ChrisReid said:
Yeah, all those are fake. Except GEM.
Wow, I must have a really active imagination. How about you all come share my delusions with me as we explore:
The Wonderful World of Operating Systems!
MWHAHAHAHAHA (Thunder Claps)
First on our tour today, we have
GeOS. I first ran across this on an HP handheld computer. Interestingly, this HP used Grafiti style handwriting recognition before the Palm even existed!
Next on our list is
CP/M , a trimmed down version of VAX VMS designed for Microcomputers (what we call PCs today). This was fairly well received by the market, and was later cloned by a man by the name of Tim Paterson. His quick and dirty clone was purchased by a startup called "Microsoft" and sold as both PC-DOS and MS-DOS.
Now we come to the oddity of the Unix family, the
Plan 9 operating system. Named after the movie "Plan 9 from Outer Space", this OS was an attempt by the inventor of Unix to improve upon his own work. With such features as "everything is a file", a new Windowing system, and a cute bunny replacement for the Unix "root" login called "glenda" (No, I am not making this stuff up) Plan 9 is considered one of the most advanced Unix-like OSes to ever exist.
Futher on our tour, we find the now extinct (but not dead yet)
BeOS. BeOS was a founded by former employees of Apple during a time when Apple was having difficulties trying to develop a new OS. As a result, BeOS focused on modern memory management, a file system with full meta-data support, and powerful multimedia features. Everyone who used it loved it, but the OS was generally immature and had few programs. Meanwhile, Steve Jobs was working on
NextStep as the most user-friendly Unix ever. Apple did finally decide to purchase an external OS, but balked at the $500 million price tag Be Inc demanded. Apple decided to purchase Next instead, and now we all know it as Mac OS X. The former CEO of Apple quipped,
"We choose plan A instead of Plan Be."
BeOS is survived by decendants such as Yellow Tab and Zeta OS.
BeOS:
NextStep. The icons along the side are the "Dock" which can be seen (in a much improved version) on modern Macs:
AtheOS (from the name Athena) was one man's experiment to produce a decruftified Operating System. He succeeded quite well, but eventually stopped maintaining it. The project has since been taken over by others and renamed "Syllable".
Last on our list is
ReactOS . ReactOS is an attempt by the Open Source community to produce a clone of the Windows NT operating system. Coming to life shortly after the now infamous (and quite dead) Freedows project, ReactOS actually began producing code up front and is now capable of running a large number of Windows NT programs. Unfortunately, the OS is not yet stable enough for general use.
If you're still curious, check
Wikipedia's list of Operating Systems both past and present. There's all kinds of OSes out there, from Apple's A/UX Unix Operating System to the Symbolics LISP machines. Let me know if you'd like a quick tour of any of them.
Most OSes for the x86 architecture can be emulated with the following programs:
VMWare ($$$)
Bochs (Free! I've developed a few small OSes on this.)
QEmu (A very fast x86 emulator that tends to work well with most Hobby OSes.)
Ask me sometime and I'll entertain you with other stories of Unisys Mainframes running MCP (Master Control Program), Sun's short-lived JavaOS, Microsoft's version of Unix, and a cool OS on a floppy from QNX.