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When I started University in 2000, I had a quad-boot system: Win98, Win2000, BeOS 5 and Slackware Linux (using the BeOS bootload as my primary because it had th

When I started University in 2000, I had a quad-boot system: Win98, Win2000, BeOS 5 and Slackware Linux (using the BeOS bootload as my primary because it had the prettiest colors). I mostly used Slackware and Win98 (for games), but BeOS was really neat. It had support for the old Booktree video capture cards, could capture video without dropping frames like VirtualDub often did, and it even had support for disabling a CPU on multicpu systems (I only saw videos of this; never ran BeOS on a SMP system). I wish we had more options today. On modern x86 hardware, you pretty much just have Windows, Linux and maybe FreeBSD/OpenBSD if you replace your Wi-Fi card with an older one (or MacOS if you're feeling Hackintoshy .. or just buy Apple hardware). I guess three is kinda the limit you're going to hit when it comes to broad support.

philwelch 7y ago
There also used to be other CPU architectures--though even at the time, enough people complained about "Wintel" that maybe it was obvious that the alternatives weren't ever going to catch on.
- msla 7y ago
  People complained about "Wintel" because the 32-bit x86 chips were so fast and cheap they destroyed the market for RISC designs and killed existing RISC workstation and server architectures, like SPARC and HPPA and MIPS. By the time the Pentium came around, the future looked like a completely monotonous stretch of Windows NT on x86 for ever and ever, amen. No serious hardware competition, other than Intel being smart enough to not kill AMD outright for fear of antitrust litigation, and no software competition on the desktop, with OSS OSes being barely usable then (due to an infinite backlog of shitty hardware like Winmodems and consumer-grade printers) and Apple in a permanent funk. We were perpetually a bit afraid that Microsoft/Intel would pull something like Palladium/Trustworthy Computing [1] and lock down PC hardware but good, finally killing the Rebel Alliance of Linux/BSD, but somehow the hammer never quite fell. It did in the cell phone world, though, albeit in an inconsistent fashion. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next-Generation_Secure_Computing_Base https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next-Generation_Secure_Computi... Microsoft and Intel really seemed permanent back then. I wonder if that's how people felt about IBM back in the 1950s.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    It also did in the PC hardware, unless you failed to notice the trends of laptops, 2-1 hybrids hardware. Desktops are now a niche product, where buying cards has to be done mostly online, with most malls having only laptops and 2-1 on display. Servers are away in some cloud, running virtualized OSes on top of a level-1 hypervisor.
  - asveikau 7y ago
    The other thing people forget, which is still a bit incomprehensible to me, is that the multiple Unix vendors were saying they'll migrate to Windows NT on IA-64.
    - projektfu 7y ago
      Perhaps Digital UNIX and HP/UX but HP/Compaq was a collaborator on IA-64. I don't think I heard of SUN or IBM saying that.
      - asveikau 7y ago
        Sgi is another prominent example cited elsewhere in the thread.
        projektfu 7y ago
        Indeed, it probably killed SGI.
    - bergie 7y ago
      I think there was some token POSIX compatibility in Windows NT back then. Probably for some government contracts.
      - lmm 7y ago
        It actually worked pretty nicely - if anything better back in those days when software expected to run on different unixes, before the linux monoculture of today.
bitL 7y ago
I think BeOS was the only OS that allowed smooth playback of videos and work at the same time, something Windows was capable 5 and Linux 10 years later :D
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Bluebottle OS (written in Active Oberon, a GC enabled systems programming language) was also capable of it. http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/Documentation/WindowManager?action=download&upname=AosScreenshot3.jpg http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/Documentation/WindowManager?...
- anthk 7y ago
  Linux could do that in 2001 just fine, and without crashing like Windows. XV was amazing. So was MPlayer.
  - Octoth0rpe 7y ago
    > without crashing like Windows That depended _very_ heavily on your graphics card at the time. In 2001, I could get X to crash on my work computer if I shook my mouse too fast. At home on my matrox card, yes, it was rock stable.
    - anthk 7y ago
      Nvidia TNT2/Geforce2 MX later. EDIT: Also, Slackware was rock solid and it crashed far less than SuSE/Mandrake.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    In 2001 I could still hang X Windows as much as I liked. And it still happens occasionally, while my Windows 10 userspace drivers just reinitialize instead of locking the OS.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
> you pretty much just have Windows, Linux and maybe FreeBSD/OpenBSD [...] That sounds just as good? Compared to quad-booting Win98/Win2000/BeOS5/Slackware, today you could quad-boot Win10/FreeBSD/OpenBSD/Ubuntu. Actually, depending on what you count as different systems and what exact hardware you have, you could have 2 laptops sitting on your desk: a pinebook running your choice of netbsd, openbsd, freebsd, or some linux (https://forum.pine64.org/forumdisplay.php?fid=107 https://forum.pine64.org/forumdisplay.php?fid=107), and an x86 laptop multibooting Windows 10, Android, Ubuntu GNU/Linux, Alpine Busybox/Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Redox (https://www.redox-os.org/screens/ https://www.redox-os.org/screens/). That's 2 processor families in 2 machines running what I would count as 4 and 8 operating systems each. I think we're doing fine.

