes or just left to die.
We would still use Os/2 whenever we went for cash and had to use an ATM. 😁
@@PaulMJohnson yeah, it's hard to compete with free. ;)
That AmigaOS file type concept is just mind blowing to me. Absolute black magic how any program can open a new file type just by registering it.
Interesting for sure, but how does the Amiga text editor open a .png file? Render as ASCII art?
@@bobmcbob4399 when you drag a png into notepad it shows the raw data, probably similar?
@@bobmcbob4399 Well, the system is fairly sophisticated; there are datatypes for datatypes. In this case there is picture.datatype which is referenced by png.datatype; the DT aware but graphically incapable text editor checks the file type, sees that the file uses a class of datatype it doesn't support, throws an error, and continues doing it's assigned task. Note that this is WAY simplified. 👍😀
😎
I'm a little late to the game here, but...
Every file has some sort of identifier in it that indicates what it is. The OS reads the identifier, and searches a list of file identifier types to find that identifier. If it finds it, there is a corresponding entry that indicates the correct kind of application to use for that type of file. To "register" the file type just means adding that identifier to the list and a corresponding entry that indicates what kind of application to use for that type of file. If a file is a png, gif, tiff, jpg, etc, the OS will read that the appropriate application for these are image viewers and image editors. Other file types will be set to open with applications appropriate for their particular file type as well.
The Amiga was definitely ahead its time with this and many other things. With much greater color depth, full multitasking, full multimedia with both audio and video capabilities on an 8 MHz cpu, and more that Window and Mac couldn't do on a 500MHz machine without expensive extra hardware.
@@haplozetetic9519 The Amiga sounds like an incredible piece of computing history that I wish I got to experience. Hard to believe something with specifications like that could do so much!
PC/GEOS was the most impressive OS technical achievement, IMO. It was a pre-emptive multithreaded multitasking OS that ran on 8088 interrupt codes! It ran OK on an 8088, ran well on an 8086, and was blazing fast on a 286. Nothing else has got anything close to that much oomph out of silicon that inexpensive.
Good list but os/2 I think deserves a place. OS/2 warp was great
os2 way underrated absolutely. i ran a bbs on a 386 and 8g RAM, with windows in a box, and gamed.
It wasn't until Win 7 that Windows caught up. 10+ years later. Anyone who ran Warp 3 through Warp 4 spent half their time trying to figure out why everyone else WASN'T. I still don't get it.
I was a little surprised it wasn't on the list, too.
I would even put OS/2 2.0 in the list as the first version of OS/2 that was actually good. But the problem was that OS/2 was underrated by IBM itself. Remember that this was the time when they had Louis Gerstner (that they got from RJR Nabisco, of all places), who said "the last thing IBM needs right now is a vision", as chairman and CEO. IBM didn't even bundle OS/2 with many of their computers of the time, instead bundling them with MS-DOS. Naturally, most other PC makers did the same or even worse. So the downfall of OS/2 was sad but not surprising.
It just never achieved sufficient market share. The turf war between IBM and MS was the main reason it did not thrive. From everything I have heard it was fantastic. Window 3.1 was a kludge, but that is what most people got instead.
My first home pc was an Amiga 500 I bought at the Post Exchange when I was in the Army way back in 1988. I still remember going to shareware parties with a stack of 3.5" disks. I miss it.
Similar thing, i miss those days.
The first time I heard a sound card was in a PX at Fort Shafter. I never heard high quality orchestral music or a human voice from a computer before. It was really amazing.
I remember doing something similar only it was a Tandy 1000TX, 5 1/4" & 3.5" disks (no HDD) ... I still have that machine along with a TI-99/A, both in working order. I miss those days with friends.
I bought my first computer in 85 in the Navy Exchange, a C128, (I was "One Upping" my older brother who was also in the Navy with a C64), it was life changing! A few years later I got my first Credit Card.... I melted it to buy an A2000. The Amiga is always my favorite, it was pure magic. We saw what a computer could do and knew it was only going to get better! Now days, everyone has a computer or two, (Game Consoles and Cell Phone are computers too), they grew up with them so they think of them more like a home appliance. Yes, I bought hundreds of blank 5.25 in floppies, I did pirate on the C64/128 but not on the Amiga.
You forgot about OS/2... Literally everyone hosting a mailbox ran it, due to multitasking done right.
...heck, you could even play Mahjong while its still being installed. It was pretty amazing.
Also, "DR/Novell DOS". *cough* If MS-DOS 5 makes the list, DR definitely deserves a spot too.
Which you can also do on a Linux-based OS.
@@jrgenjohansen2799 but not at the time OS/2 was around. People were then still struggling to get a GUI to work properly.
@@acalthu - exactly. I ran OS/2 Warp and I remember being able to format Drive A & B at the same time as I ran a check on Drive C, with only the one IO card. Ten diskettes to install...first O/S I bought 😆
In a fair world, OS/2 would have been where Windows is now. OS/2 Warp 3 and 4 totally destroyed Windows 95/NT in terms of multitasking, speed and stability, not to mention being truly object oriented and having a far superior file system (HPFS). But, 1. IBM couldn't market their way out of a wet paper bag, and lacked the foresight that by 2000 most homes would have a computer. They marketed poorly, and mostly to a limited audience. True to their name I suppose, International Business Machines. 2. The bugs that were in OS/2, IBM's hands were tied to fix because of legal rights to portions of the code due to the partnership with Microsoft. Ironically a good portion of the bugs in the system were Microsoft contributions. I'm not sure how common knowledge it is, but what Microsoft released as Windows 3.0 was essentially a reworked version of what was supposed to be released as OS/2 1.3 (I think I have the version numbers right, it's been awhile).
@@jeremyworkman5104 You are correct, sir. I'm sad they forgot these.
I personally loved Windows 7. It was fast and simple to learn.
Win7 is my favorite Windows and I started with Windows 3.1. Amiga OS is another as it was what I used before Windows 3.1.
Windows 7 is hands down the best looking OS of all time
XP
Welcoming os
Win xp and win 7 were windows golden age. Windows xp is my windows 7 in terms of nostalgia
I am still using Windows 7, why would you stop?
2:05 GEOS
3:27 CP/M
5:20 Windows 2000
7:01 BeOS
9:32 MS-DOS
11:10 Windows 95
12:55 OS X Tiger
14:41 Amiga OS
17:01 NeXTSTEP
21:01 Linux
First thank you!!!
