If you could pick any EOL operating system to revive, what would it be?

[Ian.M]

+1 for XP.  You can gut it of most of the annoying stuff that got added after 2000, and its the last Windows version that a lot of legacy tools that directly access ports (e.g Parallel, Serial and ISA bus I/O cards) will run on.  There's also its WinFLP variant when you want a really lightweight install.

Also Win98SE for legacy stuff that wont run under Win32.

[digsys]

+1 for XP.  You can gut it of most of the annoying stuff that got added after 2000, and its the last Windows version that a lot of legacy tools that directly access ports (e.g Parallel, Serial and ISA bus I/O cards) will run on.
There's also its WinFLP variant when you want a really lightweight install.  Also Win98SE for legacy stuff that wont run under Win32. 

Absolutely agree. I have dozens and dozens of old and expensive machine interfaces / custom IO card and direct io utility programs. I started to try these out
on win& once, long ago, and gave up. Not throwing away 10-20 yrs of work to keep up with yuppies :-)  ymmv

[nctnico]

I'd vote for Win2k because it is not bloated as XP but XP would be close because Windows XP supports more hardware and is slightly easier to manage. Windows XP is still my goto Windows for anything that doesn't run in Linux directly.

[Ampera]

+1 for XP.  You can gut it of most of the annoying stuff that got added after 2000, and its the last Windows version that a lot of legacy tools that directly access ports (e.g Parallel, Serial and ISA bus I/O cards) will run on.  There's also its WinFLP variant when you want a really lightweight install.

Also Win98SE for legacy stuff that wont run under Win32.

It's just that once you gut it, you get windows 2000 and a load of wasted time. I just cut out the middle man and go straight for NT 5

[Kjelt]

XP because I have two expensive programmers with parallel ports where the latest SW is depending on this OS.

[John Coloccia]

Windows 2K was my "favorite" version in as much as it was rock solid and didn't require any particular maintenance or work to keep it like that. It just kind of worked and kept chugging along forever. Windows 10 is a better OS, though. It's just so full of garbage that it's hard to see it, but it's really better in just about every way. I wouldn't go back to 2000 from 7 or 10, even though I'm nostalgic for it.

[Fortran]

Windows 2K all the way.
It did what I told it to do, not whatever the hell it felt like.

But for nostalgia, it's hard to beat Windows 95 with Microsoft BOB.

[free_electron]

others : Basic in ROM. Power-up gives you a Basic interpreter. ( as in the original ibm -pc with basic in rom. if it did not find an operating system it would launch Basic. )
why ?
- because ALL operating systems suck. They all interfere with what i am trying to do.
- because basic is the most productive and easiest language out there. F-you C with all your idiosyncrasies , semicolons and other cryptic gibberish !
- No viruses . i'd like to see you infect a mask ROM ..
- it's interpreted. so all source is always available (i don't understand why open source aficionado's don't jump on this ... )
- you can stop a program mid-run , alter it , or the data it is working on and simply continue without having to restart or recompile
- very lightweight. a good basic easily fits in 8 Kilobyte. a really good on could fit in 16k. an excellend one, including a windowing system, networking etc might fit in a few 100K....

I/RMx. why ? one of a few hardware fault tolerant systems out there. I've seen systems with broken sdram keep on working ...

[C]

I think all would like some parts of RSX-11M.

The PDP-11 had many levels of vector interrupts.
This carried over in to common use of many levels of priority for programs. I think there were 256 levels for programs.
A system could be doing some real time tasks and still respond fast to users.
From memory, Think there was a field in directory for start this program at this level.

Test of One system with many users and real time tasks was to run Colossal Cave which tried to use all of system and see if it had an effect on other stuff. When correct you could play Colossal Cave with only the response speed changing.

So when OS was swapping tasks this priority was used and system users had a field to change priority. A system under heavy load would slow somethings more then others. At light load made almost no difference. 

What also is needed today is easy to use cluster of computers.
Think of Dave's videos automatically splitting job not just across local system's cores & gpu's but many systems.
A web server that at high load spreads load across more computers in office.
A compiler that can automatically use more computers for the compile.
The change to pascal with modules compiler I used would not be a large change.  A module was separate, you did not hack module with a text editor hack.
With priority above other users might not even notice the use.

[rrinker]

TRS-DOS 6/LDOS - an early example of a modular OS< in the days of 140K floppy drives this could be important. The OS was logically grouped into modules, and if there were features you didn't need, you could just delete the module and free up disk space.

CP/M 2.2 was just nice to use.

RSX-11/M from the PDP 11 series. I used that at my first job and it was simply amazing how 4K of RAM on a PDP11/23 could run 3 terminals, one with the usage monitor, one a DECWriter printing out the test results as the 11/23 also controlled a Coordinate Measurement Machine running my test programs, and a third terminal with me logged in writing additional FORTRAN programs for other tests.

[sleemanj]

I was going to be edgy and say GEOS for C64, but wouldn't you know it, it's already been revived: https://github.com/mist64/geos

[Howardlong]

You can just pay $$$$ to MS to buy Windows 10 SA Enterprise Edition, plus $7000/mo for a system admin that masters group policy. The combination will grant you all goodies in Windows NT without forced update or spyware or any hassle. A completely unlocked Windows 10 plus an expert in group policy can allow you to touch every setting in Windows.

