Operating Systems that Time Forgot

Sometimes, an operating system has served its purpose and it's time to go live on a farm. We take a look at some operating systems that are no longer supported and explore why moving on can sometimes cause a problem.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
tech are you? So chances are if you're listening to
the show, you have a handle on what an operating

(00:25):
system is. Lots of stuff you use as an operating system.
You know, you're a computer, your smartphone, that kind of thing.
An operating system's job is to serve as a sort
of liaison between a device's hardware, you know, the actual
chips and circuits that really make it work, and the
software that runs on top of it and gets those

(00:48):
hardware things to produce output that you actually want. So
operating systems create a starting point or foundation for programmers.
If you design an application meant for a specific operating system,
then that app should work on pretty much any device
that's running that specific operating system sort of. There can

(01:08):
actually be exceptions due to various hardware configurations, but you
get the idea. So, the operating system manages all sorts
of processes like memory management. It also handles data sent
to peripheral devices like displays or printers. Before there were
operating systems. Computers were far more limited and much less efficient.

(01:30):
If you wanted to run a program on an old
computer pre operating system days, first you had to wait
until nothing else was running on that computer. Then you
would have to directly load your program onto the hardware itself.
So the classical version of this was a program designated by,
say a long strip of paper tape that has holes

(01:53):
punched into it in specific places, or a collection of
punch cards, that you would have a program built onto,
and you would have to load this on a computer.
You would also have to preset physical switches on the
computer itself to make certain that the computer began in
the proper state before you would execute your program. If

(02:15):
it wasn't, then you wouldn't get the result you had intended,
and you might not know that until much further down
the line. So very complicated. It was a physical activity,
like it wasn't just click on an icon or type
something into a command line, and it didn't always go smoothly.
Either a mistake in the programming or a bug in

(02:35):
the computer system itself could cause a crash, and that
might require a lot of backtracking to fix it. You
would have to identify what went wrong, and then fix
the problem. This was not always an easy thing to do,
but over time, computer scientists developed programming languages and operating
systems in order to enhance the capabilities of computers and

(02:57):
to make it easier to use them, and eventually there
was an explosion of operating systems. Some were peculiar to
a specific type of computer or a specific line of computers.
While the operating system made things easier for programmers who
were working on those machines, you would still often need
to specialize in certain classes of computer systems because of

(03:20):
differences between them, Like just because you know how to
program for computer system A, doesn't mean you could program
for computer system B, because how fundamentally different they were.
So today I thought I would talk a bit about
a few discontinued operating systems. These were once important, but
they are no longer in widespread use today. Some of

(03:43):
them live on, at least in part. Sometimes they're partly
a legacy element that's still found in modern day operating systems.
Some of them are supported by hobbyists. And I could
go all the way back to the days of like
mainframes and micro computers, but I figured it would be
best to kind of limit ourselves to personal computers and
that sort of thing. Maybe in the future I could

(04:06):
go further back. Also in the future, I might do
things like smartphones, because there's some smartphone operating systems that
are largely discontinued this today, and it would be interesting
to have a conversation about those as well. So it's
just important to remember that, even though I'm just really
talking about PCs in this episode, there have been a
lot of other computer systems that had come and gone

(04:27):
by the time we get up to that. I decided
to start with PCs because I would argue the PC
era is really kind of a transformational point in our world.
You know, miniaturization and mass production had made it possible
to create a computer that could fit on a desktop
and also not cost a bazillion dollars. Although I should

(04:51):
point out early personal computers were still really expensive, like
if you were to compare them to computers today, far
more expensive than what you could get today if you're
just buying like a basic system, a basic system back
in like the late seventies early eighties would cost you
a whole lot more than what you would spend today.
Comparatively speaking, you have to take inflation into account. So

(05:14):
let's start off with a computer system that launched in
nineteen eighty five. So nineteen eighty five was a year
after Apple had introduced the Macintosh computer. There was this
other company called Commodore International. It had originally started out
as this humble business of typewriter repair and reselling. Like

