Gone but not forgotten: 10 operating systems the world left behind

Of the 16 years and nine versions of the System we lived through, we'd say System 7 brings the warmest waves of nostalgia. In the heady dot-com days of the mid '90s, the System was powering a market of clone machines that rapidly expanded the Mac platform. Even though it all ended abruptly when Apple introduced System 8 without renewing the clone builders' contracts, it was an exciting time to be a Mac buff.

The clone era also gave the old System its new name with the release of Version 7.6 -- when you fired up a beige machine called a PowerPC, it helped to see "Mac OS" on the start-up screen to be sure you were dealing with a real Mac.

And, of course, System 7 was the one we were running in 1995 when bumper stickers began appearing with the words "Windows 95 = Mac OS 89" on them.

Mac System 7.0 (credit: GUIdebook).
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Sure, we remember having to rebuild our desktops after our systems froze, which in the System 7 days seemed to happen fairly often. And it was always a bit of a pain trying to share Mac files with other platforms. But those were minor gripes compared to the smooth running of our System of choice -- and the fun of seeing how much rougher everyone else's ride was.

Adios, Amiga

We tend to take multitasking for granted these days, but 20 years ago, it was a Holy Grail for the personal computing platforms. With its DOS foundation, Windows could only wish for it. The Mac and OS/2 fumbled their way around it. You could switch around among programs, but if one of them was actually doing something like downloading a file or recalculating a spreadsheet, it would slow down or stop cold until you turned back to it.

Meanwhile, a four-year-old gaming platform was running rings around them all. The Amiga operating system was so tightly coded that it took the big corporate computers almost a decade to catch up. By then, Amiga computers had been used to generate backgrounds for popular TV shows like SeaQuest, Babylon 5 and Max Headroom, and they were routinely being used for titling and cheesy real-time effects on live network broadcasts.

Naturally, the Amiga's video subsystem and NewTek's Video Toaster hardware deserve much of the credit for the system's popularity among video professionals, but the AmigaOS played a major part. Its multithreaded multitasking made it a natural for heavy graphics work. And it could strut its stuff in as little as 250K of address space.

AmigaOS 3.9 (credit: Amiga Future).
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Small wonder, then, that the Amiga gained a fiercely loyal following. It wasn't until the late 1990s that Windows NT, OS/2 and the Mac OS were able to multitask as well -- and they required vast hardware resources to do it.

Sadly, the technical prowess of the Amiga makers was overwhelmed by cash-flow problems. Beginning in 1994, bankruptcies shunted Amiga through many owners, from Commodore to Escom to Gateway and beyond. Development on AmigaOS 4 continued on the PowerPC platform, but there's currently some kind of dispute over who actually owns the operating system, so it's in a holding pattern.

Nevertheless, Amiga users remain committed to their platform of choice, as shown by the reader responses to our blog asking if anyone still uses AmigaOS -- many say they still use it every day.

We only hope that the world at large hasn't said a final adios to Amiga. Any operating system that could bring us Max Headroom is worth seeing again. And again. And ag-g-g-g-gain.