Secondly where the f**k is Solaris 11.4 ???!!
Surprised I've got so little to gripe about here. OS X Snow Leopard was far and away the best version of OS X, though. WIn 95 only deserves to be on the list because it was the first version of Windows not to suck balls.
@@rockets4kids but but what about Solaris?
@@MrLondonGo What about SunOS 4.1.4, which everyone used until the SVR4 system stabilized? What about Minix? For without Minix there likely would have been no Linux. Which reminds me, without Gnu Hurd there wouldn't have been all of the userspace Unix tools which also went into Linux. (Gnu Hurd was on the list of worst operating systems.)
It's just so hard to get behind Solaris in the Oracle era. DTrace and ZFS are awesome, but they can be had elsewhere these days.
@@rockets4kids yeah .. Solaris 2.5.1 /x86 version + Developmet kit . '95 as I remember , that was something . plus QNX and yes , OS2 at the same time on IBM PS2 ( remember running Delphi 1 on OS2 with windows 3.11 in the window , been more stable than running native on 3.11 )
My all time favourite was Windows 7. It was a proper Desktop OS, looked incredibly pretty, was absolutely stable and rock solid. Win 7 was the only OS that I installed when it came out in 2009 and never had to reinstall once in over 7 years of usage, including exchanging hardware. I then switched to Win 10 which has it's upsides but is a horrible flat and ugly half-mobile mess that likes killing the whole system with an update.
Loved Windows 7, it was the best user experience out of all the ones I ever had to work with.
I still run 7 on an Intel i3-based laptop for web browsing and file management.. solid as a rock. Boots quick even off an old hard drive, and like you I've never had to re-install the OS.
@@QuadTubeChannel Same here, but of SSD and I use linux to manage Win7 image backups
I missed out on Windows 7, because the first internet connected device I owned was a 2nd hand laptop that came with Windows Vista and I hated it so much, I ended up installing Ubuntu on it and that improved my user experience so much I never went back to using Windows.
At the time I had very little experience of using computers in any form and I believe this decision to switch to a Linux based OS so early on was critical to me eventually going on to learn how to build and publish websites including server management.
Same here ... my favorite is Win7 for it's stability
I still have a laptop running Win 7. It regularly had uptimes in the range of "a couple of months to a year". Stable as a rock indeed.
My newish laptop runs Win 10 which is fine, but it has a nasty habit of rebooting every now and then when Im not around. Taking a bunch of unsaved changes to documents and the like with it. Plus rebooting it is a pain since there is always a hard to skip tutorial or some attempt to get me to switch to Win 11.
I find it increadible how they were able to make a GUI run on the C64. That is real developers. Now with resource opulence, they can created bloated ineffcicient code and get away with it!
My first contact with "computers" was a Microsoft MSX, an 8 bit computer like the C64 which booted into basic and had a cassette tape recorder for storing programs. Good old days.
absolutely, it's the main reason why I stopped using Windows10. Horribly bloated with a huge amount of processes running in the background and slowing down a machine with 16gb of RAM. Using Pop! OS ever since.
@@frankov_83 Is it possible to use this type if trick like they did to create a web browser for instance that would run well on very old hardware and yet allow internet usage somehow modern?
@@thelovertunisia not sure, but that's the thing, Windows runs badly on modern, very capable hardware too :D
@@frankov_83 I have a pentium 3 with 256 mb of ram and I have slacko puppy with palemoon on it works ok.
Having lived through the computer era I've used most of these operating systems. Today my daily driver is Linux so am quite happy with your rating.
AMEN!!!
Back in the Motorola M6809 era I wrote my own (limited) OS, including word processor and simple database for my hand-soldered machine. These were good ol'e times. Today for me nothing else counts but Linux, partly due the possibility to change parts of it on the source code level.
@@LawsForever I had a Color Computer that I eventually ran OS/9 on and got actual multi-user/multi-processing. I had no real reason or application other than it was cool to log in from a terminal while being logged in on the console.
@@joegee2815 You mean OS/9 by Microware? Amazing to hear from someone else's experiences. Ever heard of EFFO (European Forum for OS/9) back in the 80ties (I think)? I was one of their trimestrial newspaper's authors. Among other things I published drivers and modules I wrote for OS/9 in C and Motorola assembler. That was (or is?) a really powerful real time OS!
@@LawsForever Yep, that's the one, at the time I was working at Bellcore (previously Bell Labs) and was learning Unix. The idea of having a modern OS like Unix at home was appealing to me. I was going to attach modems and start up a timeshare BBS but had to move to a new place and the project got scuttled forever apparently...
I loved the Windows 2000 OS. It brought back “Append” which had been ditched by Windows 95 and 98. I remember Windows 95 breaking my Sort Program, written using the Compact Memory Model in Borland Turbo C. I had to rewrite it using the small memory model, which required a lot more temporary files. I think Microsoft peaked with MSDOS 6.22
I agree & have an old Compaq M700 with extra HDD's for Win95, Win98SE & Win2k... also a Tandy 1000TX running DOS 6.22 & Windows 3.1
I have a soft spot in my heart for CP/M. I started my programming career in early 80's writing insurance policy calculation programs for independent insurance agencies using CP/M in BASIC on early PCs such as Xerox, TRS80, and the IBM PC. I still have a hardback book from that era with dust cover, a classic which apparently is fetching a nice price on the collectibles market, I recently did a search as we were downsizing our library of thousands of books by more than 60%. I decided to keep it for now. Fond memories of my entrance into a career in programming and IT.
cp/m was pretty good, I also used Concurrent CP/M which allowed 4 virtual work spaces so you could run edit and compile code in three separate windows . Was a touch slow but certainly my long term favourite.
Wow, didn't know about the datatypes feature of the Amiga operating system. That is seriously powerful and ahead of its time...
It was a amazing OS for it's time.
The datatypes feature was one of the reasons why I used my A1200 until 2005. Because I had to professionally juggle with so many different types of files, and the file format converters available for Windows and MacOS that could convert the various files were costly and unreliable, whilst on the Amiga you could load everything ( aside of Cheesecakes ) and then export it to the format you needed.
Right away, no hassle.
Also, the Amiga OS 3.1 UI was smoother and more responsive on a 25/50MHz MC68040 machine than Windows 98 on a 366MHz Pentium 2 and about equal to XP on a 600MHz P3.