(05:36):
it was a business that bought old, busted up typewriters,
fixed them up, and then sold them again, and eventually
they became more of a computer company. They made the
Commodore sixty four, one of the most famous personal computers
of all time. But in nineteen eighty five they introduced
a new machine that seemed to have a whole lot

(05:57):
of promise, and it was called the Amme. Now the
Amiga didn't actually start off as a Commodore project. A
group of folks who had previously worked for Atari decided
that they would strike out on their own and make
their own company. So they created a business that they
called Hi Toro. I don't know why I gave a

(06:19):
little role in the r there Hi Toro, Hi Dash
t Ro. It was this group that would receive an
acquisition offer from Commodore, and they took it. So the
Amiga measured up well against competing computers at the time,
computers like the Macintosh and the IBM PC. It boasted

(06:41):
superior graphics and sound. The Amiga was incredible in that regard.
Games on the Amiga had a tendency to look and
sound leagues better than similar titles that you could find
on other platforms. Animators and artists were drawn no pun
intended to the Amiga, and it was seen as a

(07:02):
really powerful tool for creative types in the computer space,
very much the way Macintosh computers would be viewed a
decade later, even though creatives also like Macintosh computers even
back in those early days. But when I think about
when I first got into media, anyone I knew who
worked in media and worked with computers, they had a Macintosh.

(07:24):
The mac was seen as the computer for creatives well
in the mid eighties. The goal for Commodore was to
make the Amiga that type of machine, and for a
lot of creatives it was. Now the Amiga operating system
was known as Amiga OS, which makes sense, and it
had some pretty cool features. For one, it could allow
for multitasking. Now not all PCs at this time could multitask.

(07:47):
Most would require the user to quit out of one
application entirely before they could launch another, But the Amiga
OS was different. Now, it wasn't perfect multitasking. The operating
syste would have essentially freeze whichever app you were leaving
in order to dedicate the resources to whichever app you
were switching to. So if you've got app A and

(08:08):
app B and you're leaving app A to go to
app B, app A just goes into kind of hibernation mode.
This method is called preemptive multitasking, and what it means
is that you couldn't start a process, then swap to
another window and expect the process in that first window
to continue while you're doing something else. But still the

(08:30):
ability to go back and forth between tests was a
big advance over many competitors. Like these days, I think
that would I would find that frustrating because sometimes I
will start a process in one window and it'll say
it's going to take like forty five seconds. I'm like,
I don't have time for that. I'm going to go
do something in this other window while that completes, and

(08:50):
computers today can handle that. The Amiga could not. But
you have to remember computational resources were much more limited then, right,
We were still in the very early days of personal computers.
The operating system also included a disc operating system or DOS.
We'll be talking more about the famous MS DOS later

(09:11):
in this episode, but this was called Amiga DOSS naturally,
and this disc operating system gave the user access to
things like the computer's file system and directory, so you
can navigate through that way if you didn't want to
use the graphic User interface or GUI version of the
operating system, and you might normally use Amiga's graphics user

(09:32):
interface to get around, but this would give you a
much more direct and text based method of navigating the machine.
In some ways, it was more efficient and faster if
you knew what you were doing, but if you didn't,
you could just use the GUY to get around using
its various file management systems. Now, one thing a Mega
OS did not have was memory protection. Now, as the

(09:55):
name implies, the purpose of memory protection is to prevent
processing from accessing memory for which they do not have
the permission to access. You know, if you're running a
process and another process says, oh, yeah, that memory over there,
that you're using, I'll have that and takes it. That's
not good. You want to have a system in place
to stop that from happening. Memory protection helps mitigate malicious

(10:19):
processes from causing damage to other processes or even to
the computer system itself. Right, you could program a purposefully
malicious program or application that would be meant to steal
resources from all other applications and essentially shut a computer down.
You don't want that to happen, so usually you would

(10:40):
have a memory protection method in place with your operating system,
but the Amiga OS did not have that. But this
shortcoming was not what led to the discontinuation of Amigo OS.
It's not like one day some Amiga based malware broke

