Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you? So chances are if you're listening to the show, you have a handle on what an operating system is. Lots of stuff you use as an operating system. You know, you're a computer, your smartphone, that kind of thing. An operating system's job is to serve as a sort of liaison between a device's hardware, you know, the actual chips and circuits that really make it work, and the software that runs on top of it and gets those hardware things to produce output that you actually want. So operating systems create a starting point or foundation for programmers. If you design an application meant for a specific operating system, then that app should work on pretty much any device that's running that specific operating system sort of. There can actually be exceptions due to various hardware configurations, but you get the idea. So, the operating system manages all sorts of processes like memory management. It also handles data sent to peripheral devices like displays or printers. Before there were operating systems. Computers were far more limited and much less efficient. If you wanted to run a program on an old computer pre operating system days, first you had to wait until nothing else was running on that computer. Then you would have to directly load your program onto the hardware itself. So the classical version of this was a program designated by, say a long strip of paper tape that has holes punched into it in specific places, or a collection of punch cards, that you would have a program built onto, and you would have to load this on a computer. You would also have to preset physical switches on the computer itself to make certain that the computer began in the proper state before you would execute your program. If it wasn't, then you wouldn't get the result you had intended, and you might not know that until much further down the line. So very complicated. It was a physical activity, like it wasn't just click on an icon or type something into a command line, and it didn't always go smoothly. Either a mistake in the programming or a bug in the computer system itself could cause a crash, and that might require a lot of backtracking to fix it. You would have to identify what went wrong, and then fix the problem. This was not always an easy thing to do, but over time, computer scientists developed programming languages and operating systems in order to enhance the capabilities of computers and to make it easier to use them, and eventually there was an explosion of operating systems. Some were peculiar to a specific type of computer or a specific line of computers. While the operating system made things easier for programmers who were working on those machines, you would still often need to specialize in certain classes of computer systems because of differences between them, Like just because you know how to program for computer system A, doesn't mean you could program for computer system B, because how fundamentally different they were. So today I thought I would talk a bit about a few discontinued operating systems. These were once important, but they are no longer in widespread use today. Some of them live on, at least in part. Sometimes they're partly a legacy element that's still found in modern day operating systems. Some of them are supported by hobbyists. And I could go all the way back to the days of like mainframes and micro computers, but I figured it would be best to kind of limit ourselves to personal computers and that sort of thing. Maybe in the future I could go further back. Also in the future, I might do things like smartphones, because there's some smartphone operating systems that are largely discontinued this today, and it would be interesting to have a conversation about those as well. So it's just important to remember that, even though I'm just really talking about PCs in this episode, there have been a lot of other computer systems that had come and gone by the time we get up to that. I decided to start with PCs because I would argue the PC era is really kind of a transformational point in our world. You know, miniaturization and mass production had made it possible to create a computer that could fit on a desktop and also not cost a bazillion dollars. Although I should point out early personal computers were still really expensive, like if you were to compare them to computers today, far more expensive than what you could get today if you're just buying like a basic system, a basic system back in like the late seventies early eighties would cost you a whole lot more than what you would spend today. Comparatively speaking, you have to take inflation into account. So let's start off with a computer system that launched in nineteen eighty five. So nineteen eighty five was a year after Apple had introduced the Macintosh computer. There was this other company called Commodore International. It had originally started out as this humble business of typewriter repair and reselling. Like it was a business that bought old, busted up typewriters, fixed them up, and then sold them again, and eventually they became more of a computer company. They made the Commodore sixty four, one of the most famous personal computers of all time. But in nineteen eighty five they introduced a new machine that seemed to have a whole lot of promise, and it was called the Amme. Now the Amiga didn't actually start off as a Commodore project. A group of folks who had previously worked for Atari decided that they would strike out on their own and make their own company. So they created a business that they called Hi Toro. I don't know why I gave a little role in the r there Hi Toro, Hi Dash t