Data Types seemed more powerful and more featured than MIME Types, which seemed like a bad imitation of a good idea better implemented on the Amiga than the WWW.
For me, if I would do a "top X" operating systems I would do two lists, one for operating systems which have historical value and made things that moved the industry forward and one list for the operating systems that I actually like (to use today or have used earlier). It feels very strange to compile a list where the different systems are based on different values.
That is a very rounded opinion to have. However the OP clearly stated those are his personal favorites and nothing more. Nevertheless a video based on your suggestion would be neat. How about it Dan?
Linux is the best overall because of availability. The one that even beats Linux is QNX. It is everywhere, hidden, reliable even runs heart machines, airplanes. If your life depends on it... use QNX.
@@gyrcom Yes QNX is great. It's also an RTOS. No quite the same things as a general purpose OS. I once worked on project to migrate Wind River to QNX. WR was faster but terrible driver support at the time. QNX with Photon micro GUI was very fast and slick.
Finally Linux getting the love it deserves - I agree fully with it being number 1. I have been using it as my main OS since 1996 (back before it was easy to use) and only Windows 2000 challenged it for reliability. The only OS I see missing is Solaris. That short lived OS was a game changer for graphic design and for $10000 you would get the OS and then a free Solaris box, But it never really made it into the personal operating space until the end so I guess I can understand its absence. Good list.
Irix was brilliant. But not mainstream and definitely not cheap (hardware+OS). But if you got to make Jurassic Park in 1992, it was your go-to! Digital UNIX (for DEC) was shite.
Yeah I think the cheapest of the UNIX workstations I ever personally saw was an SGI O2, they had gotten it down to like $5,000. But by then a PC with a 3D accelerator was under $2,000, and of course a few years after that, you had 3DFX, ATI, and Nvidia all producing nice 3D accelerators for a few hundred bucks that you could drop into pretty much any PC. That really killed off SGI's lower-end sales entirely.
Linux didn't help things at all in that regard -- the HP PA-RISC and DEC Alpha were taking turns at being the fastest machines on the planet, and they were like 3-5x the speed of a Intel (or AMD) CPU -- but at over 10x the cost. So already in the late 1990s when I was in college, the computer science lab had HP PA-RISC UNIX workstations (about 1/3rd computers and 2/3rds x terminals, which HP used the same chassis for so you couldn't tell which you were sitting at unless you looked at the model number.) And SGIs. But they were replacing these with PCs with Linux as time went on, a healthy PA-RISC had 3-5x the performance but at 10-15x the cost, and we were learning programming on these systems, not doing heavy-duty engineering and numerical processing, so the extra speed was not useful for what the comp sci department used them for.
@@MTonki3369I had a buddy in high school whose rich nerdy dad ran Irix.
At least you gave a shout-out to DEC's VAX. Loved that baby. Its all in the past now but still gives me good vibes when I think about it.
I have to agree and expected a DEC product to be in the list. At the risk of dating myself I used micro-rsx on a pdp11 and saw what i thought were innovative features. Then VMS on an alpha lol was awesome. If i had an error it would unwind the stack and show me the problem quickly.
Windows95 was a huge step up from 3.1, it was nice not having to deal with IRQs, DMA and memory addresses. I still have a warm place in my heart for DOS, I run 3.3 on my AT and 6.2 on a few other machines. Your list was very good
Windows 95 had a crippled serial ports to slow Netscape but also anything else - i would say it was therefore a junk os.
I moved from Windows 3.11 straight to Linux. I avoided all later Windows releases.
IRQs and DMA was really ni different with windows 95 than before it the thing is hardware designs evolved at the same time, making it possible for software to do more to configure the interrupts and memory addressesing instead of making it fully manual by the user.
Windows 95 - Windows ME were all still just additional software running on top is DOS. DOS was more obscured and crippled in ME, but still there.
Config.sys and autorun.bat where still very important and in place for many years.
Wonderful video Dan, and actually pretty close to the mark.
OS/2 was actually a really great OS that was so far ahead of MS DOS and Windows 2.x and 3.x. it took advantage of the 286 chip and 386 chip, where DOS just kind of tacked on lame support for it.
It is also amazing still to see Mac OS X, Windows 95 and Be OS finally catch up to what we were doing on out Amiga's 10 years earlier...
We used OS/2 Warp for a Windows dial-up remote access server. Each user had their own Windows 3.11 environment in a VM. That OS was rock solid and hardly ever crashed!
For me Linux is the best! However I did miss Windows for Workgroups 3.11, the system that for the first time combined networking, internet browsing with cooperative multi tasking and a nice proven GUI. Basically the hyped Windows 95 only added 32-bits and the start button to that :) Real multi tasking (preemptive) was available for NT based systems only. For most home users real multitasking only has been introduced with Windows XP. Based on technical quality and innovation and not looks, I promote Windows for Workgroups 3.11 (networking) and Windows XP (its long life 12.5 years). Microsoft had to force users to leave Windows XP.
Absolutely loved the Commodore 64 t-shirt. Learned assembly on it. Including raster interrupts. Also built my own line drawing and region fill routines around age 16. My students today can't believe that the total system memory available was sometimes less than the memory needed to store the app icon image of today's computers.
I always tell people that I did more on that 64k of RAM than I ever had on 32gigs of RAM. The Commodore 64 encouraged people to explore and experiment. I didn't develop any interesting software, but I did write some simple programs and became a MODEM master.
I wrote a BASIC expansion for the Commodore 64. You could really get a lot in 8KB.
win2k is definitely a worthy achievement. I had my box running with plenty of bells and whistles at 38mb RAM occupied, thanks in part to using an alt shell and going through BlackViper's services list. The individual has lists of services that are safe to have set to off or by request instead of how they typically end up being set, freeing up tens of MB in RAM.
I do that to my windows 10 laptop and my windows 11 laptop , windows runs so much faster
I have been in the computer field as a hobbyist since I started as a teenager in 1977 (I did three years college SC course in the mid 1990s and computer electronics courses in 2000-2001) . This is by far one of the best 10 ten lists of best OSs I have ever seen. You're on point with what each one has contributed to the industry we know today.
Now I have fun learning Blender and 3D modeling and animation and video editing with DaVinci Resolve, along with some simple Linux script writing.
I worked at Be for a spell, nice coverage of it. Those office shots brought some nostalgia!