philwelch 7y ago

There also used to be other CPU architectures--though even at the time, enough people complained about "Wintel" that maybe it was obvious that the alternatives weren't ever going to catch on.

msla 7y ago
People complained about "Wintel" because the 32-bit x86 chips were so fast and cheap they destroyed the market for RISC designs and killed existing RISC workstation and server architectures, like SPARC and HPPA and MIPS. By the time the Pentium came around, the future looked like a completely monotonous stretch of Windows NT on x86 for ever and ever, amen. No serious hardware competition, other than Intel being smart enough to not kill AMD outright for fear of antitrust litigation, and no software competition on the desktop, with OSS OSes being barely usable then (due to an infinite backlog of shitty hardware like Winmodems and consumer-grade printers) and Apple in a permanent funk. We were perpetually a bit afraid that Microsoft/Intel would pull something like Palladium/Trustworthy Computing [1] and lock down PC hardware but good, finally killing the Rebel Alliance of Linux/BSD, but somehow the hammer never quite fell. It did in the cell phone world, though, albeit in an inconsistent fashion. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next-Generation_Secure_Computing_Base https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next-Generation_Secure_Computi... Microsoft and Intel really seemed permanent back then. I wonder if that's how people felt about IBM back in the 1950s.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  It also did in the PC hardware, unless you failed to notice the trends of laptops, 2-1 hybrids hardware. Desktops are now a niche product, where buying cards has to be done mostly online, with most malls having only laptops and 2-1 on display. Servers are away in some cloud, running virtualized OSes on top of a level-1 hypervisor.
- asveikau 7y ago
  The other thing people forget, which is still a bit incomprehensible to me, is that the multiple Unix vendors were saying they'll migrate to Windows NT on IA-64.
  - projektfu 7y ago
    Perhaps Digital UNIX and HP/UX but HP/Compaq was a collaborator on IA-64. I don't think I heard of SUN or IBM saying that.
    - asveikau 7y ago
      Sgi is another prominent example cited elsewhere in the thread.
      - projektfu 7y ago
        Indeed, it probably killed SGI.
  - bergie 7y ago
    I think there was some token POSIX compatibility in Windows NT back then. Probably for some government contracts.
    - lmm 7y ago
      It actually worked pretty nicely - if anything better back in those days when software expected to run on different unixes, before the linux monoculture of today.

bitL 7y ago

I think BeOS was the only OS that allowed smooth playback of videos and work at the same time, something Windows was capable 5 and Linux 10 years later :D

pjmlp 7y ago
Bluebottle OS (written in Active Oberon, a GC enabled systems programming language) was also capable of it. http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/Documentation/WindowManager?action=download&upname=AosScreenshot3.jpg http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/Documentation/WindowManager?...
anthk 7y ago
Linux could do that in 2001 just fine, and without crashing like Windows. XV was amazing. So was MPlayer.
- Octoth0rpe 7y ago
  > without crashing like Windows That depended _very_ heavily on your graphics card at the time. In 2001, I could get X to crash on my work computer if I shook my mouse too fast. At home on my matrox card, yes, it was rock stable.
  - anthk 7y ago
    Nvidia TNT2/Geforce2 MX later. EDIT: Also, Slackware was rock solid and it crashed far less than SuSE/Mandrake.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- pjmlp 7y ago
  In 2001 I could still hang X Windows as much as I liked. And it still happens occasionally, while my Windows 10 userspace drivers just reinitialize instead of locking the OS.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago

> you pretty much just have Windows, Linux and maybe FreeBSD/OpenBSD [...] That sounds just as good? Compared to quad-booting Win98/Win2000/BeOS5/Slackware, today you could quad-boot Win10/FreeBSD/OpenBSD/Ubuntu. Actually, depending on what you count as different systems and what exact hardware you have, you could have 2 laptops sitting on your desk: a pinebook running your choice of netbsd, openbsd, freebsd, or some linux (https://forum.pine64.org/forumdisplay.php?fid=107 https://forum.pine64.org/forumdisplay.php?fid=107), and an x86 laptop multibooting Windows 10, Android, Ubuntu GNU/Linux, Alpine Busybox/Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Redox (https://www.redox-os.org/screens/ https://www.redox-os.org/screens/). That's 2 processor families in 2 machines running what I would count as 4 and 8 operating systems each. I think we're doing fine.