Ro. It was this group that would receive an acquisition offer from Commodore, and they took it. So the Amiga measured up well against competing computers at the time, computers like the Macintosh and the IBM PC. It boasted superior graphics and sound. The Amiga was incredible in that regard. Games on the Amiga had a tendency to look and sound leagues better than similar titles that you could find on other platforms. Animators and artists were drawn no pun intended to the Amiga, and it was seen as a really powerful tool for creative types in the computer space, very much the way Macintosh computers would be viewed a decade later, even though creatives also like Macintosh computers even back in those early days. But when I think about when I first got into media, anyone I knew who worked in media and worked with computers, they had a Macintosh. The mac was seen as the computer for creatives well in the mid eighties. The goal for Commodore was to make the Amiga that type of machine, and for a lot of creatives it was. Now the Amiga operating system was known as Amiga OS, which makes sense, and it had some pretty cool features. For one, it could allow for multitasking. Now not all PCs at this time could multitask. Most would require the user to quit out of one application entirely before they could launch another, But the Amiga OS was different. Now, it wasn't perfect multitasking. The operating syste would have essentially freeze whichever app you were leaving in order to dedicate the resources to whichever app you were switching to. So if you've got app A and app B and you're leaving app A to go to app B, app A just goes into kind of hibernation mode. This method is called preemptive multitasking, and what it means is that you couldn't start a process, then swap to another window and expect the process in that first window to continue while you're doing something else. But still the ability to go back and forth between tests was a big advance over many competitors. Like these days, I think that would I would find that frustrating because sometimes I will start a process in one window and it'll say it's going to take like forty five seconds. I'm like, I don't have time for that. I'm going to go do something in this other window while that completes, and computers today can handle that. The Amiga could not. But you have to remember computational resources were much more limited then, right, We were still in the very early days of personal computers. The operating system also included a disc operating system or DOS. We'll be talking more about the famous MS DOS later in this episode, but this was called Amiga DOSS naturally, and this disc operating system gave the user access to things like the computer's file system and directory, so you can navigate through that way if you didn't want to use the graphic User interface or GUI version of the operating system, and you might normally use Amiga's graphics user interface to get around, but this would give you a much more direct and text based method of navigating the machine. In some ways, it was more efficient and faster if you knew what you were doing, but if you didn't, you could just use the GUY to get around using its various file management systems. Now, one thing a Mega OS did not have was memory protection. Now, as the name implies, the purpose of memory protection is to prevent processing from accessing memory for which they do not have the permission to access. You know, if you're running a process and another process says, oh, yeah, that memory over there, that you're using, I'll have that and takes it. That's not good. You want to have a system in place to stop that from happening. Memory protection helps mitigate malicious processes from causing damage to other processes or even to the computer system itself. Right, you could program a purposefully malicious program or application that would be meant to steal resources from all other applications and essentially shut a computer down. You don't want that to happen, so usually you would have a memory protection method in place with your operating system, but the Amiga OS did not have that. But this shortcoming was not what led to the discontinuation of Amigo OS. It's not like one day some Amiga based malware broke out and ruined all the computers. That would have been hard to do anyway, because networked computers were pretty darn rare during the era of Amiga OS. Now the reason why the Amiga OS operating system was discontinued and I realized I was just repetitive there, But it's because it has to do with business. Commodore, the company that made and sold the computer, hit hard times really really quickly. So in the early eighties, Commodore was measuring up really well against competitors like Apple and IBM. They were selling computers like hotcakes. Commodore was riding high, but then there were dips in the mid eighties, and then there were more crests and then dips again. Like it got pretty rocky throughout the eighties and into the nineties, and in nineteen ninety two things were going okay. But in nineteen ninety three, sales dropped like a rock and the company lost hundreds of millions of dollars, and it wasn't in a financial position where it could recover from that. So in nineteen ninety four, Commodore announced it was entering into bankruptcy and that it would liquidate all its assets. Now it's true to say that Amiga OS faded away. It lost all official support because the company that supported it ceased to be but the operating system itself is not totally gone. Hyperion Entertainment Overseas essentially a descendant of the Amiga OS, and in fact, the most recent update I can see dates back to April of twenty twenty