(11:01):
out and ruined all the computers. That would have been
hard to do anyway, because networked computers were pretty darn
rare during the era of Amiga OS. Now the reason
why the Amiga OS operating system was discontinued and I
realized I was just repetitive there, But it's because it
has to do with business. Commodore, the company that made

(11:24):
and sold the computer, hit hard times really really quickly.
So in the early eighties, Commodore was measuring up really
well against competitors like Apple and IBM. They were selling
computers like hotcakes. Commodore was riding high, but then there
were dips in the mid eighties, and then there were
more crests and then dips again. Like it got pretty

(11:45):
rocky throughout the eighties and into the nineties, and in
nineteen ninety two things were going okay. But in nineteen
ninety three, sales dropped like a rock and the company
lost hundreds of millions of dollars, and it wasn't in
a financial position where it could recover from that. So
in nineteen ninety four, Commodore announced it was entering into

(12:07):
bankruptcy and that it would liquidate all its assets. Now
it's true to say that Amiga OS faded away. It
lost all official support because the company that supported it
ceased to be but the operating system itself is not
totally gone. Hyperion Entertainment Overseas essentially a descendant of the

(12:30):
Amiga OS, and in fact, the most recent update I
can see dates back to April of twenty twenty three,
and that's when Hyperion Entertainment released a hot fix for
Amiga OS three point two point two so I guess
you could say it's only mostly dead. There's still hobbyists

(12:51):
who very much are into creating things for the Amiga OS,
and it is still supported, just not by the company
that created it, so that's kind of cool. But as
an official operating system, it's more of a curiosity than
anything else. And that's why I decided to start off
the episode with that one. Now we're gonna take a

(13:11):
quick break, and when we come back, I'm gonna talk
about a pair of operating systems that are deeply entwined
with one another and all the drama that comes with it.
That's what's coming next. But first let's take this quick break.

(13:36):
All right, we're back, So next we have next sort
of all right, Like I said, this is a really
a two for one entry, and it involves a whole
lot of drama. And I have talked over this story
before in other episodes of Tech Stuff, but it's such
a juicy story we're gonna have to rake the coals
once more. Now, this story starts back arguably in the

(13:58):
late seventies, but really the tipping point is in nineteen
eighty five, that same year that the Amiga came out,
and this was due to something that was going on
over at Apple, because things were getting rough, all right.
The reason things were getting rough, or one of them,
is that Steve Jobs had become a bit of a handful. Now.

(14:19):
Jobs had co founded Apple along with Steve Wozniak. Wosniak
was the actual programmer and engineer of the pair, and
the two had grown the company very quickly, but they
really weren't the right fit to lead a growing tech
corporation right. Investors were a little leery of backing a

(14:40):
new bayle tech company run by a couple of college dropouts,
and if they wanted to get support from their investors,
they needed to make sure they had a quote unquote
real leader. And they got a few real leaders in
those early years. First up was a guy named Michael Scott,
not the guy from the office, and the next was

(15:02):
an early Apple investor named Mike Markula. Markula would actually
step up to be the chairman of the board of Directors,
and a new leader named John Scully the third would
come in to take over as CEO of Apple or
President of Apple originally now number three here. Scully he
had previously served as the president of Pepsi COO so

(15:24):
clearly he was the perfect pick that had a computer
company anyway. The point is Steve Jobs wasn't the one
calling the shots. He was not the executive ultimately in
charge of Apple, but occasionally he would act like he was.
In the late nineteen seventies, a computer engineer named Jeff
Raskin proposed a project that ultimately would become the McIntosh,

(15:47):
and apparently Steve Jobs thought this wasn't really a worthwhile pursuit.
I should also mention that Raskin's version of the McIntosh
was a very, very different thing than what would emerge
from Apple in nineteen eighty four. The Raskin's Macintosh was.
It could not have been more different. Really, It was

(16:08):
a text based, utilitarian workspace as opposed to what the
Macintosh would become. Anyway. Jobs wanted the company to back
the project he had been working on, which was the
Lisa personal computer, and he lobbied to have the Macintosh
killed off, but leadership sided with Raskin, and Jobs got angry.