Windows 95 - Start me up. I noticed at the time that they omitted the line "you make a grown man cry" from their advertising.
Weird Al Windows 95 Sucks ua-cam.com/video/Nwb74UQPK3s/v-deo.html
Actually, Windows 95 went on to be a truly stable, full-featured, operating system. I stuck with Windows 95 for quite some time, avoiding Vista and similar.
It was Win95 that converted me to Linux. My home PC was running Windows 3.1 and when I connected to the Internet and started having difficulty with filenames > 8.3, I figured I had to upgrade and I sure wasn't paying $$$ for the crashing-several-times-a-day nightmare (W95) that I was used to at my work. So I bought a Red Hat CD (not having a clue about Linux) and never looked back...
LOL
I always wondered, why they did not use Iron Maiden's song "Moonchild" for any Windows 7 ad, which starts like "Seven deadly sins, seven ways to win, seven holy paths to hell and your trip begins". Fits perfectly.
@@amp2amp800 Not Al. The correct title is "Bought It Up", by Bob Rivers.
One of my favorite things about BeOS was install time. I was doing deskside support at the time, having to do a lot of Windows installs, which always took forever and required a lot of babysitting. BeOS was up and fully functional in 15 minutes every time, even if I was installing a multi boot system. Just so much better on the same hardware.
I would say xp pro was the best since it could do everything for the time and a big step from 9x and 2000. Easy to network and best gui.
Xp wireless networking was terrible till service pack 2.
Certainly the best look 'n feel of any version of Windows, IMO. Which is why my Debian is configured to look broadly similar to XP (not 'cos I love XP specifically, just 'cos I like that look).
@@cr10001 XP was able to run anything. So many people became linux users specifically because XP EOL.
@@abhabh6896 you're right win7 was no replacement. but linux was not mature enough. because the poor acpi support it wasn't good for laptops: they were overheating because the cpu fans didn't work properly, which was ignored for years.
@@bernds1488 I loved win7 and became linux user at its eol but many people disliked it for...whatever reason.
Thumbs up for putting AmigaOS so high in the list. That put a smile on my face. :)
Even you listing the features it had in 1985 just gave me goosebumps. It was the first OS I had ever experienced and my most satisfying one to use. Too bad they were "run" by Commodore...
Host:"You will disagree with this video"
Me:"that means he probably wont even mention Linux"
Host:"Linux is number 1!"
Me: 😲
i run Pop!_OS it is Ubuntu based love Linux
@@linuxstreamer8910 arch xd
@@linuxstreamer8910 I use Arch, btw.
I agree with Linux for #1. But I wish that (in addition to OS/2) the list also included FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD.
@@Lucius_Chiaraviglio Yeah the BSDs are great.
OS/2 should have been on the list.
+1 on this! OS/2 was my daily driver for quite a while between Amiga and when MS and Windows finally got their shit together.
Love the hoodie! Being a former Commodore HW engineer during the A3000 years, you suckered me in. LOL.
I loved the hw in Amiga, the GUI
And not the least the multi tasking operating system
That MSDOS commercial was so old quality it looked like Tom Kenny floated into the room and I imagined his voice trying to sing a song about MSDOS
Understand it's not normally considered a Desktop OS but I really enjoyed Solaris, both on 86 and Sparc. Rock solid which is my most important criteria. I used to look after a Uni cluster of the machines and they just did the job. Sun Microsystems RIP :-(
I think you left out that Amiga OS had its own version of plug-and-play years before Bill gates announced it like it was something new. The AmigaOS is my favorite operating system as well. I have an old Amiga 3000 Tower and several 4000s still, and they are much more fun to use then even my Macintosh computers.
ProDOS (1983) had Plug-n-Play before AmigaOS (1985). Software would scan the first few bytes of firmware to determine what slot the card was in.
Technically, the Apple 2 had the first version with the Disk Drive firmware being slot agnostic.
But yeah MS was always ripping off others.
My favorite OS of all time is Windows XP, specifically service pack 2 and later. Back when it was supported, it was reliable and just worked. It wasn't bloated and you actually had much more customization options, compared to newer Windows versions. It was also the first operating system I used and it took a while before I moved to Windows 7 in 2014 (yes, I skipped Vista, don't hate)
Vista was just horrible..
In my opinion the biggest drawback to XP was the lack of proper 64-bit driver and software support. The 64-bit edition just wasn't fleshed out.
Edit: I'm sorry of course I meant Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, NOT 64-bit edition (which was exclusive to IA64)
@@neoqueto That's when MS decided to dump that abomination called Vista upon the world...
Vista was good. If you had the hardware for it to run well. Same story with WinME. You had to have powerfull hardware, that was build for it. WinXP was ok. Win7 was just created for the user, with the help of the user. Hence 7 being better than XP. However. I too have switched to Linux exclusively. I tested tons of Linux distro's between 1995 and 2016. I finally decided to switch fully in 2016, because they had announced Win7 end of life. Actually I had the idea for a year or something. Because of that EOL announcement. I must have had like 50 different flavour tested through the years. Personally I am a Debian guy. I just want my Linux to be Debian or Debian based. Then I am good and happy enough.
@@brostenen In fact, I had a custom PC on which the only pre-NT Windows that would be stable (actually *very* stable) was WinME. And then along came XP, which was excellent.
I literally only disagree with some of the ordering. This list rounds out my exact feelings on operating systems across the board objectively. Now, I have my "guilty pleasure" OSes. I know I shouldn't like Windows Me. Nostalgia is a hell of a thing though. I remember sitting with my grandfather, on Black Friday, eagerly awaiting the install to complete, just to then spend a total of seven hours and hundreds of dollars on phone support to get it up and running. I think I primarily have Me to thank for me being in the IT support industry, because I remember the absolute nightmare we went through, and never wanted anyone else to go through that. That's why I love it.
I really like Windows Me too. There are dozens of us.
So cool to have BeOS on the list! Such a totally AMAZING system. Supported petabyte file storage. I demo'ed it for my mom (a developer) on a PII-266, running 9 simultaneous AVI files with audio, no glitches, no drops, flawless (Windows on that same PC (setup as dual-boot), couldn't run 2 without dropouts). Really hoped it would go somewhere (I still have my copy), I actually ran my personal website on it for a few years off a Pentium MMX 166 NEC Laptop. I think besides the business decisions, one other issue against it, was it was very "single-user" oriented when both Mac and Windows were clearly moving into networked, centralized user managed compatible environments. I know BeOS could sort of manage things in that area, but it was more of an after-thought on the last boxed copy of BeOS, more of a super-powered workstation type OS for completing powerful projects for a given user, IMO. Still was so slick.