Coincidentally a few days ago I did an Enterprise edition build to avoid this enforced update nonsense... it installed, but lost interest when I discovered I needed to maintain my own activation server, but life is too short to waste a load more hours on that for now.

Microsoft really do know how to piss you off. I have no problem in keeping my OS patched, but I will do it when I want to, not when Microsoft want to thank you. I dread to think how people manage with Windows 10 on slow connections, 2GB or so of updates every month will be very painful.

[dannyf]

Over the last decade or so, Microsoft has been in the business of taking things that work really well and making them unusable.

Win2k and winxp are near perfect. Win7 isn't bad. But win8 and win10 are complete crap. Why the forced and unpredictable reboots for example?

The same with office.....

[Howardlong]

I have no problem in keeping my OS patched, but I will do it when I want to, not when Microsoft want to thank you. I dread to think how people manage with Windows 10 on slow connections, 2GB or so of updates every month will be very painful.

Mark your LAN connection as paid network by bandwidth. Also, you can disable WU from group policy editor, or just nuke the settings in regedit.

I think that only works for WiFi or did I misunderstand something? I have certainly considered disabling the WU service, and might yet still do that, but noting how intrusive their OS is I wouldn't be surprised if there's something in the kernel that re-enables it.

[Howardlong]

Oh, yes, Windows 2000 for me too. Simple marketing, no unnecessary chrome, the first NT to support removeable hardware. I could still happily run everything on 2000 were it still supported.

XP is 2000 plus chrome, Windows 5.1 vs Windows 5.0.

At about the time of XP the marketing wankers had taken over, remember when everythhing was called .NET? It so completely confused the customers, nobody could actually explain what .NET was, ISTR Windows 2003 was originally called Windows .NET, FFS why?

[KeepItSimpleStupid]

I might say RX-11M, but my  only experience was RT-11.  RT-11 was more like DOS.  Two of us wanted to write a major program under RSX (Reason: no experience), but it was turned down my management.  It fit, but barely with no room to expand and the programmer had to do the overlays.
One wanted to do it in C or Modula2 and not Fortran.  There was one Assembly Language instruction:  Move From Previous Instruction Space that we needed.

Somehow, secretly, I wish DEC would have developed the software for the IBM PC just because their support was second to none.

The DEC system 10 wasn't too bad.  RSTS-11 wasn't bad either.  Unix on a PDP-11 was also nice.

[Jr460]

I think it is still supported, barely.....

VMS, one of the 64bit versions if you want to get picky. 

[timb]

Risc OS. The only operating system I've ever actively enjoyed using, rather than being stuck with because it's what the applications I need to use require.

Actually, last I checked riscOS was still being developed! There's even a recent version for the Raspberry Pi, available for download from the official RPi site.

In fact, when the Pi first came out, riscOS was the second OS available for it (the first being Raspbian Wheezy Soft Float).

[doobedoobedo]

SCO Unix 

[Halcyon]

I notice not one person has said Windows Millennium Edition yet ;-)

 

[Ampera]

I notice not one person has said Windows Millennium Edition yet ;-)

 

I hate it. Being a combination of 9x kernel and 2k GUI makes it like neither. Having been forced to use it for a year in my last year of primary school. Doesn't support old DOS programs, neither new NT programs.

It's only use is that of being a quirk in computing history, and a fun toy to eff around with from time to time. It was a product that should never have been released.

To be fair the same thing could be said about Vista, Windows 8, 8.1, and 10.

[C]

I notice not one person has said Windows Millennium Edition yet ;-)

 

Worked for some computers, big fail or problem source for some.
So big a fail that Microsoft dropped it.

[Berni]

I notice not one person has said Windows Millennium Edition yet ;-)

 

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/QIirmeX-XgA/hqdefault.jpg

Burn it! Burn it with fire!

I remember having it for a month and then giving up and downgrading cause nothing worked properly. From then on i started making informed decisions on what benefits a OS upgrade gives me before going for it. Hence i stayed on win2k well in to the XP era until things started becoming incompatible before switching to XP.

[Halcyon]

I notice not one person has said Windows Millennium Edition yet ;-)

Burn it! Burn it with fire!

I remember having it for a month and then giving up and downgrading cause nothing worked properly. From then on i started making informed decisions on what benefits a OS upgrade gives me before going for it. Hence i stayed on win2k well in to the XP era until things started becoming incompatible before switching to XP.

Yep, same. It was unstable as hell and had nothing to do with my hardware (ran it on a Supermicro P6SBA motherboard and an Intel PIII-450 CPU). Went back to Windows 98se until XP came around.

[george.b]

I notice not one person has said Windows Millennium Edition yet ;-)

 

About that one:


As far as Windows goes, I was having this talk with a friend just the other day - if it hadn't been forcibly obsoleted, I reckon Windows 2000 would be a fine system to use today. It was my favorite one.
First used it on a Pentium MMX with 48MB of RAM - it was slow, but at least it was stable, unlike the Win9x crapola of which WinMe was part.