(16:29):
The Lisa would end up being pretty much a forgotten
failure of Apple. It did not do so well, but
by that time Jobs was even angrier because in nineteen
eighty two, the rest of the Lisa team forced Jobs
off the project. They just felt his demands were kind
of making things go askew. So Jobs got kicked off

(16:52):
of the project he was running. And that was a
tough look because arguably Lisa took its name from Steve
Jobs's own daughter, or maybe it didn't, because stories vary
on that one. Some stories say no, no, no, it
was never meant to be named after Steve Jobs's daughter.
That was a coincidence. It was an acronym. But most

(17:15):
of the stories seem to say, like, yeah, it was
kind of named after his daughter, and then the acronym
stuff came later. It was acronyms, not acronyms. It's people like,
how can we let's come up with an acronym to
justify the name, and then we can argue that we
never named it after his daughter in the first place. Anyway,
Jobs then honed in on Raskin's team because now he

(17:38):
had an ax to grind. He had a grudge against
the Lisa team, and so he sort of waded into
the Macintosh project and sort of took it over. And
like I said, originally that Macintosh project was a text based,
keyboard centric machine, and Jobs kind of turned it into
a sort of a Lisa clone. It was another computer

(17:59):
with a graphic user interface and a mouse, which he
had lifted from Xerox Park. And he was now in
secret competition with the Lisa team, which meant he was
furiously working to prove that they were wrong and that
he was right. And maybe you could argue he also
lost sight of the fact that they were all actually
working for the same company and arguably for the same results.

(18:22):
So the Macintosh would actually come out in nineteen eighty
four looking very different from what Raskin's original nineteen seventy
nine concept was, and this would be the birth of
the classic mac OS operating system. That's important because macOS,
the classic version of macOS, is one of the two
operating systems that I'm really focusing on in this section.

(18:44):
But Jobs' behavior was seen as being really disruptive and
counterproductive to most of the teams that he interacted with,
and Scully and Jobs clashed numerous times, and Markola, the
chair of the board and the former head of Apple,
sided with Scully against Jobs. So Jobs left the company

(19:04):
in nineteen eighty five or he was fired. Interpretations on
this vary as well. It's clear that Scully did his
best to distance Jobs from any meaningful projects, So I
guess it all comes down to semantics, Like you could
argue that, Okay, Jobs wasn't fired, he was just removed
from operations to the point where he wasn't really doing anything,

(19:25):
so he decided to leave. Fun fact, years later, Marcula
would actually be instrumental in forcing Scully out of Apple.
So I guess what goes around comes around. Anyway, Jobs
went off to found a different company. This would be
the next company. Now, the focus of the next company
was to create hardware for education. Jobs saw an opportunity

(19:50):
to design computer workstations specifically meant for the education sector,
so like professors and researchers, that kind of thing, not
like necessarily your average teacher, because, as it would turn out,
the next system would be very expensive and beyond the
reach of a lot of say, you know, smaller schools.

(20:10):
But people in those fields were already using personal computers.
The problem was that PCs are general purpose machines, so
they're supposed to be, you know, pretty good at everything,
but they're not necessarily really good at any one thing.
So Jobs's aim was to create a computer that would
be ideally suited for education. Several former Apple employees went

(20:32):
with jobs to create this company and they got to
work designing the next computer. The operating system for this
computer would be called next Step one word. It would
take several years to bring this computer to market. So,
like I said, starts in nineteen eighty five, and the
original hope was to have a machine ready to launch
in nineteen eighty seven. But in reality, the next computer

(20:54):
wasn't ready until nineteen eighty nine, and even then it
was a small number of test machines that were ready.
And that initial batch cost six thousand, five hundred dollars
per computer. Now, if we adjust that for inflation, because
remember this is nineteen eighty nine, today, a computer like

(21:15):
that would cost you sixteen thousand, five hundred dollars. Right,
That's how much this initial batch, the test batch of
next computers cost when they actually were ready to launch
the computers in nineteen ninety For realsi's and make it
a larger batch. It went for an eye wateringly high

(21:38):
nine thousand, nine hundred ninety nine dollars. So again, if
we adjust that for inflation, brace yourselves. Those computers cost
twenty four thousand dollars a pop. So yeah, this was
not a computer aimed at the consumer market. In fact,
even universities would look at that sales price and say, who,
that's steep. It didn't take long for Jobs to reconsider

(22:01):
NeXT's role in the industry. So the funny thing is
when he was first thinking about this, originally his plan
was to create hardware that was meant for the education
sector and not to create software, like he was going
to license the software from someone else, but then ultimately
changed his mind and created a hardware and software combined approach.

