The top 10 operating system stinkers
I love old technology as much as the next techno-geezer, but come on, it wasn't all wonder and goodness. After we're done reminiscing about the good old days of operating systems, let's reflect on the bad old days of operating systems as well. After all, the bad times are still with us -- even in 2009, there are still some wretched operating systems out there.
In historical order, from oldest to newest, here's my own personal list of the top (bottom?) 10 OS stinkers.
OS/360, 1964
No, no, I'm not talking about the later versions of OS/360 that some of us used on IBM 360 mainframes back in the late '60s and early '70s. For its day, it was fine. Indeed, my very first operating system was an OS/360 descendant with TSO (Time Sharing Option) running on top of it.
What I'm talking about is the very first version of OS/360 -- the one that led its project manager, Fred Brooks, to write The Mythical Man-Month, his classic book on how software development fails. That first version of OS/360, to paraphrase Brooks, came in late, had flaws in its control programs, required more memory than planned, was over budget by several times the original estimate, and, oh yeah, it was slow too.
On the other hand, we did get a classic book on how not to develop software, which included such nuggets as "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." Brooks likes to describe it as a software developer's Bible, because "everybody reads it, but nobody does anything about it." As the rest of this tale shall reveal, he was right.
ITS (Incompatible Timesharing System), late 1960s
What can one say about an operating system written in DEC PDP-6 and PDP-10 assembly language that supported one mono-case, six-character filename ... per directory? (Yes, you read that right: Each file resided in its own separate directory.) And security was nil -- for example, no passwords were required, and you could log into anyone's active session and do pretty much anything you wanted with it.
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Ever heard of Tripos?
Not so much its kernel, as ports to computers that should never have seen the light of day.I remember some part of it storing keystrokes while a disk access was in progress, then releasing them all at once. So you would hit delete in the editor, nothing would happen, hit again... whoops, half a document gone.