I love the hoodie, Dan! That takes me back to my youth. The C64 was big when I was just going into middle-school. We used those in 6th grade. Crazy.
No TempleOS on the list? Unsubbed lol
LOL
Templeos is crap I hope you are kidding
@@danielhilton7623 TempleOS requires its users to poses Divine Intellect which I am sure you don't.
@@danielhilton7623 you must be a CIA agent.
@@danielhilton7623 No matter how much you hate it, you have to appreciate that a single man built it all by himself: the kernel, the games, the programming language, etc
OS/2 was my first full preemptive multitasking OS, so it had a special place in my heart. Such a difference from Windows95 where basically { halt; jmp $-1 } was all you needed to 99% hang the OS. But I never got a hang of which OS/2 settings interacted with DOS performance, so I reverted back to Windows 95 to make my BBS users happy.
Windows 2000 was the first Windows OS that seemed to truly be able to multitask for real and have a good user interface, which probably killed off OS/2. And better application compatibility. So since Windows 2000 I’ve considered windows pretty mature.
you could crash Windows 9x by typing for example c:\con\con in a run windows or DOS prompt.
I don't have a favorite OS I happen to have an appreciation for many and so I continue to used old and new operating systems.
Excellent voice and cadence for narrating a Y-T Vid , and a fairly light hearted take on the subject, with virtually no hint of pretentiousness whatsoever . WELL done ! A more professional approach to screen presence might _help_ , but overall the PRESENTATION is _excellent_ .
Why the hell is't windows xp included in this video?? It was the best operating system of all times!
My favorite OS of all time as got to be Windows XP of all the windows operating systems I started with the Amiga OS as my first.
XP used the basis of 2k with some upgrades to the ui to make it more end user friendly and much cheaper ($300 for a win2k professional license, vs $99 for an upgrade license to xp). The big milestone was Win 2k which made the whole system so much more stable compared to the old windows versions that were still based on ms dos.
@@Psi-Storm "All roads lead to Cairo" was the quote I remember and Cairo was the universal kernal for all Windows PCs. DOS, 3.1, W95, W98, WME on one stream and the various iterations of WNT followed by W2000 on the other. XP was when they came together and the one I stuck with for the longest time.
Windows 2000 = Windows 5.0 while Windows XP = Windows 5.1 and it is a further development and multiple versions of Windows 9x not being seperately listed. I truly loved Windows 2000 and I used it the longest ever. But in the early beginnings it was difficult because of lacking device drivers (developers could no longer do their dirty tricks under water). In the Final service pack 2000 was virtually the same as the back then XP. For me missing in this list is Android. The importance being that IT truly unfolded portable computing and most users no longer need a pc at home any more.
2k is for me.
I agree with XP, not because it was innovative, but because it ironed the bugs out of Win 2000. Finally, PnP worked reliably. BSOD almost never occurs. XP is such a pleasure to use, that most customers refused to "upgrade" until Microsoft provided a cheap slide across to Win 8 (and then a free slide to Win 10). Everything from Win 7 has been a downgrade. Win 10 is bloated like Vista was - old laptops are slowed to a crawl.
I still keep a Win XP desktop system handy for using my old HP scanner, because HP refused to provide any updated drivers.
Ok, that data type feature of amiga os is possibly the most fascinating and useful feature I've ever heard of in my life, and I'm disappointed that Windows doesn't have a similar feature built in. Windows has something similar, kind of. You can install codes to allow playback of new video and audio files, but that only works for certain container formats.
I had forgotten how advanced AMIGA OS was back in the da. NeXT is impressive as well but I never knew a lot about that one.
wow, didnt know amiga was so advanced. The file compatibility thing is a struggle, even today. How many things still can't display .png!
My favorite thing about Amiga OS was that if it detected the system was going to crash, it would be kind enough to let you know to save your work first. How the hell it did that, I don't know, but I've always been miffed that Windows never did that.
@@captbloodbeard Amiga has had the "Guru Meditation" that tells you what had happen. So when I'm programming in Asembler, I alwasy know what had happen. I loved programming the 68000 processor. It was easy to do. The 86x processors are bullshit.
My top 15:
15. Commodore 64
14. Windows 1995
13. Windows 4
12. Windows 1998
11. Windows 2000
10. Windows Millennium Edition
9. Windows XP
8. Windows Vista
7. Windows 7
6. Windows 8
5. Windows 10
4. Solaris
3. Linux
2. Operating System X
1. Windows 11
Before viewing it I was thinking that it would be mission impossible to make such a list and properly sustain it with real content, but you did... bravo!
I think your list is pretty accurate - I especially agree with you about Amiga OS being miles ahead of the competition with preemptive multitasking... such a pitty Commodore management at the time couldn't organise a pissup at a brewery.
Commodore USA was the one who couldn't get anything right, and Europe was the one who ran the company well. If Commodore Europe were the ones in charge, Commodore might still be around today, but they were not. I still like the story that Commodore brass said at the CES or some other show that the 128 was going to have a memory expansion unit, without telling the Engineers who worked at Commodore about the announcement. They found out at the same time as the public did.
@@quantumleaper Yes! Sorry - you are absolutely correct.
I'd say, very difficult to argue with the reach, the depth, the diversity, of Linux. Most certainly #1.
GNU/Linux*
Very easy to argue against it. At the beginning he says he focuses on personal computer operating systems. Linux is nowhere on PCs and never has been.
@@jeremypnet He says "my personal favourite operating systems" easy mistake to make.
@@TomChaton he definitely limits the scope to Personal computers generally.
@@jeremypnet Shut the fuck up. I run gnu/linux on my pc and it's good. In fact, lots of people run gnu/linux on their pcs. Gnu/linux IS on pcs and it wouldn't take long to search for desktop linux-based oses.
The greatness of Linux is that it has changed the culture of computing from all perspectives.
But,to be fair, we have to give a very big chuck of the credit to the founder of GNU project, namely Richard M. Stallman
@Tone. Android is a non GNU Linux. So no, GNU/Linux is not correct neither.
Linux killed so many brilliant OS.