(22:26):
But at these computer prices, it was clear the company
wasn't going to sell that many units. It just couldn't.
These educational institutions just you know, they couldn't afford these
incredibly high prices, and he made the decision to gradually
shift over to become a software focused company, with the

(22:48):
heart of that focus being the next Step operating system.
Next Step was built on top of a Unix operating system.
It also it featured an object oriented application layer. It
had had a graphic user interface or GUY. It could
handle multitasking, and it was interesting. It didn't exactly set
the world on fire at the time, but it did

(23:10):
gain the interest of certain folks in the tech and
research and education spheres, so people realized there was value
in it, even though it wasn't exactly becoming the next
big thing. All right, But now we've got our classic
Mac operating system or macOS, and we've got our next
step operating system. To continue our story, we actually have

(23:32):
to go back to Apple and back to the nineties
and see what happened with the company. So Scully had
effectively pushed jobs out of Apple. Under Scully, Apple took
a path that wasn't very Apple like. One of the
things that had set Apple apart from IBM is that

(23:52):
when IBM made their personal computers, they used off the
shelf parts to do so, and that meant that competitors
could build their own IBM style computers also known as
IBM compatibles or IBM clones, and they would just use
the same or similar parts that IBM used, and they
would get an operating system that was compatible with IBMS.

(24:14):
Because IBM had failed to secure an exclusive agreement from
the provider of their operating system, which I'll talk about
later on in this episode. So this ended up being
really bad news for IBM's personal computer division, because suddenly
the company was facing competition from numerous upstarts, most of
which were offering computers that were comparable to IBMS but

(24:37):
at a much lower price point. Apple, by contrast, had
traditionally developed its own hardware and software in house and
jealously guarded its proprietary approach, so if you wanted an
Apple computer, you had to go to Apple. But under Scully,
that began to shift and began to change. He pushed
the company to build a version of its operating system

(24:59):
to run on the power PC microprocessor architecture. This was
later on seen as a huge mistake. There was also
then a move to license Apple technology to other companies,
leading to what were called Mac clones that didn't exactly
match Apple's own quality standards. This was seen in retrospect
as a really big old pair of booboos, bad enough

(25:22):
that the board of directors decided to give Scully the
boot in nineteen ninety three. They replaced him with a
guy named Michael Spindler. Michael Spindler had previously been the
chief operating officer, but Spindler also didn't impress the board
that much. He led some massive cost cutting measures. While
he was at Apple, he shut down several R and
D projects. He laid off a lot of folks. But

(25:43):
Apple was in a chaotic mess at the time, and
the board lost its confidence in Spindler just after a
few years, so in nineteen ninety six they swapped him
out with a guy named Gil Emilio. So Emilio inherited
a really rough situation. Things were in a real mess
at Apple. One of the things that was going really
poorly was this evolution of the classic Macintosh operating system

(26:06):
aka the original mac OS. Because you see, there was
a team at Apple that had been working on a
next generation operating system for the Mac and it was
code named Copeland. But this project had languished in development
and was rife with feature creep. So that's when a
team gets bogged down by a product. When they add

(26:26):
more and more features that don't necessarily contribute to whatever
the end purpose of the product is, it just gets bloated.
And on top of that, there were also personality conflicts
within the team, especially at the leadership level. Project management
was in a shambles. It was just a total mess.
So Copeland was intended to be macOS eight. It was

