Installing Five Rarely Used Vintage Operating Systems Rapidfire (ft. Cray mainframes)
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Published 2024-02-10
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COS Recovery Story:
* www.modularcircuits.com/blog/articles/the-cray-fil…
* chrisfenton.com/
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An operating system is an essential piece of software that every computer uses to control its base functions. Most of us are familiar with Windows, macOS, and/or Linux, but there are some so obscure that most watching will see them first hand. For example, did you know Microsoft released a copy of Windows for Legacy PCs? Or that Apple simply slapped the Platinum look and feel on NeXTstep, and callled it Mac OS X Server 1.0?
In this video, we're going to install five operating systems that are so obscure, you've probably never heard of them before. They are, in order:
* Dell UNIX - gunkies.org/wiki/Dell_UNIX)
* Windows for Legacy PCs - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Fundamentals_for_Leg…
* Mac OS X Server 1.0 - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Server_1.0
* Sprite - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_(operating_system)
* Windows 11 for ARM
* COS
Music used in order from YouTube Creator Library:
* Jeremy Blake - Heaven and Hell
* Huma-Huma - From Russia With Love
* Patrick Patrikios - The Awakening
* DivKid - Icelandic Arpeggios
* Kevin MacLeod - Five Armies
* Jimena Contreras - Hopeless
* Huma-Huma - Hydra
All Comments (21)
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I am really (unpleasantly) surprised that a machine as iconic and important as the Cray has been lost in time. At least some brave soul managed to recover parts of it.
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I hope that whoever stuck "D E L L" in that X root menu got a raise.
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Was I the only one surprised and humored to see MSN Messenger included in the XP install? They stripped it down to the bare essentials but still included MSN Messenger. Oh, Microsoft!
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Floppy and tape installs - yep, back when I didn't have gray hair. I managed to read a whole BUNCH of novels during installs (and collected overtime) 🙂
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My grandfather worked for Control Data for like 35years love seeing CDC and Cray stuff
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Windows FLP is not actually the final release of the Windows XP codebase, that would be Windows XP Embedded POSReady 2009. That release actually got patches longer than plain XP did, so many people applied a registry hack to convince Windows Update they’re on that version.
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Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PC was awesome. A decade ago I set up a Pentium 3 with it for text editing with AbiWord for my grandma. The system worked like a champ for years. Very light and very stable. I think it still works but it's been sitting in the attic for a long time.
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Not too sure if you know this but Apple did release beta versions of Mac OS X Server under the name Rhapsody that not only supported PowerPC but also x86 computers too. iirc it's one of the only times Apple made an operating system for typical desktop computers and pre dates Apple's transition to Intel processors by around 5 years.
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The Cray segment reminds me of the MVS Turnkey System emulator that emulates an IBM System/370 machine. I’ve only messed around a little bit, but the sheer difference in how you interact with the mainframe system vs modern computers is wild
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Its amazing how many pieces of software were out there. Being able to see all of this from the screen of a cell phone is amazing in many ways by itself. Great job!!
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We were dealing with Crays for a few years at the department I worked at. They were a shit of a thing to work with. The VMS machines were a peach comparitively.
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Awesome that you tried SPRITE. I remember running it on Sun and DEC hardware back in the mid 90s.
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At my college, my class built a very basic MUD in the Harris minicomputer JCL. Plusses and minuses. Plus: That game got popular and got its own user ID via the sysops. Negative: This was because it was the last year for the Harris, which was scrapped the next year.
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Hey, hey ! ncommander is back !! yay ! And with more pain and suffering than ever, obviously ! :)
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So good to see you back.
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Out of space on the last disk... damn! Welcome back! Edit: I used to daily WinFLP on main PC (dual p3 @ 1ghz). The only thing missing that I needed was tape drive support.
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The hyper floppy install reminds me of installing OS2 in 1993. I believe it was 103 disks all up, which at $149 retail was cheaper than buying that many floppies, and those IBM ones were good ones..
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17:40 I just realised, that in Max Payne 1, when you have to disable Nicole Horne's office security system, you have to destroy Cray super-computers.
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For Windows 11 on Arm64 part. I actually have 2 ARM devices that natively runs Windows 11. I used UUP Dump to create Windows 11 ISO. One device is a notebook from Xiaomi, that device actually uses UEFI and Windows 11 preinstalled. The other is an 855 phone that uses WoA Project that their Mu implementation to replace stock Android. To be honest, currently, only EAC protected and Vulkan games aren't working. Even Warcraft 2 is playable!
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SUPER-UX and its cousin ESOS are likely to be lost to history. SUPER-UX was a UNIX variant used on NEC's SX line of vector supercomputers up until Linux was adopted. ESOS was the operating system for the Earth Simulator and the Earth Simulator 2. Many older Cray systems- and this included the CDC 6600 and 7600- ran the operating system in the I/O processors to allow the main processor to be free to work on computing tasks. This was also true of many CDC CYBER systems.