I'm surprised you didn't include Windows XP, which I think was the most robust version of Windows. It was the only Windows version that gave non-admin users the ability to remap the keyboard. If that feature had survived into Windows Vista, 7, 8 and 10, people in restricted jobs that don't allow admin access or personal software like AutoHotKey would be able to type on the keyboard layout of their choice. Of course, you can do the same thing on Linux.
It crashed a lot and had to be fully reinstalled or repaired. After it had been on the system for a while it would slow down by at least 70%. Memory manager could not use more than 3.5gb of ram so on systems with 8gb of ram it would not see it and it would loose stuff in the ram it did not see crashing the system. This is just one of the issues it had of many main crashing very unstable on some systems.
@@WidowUK It was earlier in the evolution of Windows and had a lot of those kinds of problems. It also had very poor security and could be hacked easily. I was talking more about some of its features that unfortunately didn't make it into Windows Vista - 11.
NeXT and Amiga were 10 years ahead of its time, its a tragedy they had lost and MS won setting back technological progress a whole decade back if not more
NT4 deserved a place, the first Windows version that combined stability with a friendly UI.
I recently got NT4 running in VirtualBox and was trying to remember why it didn't replace Win95 for me back in the day. NT4 was a great OS, but then I recalled that it couldn't run games because I think it didn't support DirectX. Couldn't run DOS games at all like, Quake.
But I did just reinstall Win7 on my home server and used Prairie Wind.bmp for the wallpaper :) Brings back great memories of winter 96/97.
@@AeroModuleThe main reason that NT4 didn't run games well, if at all, was that MS were pushing a split between a professional/business operating system and a home/student one. Perhaps the other reason that NT4 wasn't so popular was that it could be a bit tricky to configure. I ran NT4 systems at work, but Win95/98 at home and found both best suited the environment. As the system manager/administrator in a large scientific research organization I had to provide a lot more hands-on support for NT4 and 2000 than for previous OS's - and my users were all PhDs or graduate engineers and scientists. So no dummies.
Allen Jenkins
Yep - it was horrible to configure. It was pretty much under construction, though, and Win95, 98...2000 then XP evolved the GUI features until the point where it was polished.
NT had the stability, but the UI/UX wasn’t quite there yet.
With a lot of effort you could get it running alright. But it remains NEANDERTHAL TECHNOLOGY...
Windows NT was developed by developer that left Digital VMS, and there are jokes about the name selection
what comes after V in VMS -> W
what comes after M in VMS -> N
what comes after S in VMS -> T
what would that be Windows NT
hahaha
Agree on 2. I still use Windows 2000 on a 20-year-old Acer laptop with 128 MRAM. Still fast, but better yet, a simple interface.
No love for Atari TOS / Tramiel Operating System then Dan?
Agreed. Big fan of GEM here!
To many flies and bombs 😄😄
@@judewestburner that was old MacOS.
@@ShamrockParticle quite true
@@londongaz2 I loved GEM. Well, on the Atari ST. DRI's GEM on x86 was so weak in comparison. I'm not sure that was due to DRI not being as clever as Atari Corp's ex-Atari Inc programmers who improved their version of GEM or it being due to the crippling legal settlement DRI signed with Apple.
It's not that i don't agree with your list, more I had never heard of some of those OS until today. Good job in giving a brief rundown on them.
I used to run an independent computer shop in the Midlands and can tell you that you missed one. Sort of.
Twenty odd years ago we would load Win 98 SE then load the Win Me upgrade disc onto our machines. That gave the basic half decent core of Win 98 SE but with the extras of Win Me like System Restore. Worked for us!
"Please say BeOS, please say BeOS, please say BeOS... Yes!!! BeOS!!"
and haiku!
Boy was Apple lucky they didn't buy beos. They ended up with something much better instead.
@@lsorense today isn't April 1st, MacOS X is a souped up FreeBSD with bits of NEXT instead. Which is still good but BeOS as MacOS X would have been truly fantastic.
@@ShamrockParticle having used beos on a bebox quite a bit I was not impressed. Next step is a better os.
I used to run BeOS Central. Those were good times.
Been following for years, glad to see you're finally almost at that 50k mark! Keep up the great work Dan, as a former Amiga owner - I've loved your videos over the years.
You' ve got a great list, if I consider the most influential OS, Bell Labs Unix should be in the list along with Xero Alto Exec.
Absolutely! Unix (still around) is the grandfather of all the -ix and -ux OSs. I used Unix before Windows (and the Xerox Alto) existed. It is extremely clean and compact, designed to run in less than 64KB. That is KB, not MB or GB! And fast on a 1uS cycle minicomputer. Modern software is languid mega-bloatware in comparison.
Ever hear of IBM Z/OS and Z/VM? You know, the operating systems that pioneered just about everything you use today?
@@zf4hp24 I haven't heard much about those and was more a PDP-11 VAX/VMS guys back then ;-)
@@BigMacIIx Not picking on you, Etienne ;^). It's amazing how few folks know anything that predates Steve, Bill and Linus. And the products Xerox PARC produced are still monumental (WYSIWYG, Ethernet, Postscript, Smalltalk). I was lucky to be a Xerox STAR beta tester.
@@zf4hp24 Wow I envy you, I never got the chance to use a Xerox computer. Xerox Parc pretty much "invent" all the tech we still use today, to bad Steves Jobs got away with this ;-)
Once upon a time, a friend of mine came over to show me his Commodore 64 system and the game he was playing. He set it up in my kitchen, booted it up, connected to the floppy disk system, and started the game loading, and we waited, and waited,... After a little bit I said "Hey, let me show you the game I am playing on my Apple II." So we went to the next room, and I booted my Apple II, loaded Autoduel, and demonstrated the game for a little while. Then we went back to the kitchen to check the Commodore: Still booting. Soon after that my friend bought an Apple II and was never sorry about it.
I'll add to the list of people who say that OS/2 should have been on this list. OS/2 ushered in the era of Client-Server software where the desktop PC wasn't used just for word processing and spreadsheets. It allowed businesses to harness their back-end servers and present it in a user-friendly, powerful and stable interface. Many bank machines ran OS/2 as did in-branch banking applications. It allowed Enterprise-grade software applications on a personal computer for the first time - not just sharing files in a workgroup.