three, and that's when Hyperion Entertainment released a hot fix for Amiga OS three point two point two so I guess you could say it's only mostly dead. There's still hobbyists who very much are into creating things for the Amiga OS, and it is still supported, just not by the company that created it, so that's kind of cool. But as an official operating system, it's more of a curiosity than anything else. And that's why I decided to start off the episode with that one. Now we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, I'm gonna talk about a pair of operating systems that are deeply entwined with one another and all the drama that comes with it. That's what's coming next. But first let's take this quick break. All right, we're back, So next we have next sort of all right, Like I said, this is a really a two for one entry, and it involves a whole lot of drama. And I have talked over this story before in other episodes of Tech Stuff, but it's such a juicy story we're gonna have to rake the coals once more. Now, this story starts back arguably in the late seventies, but really the tipping point is in nineteen eighty five, that same year that the Amiga came out, and this was due to something that was going on over at Apple, because things were getting rough, all right. The reason things were getting rough, or one of them, is that Steve Jobs had become a bit of a handful. Now. Jobs had co founded Apple along with Steve Wozniak. Wosniak was the actual programmer and engineer of the pair, and the two had grown the company very quickly, but they really weren't the right fit to lead a growing tech corporation right. Investors were a little leery of backing a new bayle tech company run by a couple of college dropouts, and if they wanted to get support from their investors, they needed to make sure they had a quote unquote real leader. And they got a few real leaders in those early years. First up was a guy named Michael Scott, not the guy from the office, and the next was an early Apple investor named Mike Markula. Markula would actually step up to be the chairman of the board of Directors, and a new leader named John Scully the third would come in to take over as CEO of Apple or President of Apple originally now number three here. Scully he had previously served as the president of Pepsi COO so clearly he was the perfect pick that had a computer company anyway. The point is Steve Jobs wasn't the one calling the shots. He was not the executive ultimately in charge of Apple, but occasionally he would act like he was. In the late nineteen seventies, a computer engineer named Jeff Raskin proposed a project that ultimately would become the McIntosh, and apparently Steve Jobs thought this wasn't really a worthwhile pursuit. I should also mention that Raskin's version of the McIntosh was a very, very different thing than what would emerge from Apple in nineteen eighty four. The Raskin's Macintosh was. It could not have been more different. Really, It was a text based, utilitarian workspace as opposed to what the Macintosh would become. Anyway. Jobs wanted the company to back the project he had been working on, which was the Lisa personal computer, and he lobbied to have the Macintosh killed off, but leadership sided with Raskin, and Jobs got angry. The Lisa would end up being pretty much a forgotten failure of Apple. It did not do so well, but by that time Jobs was even angrier because in nineteen eighty two, the rest of the Lisa team forced Jobs off the project. They just felt his demands were kind of making things go askew. So Jobs got kicked off of the project he was running. And that was a tough look because arguably Lisa took its name from Steve Jobs's own daughter, or maybe it didn't, because stories vary on that one. Some stories say no, no, no, it was never meant to be named after Steve Jobs's daughter. That was a coincidence. It was an acronym. But most of the stories seem to say, like, yeah, it was kind of named after his daughter, and then the acronym stuff came later. It was acronyms, not acronyms. It's people like, how can we let's come up with an acronym to justify the name, and then we can argue that we never named it after his daughter in the first place. Anyway, Jobs then honed in on Raskin's team because now he had an ax to grind. He had a grudge against the Lisa team, and so he sort of waded into the Macintosh project and sort of took it over. And like I said, originally that Macintosh project was a text based, keyboard centric machine, and Jobs kind of turned it into a sort of a Lisa clone. It was another computer with a graphic user interface and a mouse, which he had lifted from Xerox Park. And he was now in secret competition with the Lisa team, which meant he was furiously working to prove that they were wrong and that he was right. And maybe you could argue he also lost sight of the fact that they were all actually working for the same company and arguably for the same results. So the Macintosh would actually come out in nineteen eighty four looking very different from what Raskin's original nineteen seventy nine concept was, and this would be the birth of the classic mac OS operating system. That's important because macOS, the classic version of macOS, is one of the two operating systems that I'm really focusing on in this section. But Jobs' behavior was seen as being really disruptive and counterproductive to most of the teams that he interacted with, and Scully and Jobs clashed numerous times, and Markola, the chair of the board and the former head of Apple, sided with Scully against Jobs. So Jobs left the company in nineteen eighty five or he was fired. Interpretations on this vary as well. It's clear that