(26:50):
intended to replace classic Mac operating system and become the
new standard, but it was in such a mess that
when Apple brought on Emilio, he said, I need to
have somebody come in and try and get this into shape.
He brought on a woman named Ellen Hancock to try
and get Mac OS eight to a point where it

(27:11):
could ship, and she essentially said, Yo, this thing is busted.
Not in so many words I'm paraphrasing, and she concluded
that the project was so mired in issues that it
would actually make way more sense to scrap it than
to attempt to salvage it. And Emilio didn't really have
any other options. He said, I guess that's what we
have to do, because it was a real mess. So

(27:33):
Apple switched gears and released a far more modest evolution
of the classic Mac operating system, and then they called
that Mac OS eight. And in the meantime, Emilio was
looking outside of Apple to try and find a solution
to create an actual next generation operating system. At one
point he was said to be looking at a company

(27:54):
called be Incorporated. This was led by a guy named
Jean Luis Gesse, and I ironically Gass had formerly been
an executive at Apple. In fact, you could say he
was Scully's choice to replace Jobs back in the eighties,
but that deal with b Incorporated fell through, and instead
Emilio looked to drum roll please Next Computers and next Step.

(28:20):
So that's right. Apple's solution to the problem of having
no next generation operating system strategy was to negotiate with
the former co founder of Apple. So Emilio convinced the
board of directors to pursue an acquisition of Next Computers,
and Steve Jobs would more or less come along for
the ride, essentially at least initially as a consultant. And

(28:42):
Emilio's real goal was to get hold of the Next
Step operating system and use that as a foundation for
the next generation version of the Mac operating system. So
this acquisition happened in early nineteen ninety seven. Apple would
release another modest Mac OS update, called fittingly macOS nine,
but the plan was to merge next Step with elements

(29:05):
from Copeland and other work done at Apple, and so
eventually the next generation operating system would come out and
it would be this kind of mishmash's combination, and this
would be macOS ten, or you might call it mac OSX,
because they switched from using you know, the numbers that

(29:27):
we would be familiar with and went to Roman numerals
for ten. By the time mac OS ten launched, Jobs
had convinced the Board of directors to give Amelio his
marching orders, so Emilia was no longer the head of Apple.
Jobs initially took over as interim CEO of Apple, but
he became way less interim over time. He also alienated

(29:49):
Ellen Hancock, you know, the woman who came over to
evaluate Copeland and determine whether or not could ship. She
did not want to use next Step as the found
for the next generation Macintosh operating system. She had argued
against that, so Jobs obviously did not like her at
all because the next Step OS is what brought Jobs

(30:13):
back into Apple's fold. So he pretty much made sure
that she didn't have a whole lot to do, so
she ended up resigning, you know, not long after he
kind of took power. But mac OS ten, despite a
somewhat slow launch, did become the bedrock for Apple's operating
system strategy moving forward, and it would take a few

(30:33):
years for Jobs to get things turned around, and it
was helped tremendously by some creatively you know, designed products
courtesy of Johnny Ive and the legacy operating systems of
the classic mac os and next step would kind of
ride off into the sunset, and mac OS ten would
end up taking their place. All Right, I'm gonna take
another quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about

(30:56):
another discontinued operating system, this one coming courtesy of Microsoft.
But first let's take this break. Okay, it's time to
talk about DOS. This one, also, you could argue, has

(31:19):
some pretty significant drama associated with it, and this one
predates the other operating systems we mentioned because the family
of DOS operating systems, beginning with eighty six DOS and
ending with MS DOS eight point zero, starts in the
early eighties and stretches on until two thousand. Now, to

(31:40):
be clear, there have been lots of other DOS versions
since MS DOS eight. The family of operating systems has
a few branches, more than a few. So I'm specifically
talking about MS DOS here, But DOS itself is still
alive and well, it's just it's no longer that particular
line of DOS. So this family of operating systems ties

(32:04):
in with the history of the eighty eighty six microprocessor,
which came from Intel. There was this company that was
called Seattle Computer Products, and there was a guy who
worked there named Tim Patterson who was a pretty brilliant
computer engineer and programmer. Patterson built a primitive eighty eighty
six based CPU card, and he actually worked with Microsoft