11:43 In the 90s CD-ROM can read upside down cd! Lol
That's clearly the localised Australian version of Windows 95
Linux as an OS is too broad that’s like saying Windows is the best operating system
well, just fill in the distro of your choice and there you go ... linux at no. 1
I still have my OS 2 warp.... and still loving it!
My vote for best after nearly 30 years in the computer engineering business: IBM's OS2 and a distance second placer Windows 7.....worse is any version of Linux! Linux takes a computer nerd to use.....sit down the average non technical user and ask them to copy a file from one drive to a different one....good luck!!
I worked in an air force unit that used Windows 3.11 on one of their systems right up till early 2015. It was a stand alone used to run some DAT voice recorders and the only place I could still play Mine Sweeper and Solitaire anywhere on base.
I don't know if I have a top 10 but my favorites are Windows 7 and XP, Mac OS Mojave and Snow Leopard and Linux Mint and Peppermint Linux. Thats just me. Thanks.
I agree with your choice of AmigaOS.
For me the top OS is OS/2 which at the time was leaps and bounds beyond anything available from Microsoft at the time (there was no Linux). Both for development as well as rock solid stability and versatility it was a game changer. With version 3.0 it ran 32-bit applications before Windows NT was available. It's presentqaion manager was a pleasure to develop code for.
The failing grace of OS/2 was the Enterprise-oriented marketing by IBM - something IBM was very strong in. They had no idea how to market their product to the home consumer, while Microsoft had huge experience selling to the home user with it's DOS and Windows 3.x platforms. They managed to out-hype IBM when marketing Windows 95 even though OS/2 was superior to Windows 95 in every way. While IBM was busy courting the banks and industries of the time, Microsoft was busy encouraging developers to create Win-95 applications which left OS/2 with very little commercial software in the various Brick & Mortar stores (internet-based stores didn't exist).
Had IBM been a little more consumer-conscious the OS tapestry would look very different today - but they dropped the ball and Microsoft was swift in picking it up.
The biggest laugh over the whole thing is that the kernel of OS/2 was co-developed between Microsoft and IBM, and was used as the basis of Windows NT. Where they diverged of course is with the GUI system - IBM had Presentation Manager, Microsoft had it Windows.
And I liked "Norton Commander", personally.
I used to use that on my 286. Although, not really an OS as it was more of a file manager on top of MS-DOS. But, you probably knew that and were just being funny.
What LInux needs for it to become more widespread in its adoption is for "the Bourne shell to be given the 'bum's rush', C-Shell to exiled to the C-shore", and the Korn cut, and a replacement that is far more intuitive and free of cryptic mixed case notation, but support all of the ingenious innovations like pipes and filters, as well as rework of utilities like Grep and Awk to reflect the rework. BTW, maybe Microsoft's Powershell could be adapted to be an alternative.
No love for us Tandy kids? The kids whose parents bought a computer for their home office (TRS-80) instead of something the kids would love (Commodore), and the kids just had to learn how to use the business box to pass the time in 1983. I still dream in TRSDOS.
Windows 2000 also introduced Active Directory too.
I was so scared that there wouldn't be Linux in the top 1. Though I could have accepted AmigaOS for Nr.1 as in many ways that's the most impressive OS of it's time. I could still be really happy with it. But nothing beats Linux. I first saw it in 1994 Assembly demo party, couple months after 1.0 release. I remember thinking it looked great, but was really slow. And I thought it has no change of getting anywhere.
I installed 1.0, downloaded it onto floppy disks. It was the Slackware distribution. Was a pain to get the graphics sorted, today it's one of the easiest installs of any operating system out there.
I first started using Linux when it was beta kernels. You'd almost always have to recompile the kernel to support the hardware you had in the machine and that would take a good amount of time.
@@shanehebert396 ugh I don't miss that! Still occasionally have to compile a kernel mod, but mostly they're abstracted away with DKMS doing the hard work.
AmigaOS... Still sad that I had to let it go, kept it until I had to switch to PC in 98.
Although I have worked on ALL of the OSes mentioned(and associated hardware), I purchased the AmigaOS(with Amiga 3000 and 3000T) in 1990 and it will forever be my favorite OS..I still have the working hardware packed somewhere in my garage...unfortunately, it will not survive my next move...
@@khathmandu I had gotten rid of my old, trusty A500 when I moved, but have since bought an A600 and A1200 that I will upgrade and never give away again. Back in the 90s I learned how to program on the Amiga, first in GFA Basic and then in C. The OS was really nice and had pretty cool features for its time.
While not my "favorite" Win 95 was the most influential OS of all time. It was such a huge cultural phenomenon, people were camping outside, the TV adverts were exciting, etc.. Most importantly, it gave us true plug-and-play from any vendor and the Start Menu.
I would say it's unfair to call what MS did to Digital Research as underhanded. Bill Gates himself recommended them to IBM and Gary Kidalls wife refused to sign and NDA with IBM. IBM turned to them because they had little choice at the time and Gates had to find a DOS quickly.
I would add OS/2 Warp to the list. Other than that it’s perfect!!!
Great video!
I am surprised you did not include MVS or IBM VM. They ran the world until 1980s.
I agree Linux as #1. I was a mainframe developer for IBM for 10 yrs and moved over to Linux in the Embedded Systems group. I ran and developed Linux kernels and drivers on Mainframes, Rs6000s, and PowerPC embedded systems, like set-top boxes. It is the most flexible OS I ever saw. I even had my hard drive copied and all my emails impounded because of that stupid SCO law suite. Good times!
MVS and VM/CMS (on the IBM or compatible 370 mainframe) - tops!!!
Number 1: "Let me interject for a moment..."
Instead of Windows 95 you have had OS/2. Windows 95 was just another GUI addon to DOS. OS/2 was a full Object Oriented OS. It used PostScript fonts on the GUI. It supported different fonts in each window, different colours, different backgrounds and it was all drag'n'drop. And it had the option of making a folder a Workplace, which meant that when you opened that folder everything in it opened as well. And when you closed that folder everything that was opened from that folder was closed again. So if you had a folder with software development tools you didn't need to start all the tools separately, you just made the containing folder a Workplace.
The Task list was a bit special too. You could multiselect running tasks with the mouse or the keyboard and terminate them with the 'Delete'-key.
At 1:30, VMS doesn't run on mainframes, MVS does. VMS runs on minicomputers, MVS on IBM mainframes.
