Creaky Operating Systems Form IT Foundations

maotx writes "The Washington Post has an article on how aging operating systems are still widely used. The article states that "The research firm IDC estimates that of the roughly 514 million paid-for copies of Windows on desktops and laptops worldwide at the end of 2004, almost 21 percent were the aging Win 95, 98 and Millennium Edition releases." That equates to around 108 million copies being used."

Windows 3.11

[kyoko21]

Windows 3.11 for workgroups running TCP/IP and NCSA Mosaic. :-)

Only when it's old?

[lgbarker]

You mean Windows isn't supposed to creak when it's new?

If "Windows ANYTHING" is your foundation...

[stevens]

...then you have my sympathy.

Re:I used NT 4.0 for a long time because

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear it also had a propensity for adding spurious apostrophes in the possessive "ITS". I'm sure if we could get rid of those apostrophes, internet traffic would be reduced by 5% overnight. Toss in the badly-formed "plural's", we'd knock off another 7%.

Debian

[BradWarden]

oh....I'm current

Details?

[Joe Random]

We found that it had been an internal mail server for Northwest Mental Health Services.

Oh, c'mon now! You can't drop a juicy tidbit like that without giving us more details. Just a few snippits of the more ... "interesting" ... emails would do. Surely you found something worthy of sharing on a frickin' mental health services mail server.

Re:3.1

[mnmn]

I salvaged Windows 3.11 disks from a pile of floppies getting trashed and tried it on my P4. The speed was enjoyable... but... I kinda expected WINDOWS. Rightclick does practically nothing. I had good memories from those days, but win3.11 gave me practically nothing, except a nice way to launch DOS apps.

I imagine in a few years, Windows 2011 will boot on my Intel Hexium 2mm laptop, in about 1.5 hours.

Re:I used NT 4.0 for a long time because

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, if Linux was a proper microkernel OS, it would not let anything as trivial as a driver lock it up.

Re:WfWg 3.11 FLIES on a P3 with 512 MB of RAM

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought you were joking, but then I hit google for a bit, and discovered there actually still is a community of people running windows 3.11 on top of dos 7.1 with osr2fix applied, and using large chunks of their memory as ramdrives to edge out that last bit of performance.

I don't know whether to be awed or struck by horror.