(32:27):
in order to get a version of Microsoft Basic, the
programming language, to run on this card, along with an
extremely primitive operating system. Patterson also became acquainted with an
earlier operating system from Microsoft that sometimes it's called m DOS,
sometimes it's called MIDAS, but this was an operating system

(32:49):
designed to actually run on an older generation of processors,
not the eighty eighty six family, but it did give
Patterson some ideas. So Patterson then goes back to Seattle
Computer Products and gets to to create a suitable operating
system to run on top of the eighty eighty six
based computers, or at least their computer motherboards. So this

(33:10):
is in nineteen eighty. Within half a year he's got
one and he calls it q DOS, which he said
stands for a quick and dirty operating system, but Seattle
Computer Products rebrands it as eighty six DOS, meaning it's
a disc operating system that runs on top of eighty
eighty six architecture. The company reaches out to Microsoft to

(33:32):
create a cross licensing deal. Microsoft would get access to
the operating system if Seattle Computer Products could adapt Microsoft
Basic for it. Now. This eventually leads to Patterson joining Microsoft.
He leaves Seattle Computer Products and joins Microsoft, and then
Microsoft outright buys the rights to eighty six DOS from

(33:52):
Seattle Computer Products the following year. And here's the thing,
this is why there's some drama here. Microsoft buys those
rights and then proceeds to go on a crazy licensing
deal with this operating system. So while they paid like
seventy five grand initially at least for the rights, they

(34:15):
made so much money licensing it to all these other
companies that folks felt that Microsoft had kind of screwed
over Seattle Computer Products. That especially since the perception was
that Microsoft had developed MS DOSS when in fact they
had purchased it from another company. They did tweak it, like,

(34:37):
they didn't just keep it exactly the same and sell it.
They did make changes, they made advancements to it and
everything and improvements. But the heart of that work came
from a totally different company, and so there's some who
feel that it was like reverse robin Hood, steal from
the poor and give to the rich. Anyway, that all

(34:58):
depends on who's story you really want to listen to,
I suppose. But Microsoft around this time also signs a
deal with IBM, and IBM had wanted an operating system
from Microsoft that it could run on its eighty eighty
six based machines, specifically its personal computer line, which it

(35:19):
was launching. So Microsoft then decides that it will license
eighty six DOS to IBM, but they rename it to
MS DOS. Now again, if you didn't look further, you
might think Bill Gates designed all of this, but he didn't. Again,
it came from this other company, although the guy who

(35:41):
made it for the other company was now working for Microsoft,
So I guess there's some argument to be made there too.
So if you've never used MS DOS, let me explain
what it was like. And you still can use at
least a facsimile of MS DOS if you're using a
Windows machine. It's a text based command line operating system.

(36:04):
So when you would boot up your computer back in
the olden days, you might actually be using a floppy
disk to boot your computer up if you didn't have
a hard drive, because back in the olden days hard
drives were not standard either, and the operating system would
be on your desk. It would load into computer memory.
Once it loaded in, you would be presented a command

(36:25):
prompt and you would type in commands on the command prompt,
and then the operating system would execute those commands, assuming
that you did it correctly. So you might list in
a command to do something like list out all the
file directories that are on a disc, whether that's a
hard drive or a floppy disk or whatever, and this

(36:45):
would be so that you can just see what's on there. Right.
There were times where I would have a floppy desk,
there'd be no label on it. You put it into
a drive, and you would have to, you know, navigate
through the file directories just to see what the heck
is on this thing, what kind of files? You know?
Maybe maybe the organization would give it away right away,
or maybe you'd have to dig in to figure it out.
Those are the days, man, You would use commands to

(37:08):
navigate through the directory, like if you wanted to switch
to specific folders and drilled down you would have to
do that by typing it in and typing in the
command and changing directories that way. You might want to
switch to a totally different drive. Maybe you don't want
to look at the flobby disk, Maybe you want to
look at the hard drive. Maybe you just want to
execute a program, or you would have to type in