Scully did his best to distance Jobs from any meaningful projects, So I guess it all comes down to semantics, Like you could argue that, Okay, Jobs wasn't fired, he was just removed from operations to the point where he wasn't really doing anything, so he decided to leave. Fun fact, years later, Marcula would actually be instrumental in forcing Scully out of Apple. So I guess what goes around comes around. Anyway, Jobs went off to found a different company. This would be the next company. Now, the focus of the next company was to create hardware for education. Jobs saw an opportunity to design computer workstations specifically meant for the education sector, so like professors and researchers, that kind of thing, not like necessarily your average teacher, because, as it would turn out, the next system would be very expensive and beyond the reach of a lot of say, you know, smaller schools. But people in those fields were already using personal computers. The problem was that PCs are general purpose machines, so they're supposed to be, you know, pretty good at everything, but they're not necessarily really good at any one thing. So Jobs's aim was to create a computer that would be ideally suited for education. Several former Apple employees went with jobs to create this company and they got to work designing the next computer. The operating system for this computer would be called next Step one word. It would take several years to bring this computer to market. So, like I said, starts in nineteen eighty five, and the original hope was to have a machine ready to launch in nineteen eighty seven. But in reality, the next computer wasn't ready until nineteen eighty nine, and even then it was a small number of test machines that were ready. And that initial batch cost six thousand, five hundred dollars per computer. Now, if we adjust that for inflation, because remember this is nineteen eighty nine, today, a computer like that would cost you sixteen thousand, five hundred dollars. Right, That's how much this initial batch, the test batch of next computers cost when they actually were ready to launch the computers in nineteen ninety For realsi's and make it a larger batch. It went for an eye wateringly high nine thousand, nine hundred ninety nine dollars. So again, if we adjust that for inflation, brace yourselves. Those computers cost twenty four thousand dollars a pop. So yeah, this was not a computer aimed at the consumer market. In fact, even universities would look at that sales price and say, who, that's steep. It didn't take long for Jobs to reconsider NeXT's role in the industry. So the funny thing is when he was first thinking about this, originally his plan was to create hardware that was meant for the education sector and not to create software, like he was going to license the software from someone else, but then ultimately changed his mind and created a hardware and software combined approach. But at these computer prices, it was clear the company wasn't going to sell that many units. It just couldn't. These educational institutions just you know, they couldn't afford these incredibly high prices, and he made the decision to gradually shift over to become a software focused company, with the heart of that focus being the next Step operating system. Next Step was built on top of a Unix operating system. It also it featured an object oriented application layer. It had had a graphic user interface or GUY. It could handle multitasking, and it was interesting. It didn't exactly set the world on fire at the time, but it did gain the interest of certain folks in the tech and research and education spheres, so people realized there was value in it, even though it wasn't exactly becoming the next big thing. All right, But now we've got our classic Mac operating system or macOS, and we've got our next step operating system. To continue our story, we actually have to go back to Apple and back to the nineties and see what happened with the company. So Scully had effectively pushed jobs out of Apple. Under Scully, Apple took a path that wasn't very Apple like. One of the things that had set Apple apart from IBM is that when IBM made their personal computers, they used off the shelf parts to do so, and that meant that competitors could build their own IBM style computers also known as IBM compatibles or IBM clones, and they would just use the same or similar parts that IBM used, and they would get an operating system that was compatible with IBMS. Because IBM had failed to secure an exclusive agreement from the provider of their operating system, which I'll talk about later on in this episode. So this ended up being really bad news for IBM's personal computer division, because suddenly the company was facing competition from numerous upstarts, most of which were offering computers that were comparable to IBMS but at a much lower price point. Apple, by contrast, had traditionally developed its own hardware and software in house and jealously guarded its proprietary approach, so if you wanted an Apple computer, you had to go to Apple. But under Scully, that began to shift and began to change. He pushed the company to build a version of its operating system to run on the power PC microprocessor architecture. This was later on seen as a huge mistake. There was also then a move to license Apple technology to other companies, leading to what were called Mac clones that didn't exactly match Apple's own quality standards. This was seen in retrospect as a really big old pair of booboos, bad enough that the board of directors decided to give Scully the boot in nineteen ninety three. They replaced him with a guy named Michael Spindler. Michael