Linux is even easier to install than Windows for the most part (such as Mint as he showed in video). No serial number to enter. Surprised to not hear Windows 7 at all
I love AmigaOS4 and architecture different from all other OS! 💪 👍
The fact you can put someone in front of it today, and they can use it without too much difficulty shows you how advanced it was for its time.
Also, speaking as someone who has had to put together a lot of Sysadmin scripts recently, there are times over the last month, i would have Loved to have AmigaDos ASSIGN command's ability to add folders together and remove them again at a whim.
@@spodula probably can do that with union fs in Linux if i remember how it works right
@@spodula assign is a beast of a command and it makes it possible
to check a drives structure on hd before you write it on a media.in reverse you can copy a media to hd and assign the correct drive letters.
in the 90s i copied all ADos floppies to hd and used a script on demand to assign the disks to the folders.
GEOS is amazing, I still remember the first time I loaded it up as a primary school kid in the 80s and thinking it was an amazing operating system, I think I compared it to apples latest GUI at the time and infact it was arguably better than windows of the time and came with its own office apps that rivaled ms Office of the time as well.. all this on a 1mhz 64kb ram system.. infact I find GEOS makes a Commodore 64 just as useable if not more so than a 286 with Windows 3.1 and early MS Office... amazing programming from those at Berkeley software.. As far as my favourite OS nowadays is Windows.. yes I've tried and played with Linux but day to day Windows 10 works for me and they have brought across the best of both worlds now with WSL, windows snap to corners and multiple desktops along with fastboot.. Windows just works and looks nice with the default themes and colours
Geos64 was a great OS but GeoPublish was very show unless you had an REU or RamLink.
As happy as I am that you’ve included CP/M I think you undersell its impact. While it was the BIOS/BDOS architecture which made it possible to port CP/M to so many hardware platforms (prior to CP/M every system required its own custom OS), it also made it possible for the first time to write software that was truly platform agnostic. At a time when Bill Gates was running around custom producing BASIC for each hardware platform, one could now write software to the OS, not the platform.
In short, CP/M birthed the microcomputer software industry. Even as late as 1985 there was still more software for CP/M than for any other operating system ever.
@@jmc000 I don’t know how any of that negates what I said.
*”…a huge pile of messy quirky programs”*
In other words, a software industry in its nascency finding its legs. What else would one expect?
*”(GSX) arrived too late.”*
CP/M ran on 8-bit hardware, which was too primitive to support graphical subsystems of any but the most rudimentary sort. By ‘83 or so Digital Research had early versions of GEM for its 16-bit OSes, but by that time it was, as you said, too late.
One thing worth mentioning is that Linux was first designed as a 'black box' replacement for AT&T's Unix OS
I think your choices were good, Dan.
For me personally:
Best OS: Linux (no specific distro).
Favorite OS: Mac OS X (no specific version).
I always felt that a GUI on top of Unix would make the best OS. Then I discovered MacOS was a GUI on BSD Unix, and I had found my dream OS.
These aren't the best OS's of all time, they are the best "of their time"...
Windows 7 has got too be the most loved OS
I have been using Linux Mint for years, easy to install, easy to convert from a windows user to linux user. No 3 hour time to install and update like older windows, automatic updates in the background, fast running on older machines, ability to run from a USB stick or DVD, many many free applications, and an open office that is compatible with MS office documents, and many more plusses.
What more do you need from an OS.
It is "object-oriented" and not "object-orientated", just like it's "computed" and not "computated". You're welcome.
Those M$ ads proved Jobs' opinion that "they just have no taste."
Mac os whole gui is an example of bad taste.
Gates is a carpetbagger, always was a sneaky pilferer.
(Open)VMS with DCL ;)
Please, no. The worst CLI I have used that professed to be multi-user and multi-tasking. The "spawn" feature was no where nearly as powerful as a csh job control.
Absolutely overpriced trash, which also begat more overpriced trash in the form of Windows NT from the same over privileged dullards.
Here is my additions/modifiacions to your list(although I STILL gave you a massive thumbs up)
1) MP/M coupled with GEM windowing system, in early 1985(almost a year before Windows 1), again by Gary Kildall! A fully preemptive multitaking, fully color windowing system for ther Intel machines. It was a full 10 years ahead of Macintosh and Windows as they did not have preemptive multitasking until 10 years later. What's more GEM was sued into oblivion(where it had to be discontinued from x86), as BOTH Apple and Microsoft saw it as the main and most SERIOUS threat to their dominance
2) DRDOS - Again by Gary Kildall!! Even after Microsoft RIPPED OFF(yes ripped off, and reversedd engineered CP/M) Gary Kildall came back and did DRDOS, which DOMINATED MSDOS and was putting MSDOS out of the market until Microsoft put special code into Windows 3.1 that would detect DRDOS and not start on purpose. The Nostalgia Nerd just a week ago, did a great video on this historic fact.
3) Windows nor MSDOS should NOT be anywhere on the list(although I understand your reasons for win2000,win95,MSDOS) - for the following reasons. These operating systems were forced on to the market with antitrust tactics. Microsoft lost a Federal Investigation, and were found guilty of Antitrust on many accounts. These products, like windows, msdos, replaced other companies SUPERIOR(objectively and documented superior) products. Thus these products did NOT propel the market but rather "rode the wave" the computer revolution and as imposters. Imagine, what MP/M GEM would have been developed into, taking into account it was already 10 years ahead of Mac and Windows in 1985!! Image what Amiga OS what have become,etc.. We were handed inferior products, while superior products were taken away from us. The computer revolution could have been so much more!
4) And youu really cannot mention Linux without giving most credit to GNU. Even though GNU can be replaced nowadays, in the early 90's GNU was the only thing that actually made Linux a usuable "operating system".
I don't think GNU was good enough to make Linux "usable" but my theory is that gcc meant that C applications could be ported to Linux, and given that AT&T decided to sue BSDi, a lot of people who had BSD derived Unix variants (e.g. Silicon Graphics) who also had lots of clients in the DOD/military collectively lost their it.sh thinking that they would have to ditch their operating systems.
Thankfully the AT&T vs BSDi lawsuit was settled, in BSDi's favor. BSDi changed a handful of things, kept shipping code, and these days is known as iXSystems.
@@grey5626 the ONLY thing that made Linux usable was GNU! In fact when Linux started , 98% of what was called "Linux" was in fact GNU!
My heart was broken when BeOS was discontinued but I'm pleased to find that MX Linux meets all my needs.