(37:29):
the command to that too, So you would have to
memorize a list of commands that you would type in.
You could get by just by knowing like half a
dozen of those or so, maybe not even that many
if you really want to just basic operations for folks
who don't work on command line systems. When you first

(37:50):
look at this, it looks really obtuse and challenging, like
it's got a huge learning curve to it. But it
really wasn't that hard. You just had to get some
basics down. It just wasn't intuitive the way that a
graphics user interface was. That's what the beauty of guy
based operating systems happens to be. They are easy to

(38:12):
grasp and easy to navigate. If you're using these old
text based DOSS systems, they are a little more intimidating.
Now I'm old enough that I remember using Doss on
computers and loving it. And I actually remember that when
Windows rolled around, I hated Windows, not because I didn't
think Windows was useful. I certainly recognized how it could

(38:35):
be a lot easier for a new person who wasn't
familiar with computers to navigate a system that had Windows
versus DOS. Right, Like, I knew that that was easier
to do. There were times where I felt like it
was dumbing things down a bit too much. But really,
the reason why I didn't like Windows is that Windows
required a decent amount of your computer's resources to run.

(38:57):
That meant there were fewer resources are your actual programs.
So I resented the fact that so much of my
computer's processing power had to go just to running the
operating system of all things. I mean, why not just
take the time to learn DOSS. It's a much more
lightweight operating system, and then your computer runs faster and

(39:18):
you could devote that processing power to the actual programs
that you want to run. But it turned out I
was your typical old man yelling at a passing cloud,
and the whole world moved on to guy based operating systems,
and eventually all the software that was coming out for
PCs required Windows. Like when I would go to an

(39:39):
electronics store and look at the computer games and they
were all like Windows required. The writing was on the wall.
There was just no way for me to get around it.
I could not continue to hold out against Windows. I
had to get it, and you had to get with
the program literally, or just be satisfied with running obsolete
software for the rest of your life. And you might

(40:00):
be able to tell that I'm still a little bitter
about this. Even though it's decades later. Microsoft continued to
support DOS and they updated it all the way up
until two thousand, that's when they shut down support for
MS DOS. But they do still include DOS or DOS

(40:20):
like tools in Windows, so you can find little command
prompt Windows to help run things sometimes you need to
in order to do things like, you know, maybe check
a driver or that sort of stuff. And as I said,
there are other versions of DOS that are still around.
It's not like all versions of DOS died. Microsoft after all,

(40:41):
licensed DOS out to dozens of different companies. That's how
they made so much bank. Early on IBM, like I said,
used a version of DOS that for many years was
essentially identical to MS DOS. They had DOS and the
two were essentially identical until they finally kind of parted

(41:05):
ways many years into that relationship. And as I said,
it's one of the reasons why IBM lost the personal
computer battle in the first place, right because not only
were they using off the shelf components, they were using
this operating system that they licensed for Microsoft, and they
did not make it an exclusive licensing deal. If they

(41:26):
made it exclusive and Microsoft had only been allowed to
license to IBM, there would have been nowhere else to go,
and this would be a totally different world. But because
they didn't do that, it meant that these other companies
could attempt to copy IBM by buying those same sort
of off the shelf components and then licensing the same

(41:46):
MS DOS for Microsoft, and it would be close enough
to IBMS to be essentially compatible. And that's where you
would get your IBM clones or IBM compatible machines, and
you could sell them at a fraction of what IBM
was demanding for their PCs. And thus IBM had shot
themselves in the foot, and we got all these other

(42:06):
companies that came out as a result of that, many
of which are no longer around, but some of them
still are anyway. That's a look at just a small
number of discontinued operating systems. Like I said, there are
tons more of these. I haven't really scratched the surface, honestly.
I just chose some very high profile, famous ones. So

(42:27):
I'll likely do lots more episodes with retrospectives on these
older operating systems in the future. Like I said, I
need to do one that's just on smartphones or cell phones,
because there are quite a few of those as well.
In the meantime, I hope that all of you are
doing really well. Thank you very much for listening, and

(42:47):
I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is
an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.