Spindler had previously been the chief operating officer, but Spindler also didn't impress the board that much. He led some massive cost cutting measures. While he was at Apple, he shut down several R and D projects. He laid off a lot of folks. But Apple was in a chaotic mess at the time, and the board lost its confidence in Spindler just after a few years, so in nineteen ninety six they swapped him out with a guy named Gil Emilio. So Emilio inherited a really rough situation. Things were in a real mess at Apple. One of the things that was going really poorly was this evolution of the classic Macintosh operating system aka the original mac OS. Because you see, there was a team at Apple that had been working on a next generation operating system for the Mac and it was code named Copeland. But this project had languished in development and was rife with feature creep. So that's when a team gets bogged down by a product. When they add more and more features that don't necessarily contribute to whatever the end purpose of the product is, it just gets bloated. And on top of that, there were also personality conflicts within the team, especially at the leadership level. Project management was in a shambles. It was just a total mess. So Copeland was intended to be macOS eight. It was intended to replace classic Mac operating system and become the new standard, but it was in such a mess that when Apple brought on Emilio, he said, I need to have somebody come in and try and get this into shape. He brought on a woman named Ellen Hancock to try and get Mac OS eight to a point where it could ship, and she essentially said, Yo, this thing is busted. Not in so many words I'm paraphrasing, and she concluded that the project was so mired in issues that it would actually make way more sense to scrap it than to attempt to salvage it. And Emilio didn't really have any other options. He said, I guess that's what we have to do, because it was a real mess. So Apple switched gears and released a far more modest evolution of the classic Mac operating system, and then they called that Mac OS eight. And in the meantime, Emilio was looking outside of Apple to try and find a solution to create an actual next generation operating system. At one point he was said to be looking at a company called be Incorporated. This was led by a guy named Jean Luis Gesse, and I ironically Gass had formerly been an executive at Apple. In fact, you could say he was Scully's choice to replace Jobs back in the eighties, but that deal with b Incorporated fell through, and instead Emilio looked to drum roll please Next Computers and next Step. So that's right. Apple's solution to the problem of having no next generation operating system strategy was to negotiate with the former co founder of Apple. So Emilio convinced the board of directors to pursue an acquisition of Next Computers, and Steve Jobs would more or less come along for the ride, essentially at least initially as a consultant. And Emilio's real goal was to get hold of the Next Step operating system and use that as a foundation for the next generation version of the Mac operating system. So this acquisition happened in early nineteen ninety seven. Apple would release another modest Mac OS update, called fittingly macOS nine, but the plan was to merge next Step with elements from Copeland and other work done at Apple, and so eventually the next generation operating system would come out and it would be this kind of mishmash's combination, and this would be macOS ten, or you might call it mac OSX, because they switched from using you know, the numbers that we would be familiar with and went to Roman numerals for ten. By the time mac OS ten launched, Jobs had convinced the Board of directors to give Amelio his marching orders, so Emilia was no longer the head of Apple. Jobs initially took over as interim CEO of Apple, but he became way less interim over time. He also alienated Ellen Hancock, you know, the woman who came over to evaluate Copeland and determine whether or not could ship. She did not want to use next Step as the found for the next generation Macintosh operating system. She had argued against that, so Jobs obviously did not like her at all because the next Step OS is what brought Jobs back into Apple's fold. So he pretty much made sure that she didn't have a whole lot to do, so she ended up resigning, you know, not long after he kind of took power. But mac OS ten, despite a somewhat slow launch, did become the bedrock for Apple's operating system strategy moving forward, and it would take a few years for Jobs to get things turned around, and it was helped tremendously by some creatively you know, designed products courtesy of Johnny Ive and the legacy operating systems of the classic mac os and next step would kind of ride off into the sunset, and mac OS ten would end up taking their place. All Right, I'm gonna take another quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about another discontinued operating system, this one coming courtesy of Microsoft. But first let's take this break. Okay, it's time to talk about DOS. This one, also, you could argue, has some pretty significant drama associated with it, and this one predates the other operating systems we mentioned because the family of DOS operating systems, beginning with eighty six DOS and ending with MS DOS eight point zero, starts in the early eighties and stretches on until two thousand. Now, to be clear, there have been lots of other DOS versions since MS DOS eight. The family of operating systems has a few branches, more than a few. So I'm specifically talking about MS DOS here, But DOS itself is still alive and well, it's just it's no longer that particular line of DOS. So this family of operating systems ties in with the history of the eighty eighty six microprocessor, which came from Intel. There was this company that was called Seattle Computer Products, and there was a guy who worked there named Tim Patterson who was a pretty brilliant computer engineer and programmer. Patterson built a primitive eighty eighty six based CPU card, and he actually worked with Microsoft in order to get a version of Microsoft Basic, the programming language, to run on this card, along with an extremely primitive operating system. Patterson also became acquainted with an earlier operating system from Microsoft that sometimes it's called m DOS, sometimes it's called MIDAS, but this was an operating system designed to actually run on an older generation of processors, not the eighty eighty six family, but it did give Patterson some ideas. So Patterson then goes back to Seattle Computer Products and gets to to create a suitable operating system to run on top of the eighty eighty six based computers, or at least their computer motherboards. So this is in nineteen eighty. Within half a year he's got one and he calls it q DOS, which he said stands for a quick and dirty operating system, but Seattle Computer Products rebrands it as eighty six DOS, meaning it's a disc operating system that runs on top of eighty eighty six architecture. The company reaches out to Microsoft to create a cross licensing deal. Microsoft would get access to the operating system if Seattle Computer Products could adapt Microsoft Basic for it. Now. This eventually leads to Patterson joining Microsoft. He leaves Seattle Computer Products and joins Microsoft, and then Microsoft outright buys the rights to eighty six DOS from Seattle Computer Products the following year. And here's the thing, this is why there's some drama here. Microsoft buys those rights and then proceeds to go on a crazy licensing deal with this operating system. So while they paid like seventy five grand initially at least for the rights, they made so much money licensing it to all these other companies that folks felt that Microsoft had kind of screwed over Seattle Computer Products. That especially since the perception was that Microsoft had developed MS DOSS when in fact they had purchased it from another company. They did tweak it, like, they didn't just keep it exactly the same and sell it. They did make changes, they made advancements to it and everything and improvements. But the heart of that work came from a totally different company, and so there's some who feel that it was like reverse robin Hood, steal from the poor and give to the rich. Anyway, that all depends on who's story you really want to listen to, I suppose. But Microsoft around this time also signs a deal with IBM, and IBM had wanted an operating system from Microsoft that it could run on its eighty eighty six based machines, specifically its personal computer line, which it was launching. So Microsoft then decides that it will license eighty six DOS to IBM, but they rename it to MS DOS. Now again, if you didn't look further, you might think Bill Gates designed all of this, but he didn't. Again, it came from this other company, although the guy who made it for the other company was now working for Microsoft, So I guess there's some argument to be made there too. So if you've never used MS DOS, let me explain what it was like. And you still can use at least a facsimile of MS DOS if you're using a Windows machine. It's a text based command line operating system. So when you would boot up your computer back in the olden days, you might actually be using a floppy disk to boot your computer up if you didn't have a hard drive, because back in the olden days hard drives were not standard either, and the operating system would be on your desk. It would load into computer memory. Once it loaded in, you would be presented a command prompt and you would type in commands on the command prompt, and then the operating system would execute those commands, assuming that you did it correctly. So you might list in a command to do something like list out all the file directories that are on a disc, whether that's a hard drive or a floppy disk or whatever, and this would be so that you can just see what's on there. Right. There were times where I would have a floppy desk, there'd be no label on it. You put it into a drive, and you would have to, you know, navigate through the file directories just to see what the heck is on this thing, what kind of files? You know? Maybe maybe the organization would give it away right away, or maybe you'd have to dig in to figure it out. Those are the days, man, You would use commands to navigate through the directory, like if you wanted to switch to specific folders and drilled down you would have to do that by typing it in and typing in the command and changing directories that way. You might want to switch to a totally different drive. Maybe you don't want to look at the flobby disk, Maybe you want to look at the hard drive. Maybe you just want to execute a program, or you would have to type in the command to that too, So you would have to memorize a list of commands that you would type in. You could get by just by knowing like half a dozen of those or so, maybe not even that many if you really want to just basic operations for folks who don't work on command line systems. When you first look at this, it looks really obtuse and challenging, like it's got a huge learning curve to it. But it really wasn't that hard. You just had to get some basics down. It just wasn't intuitive the way that a graphics user interface was. That's what the beauty of guy based operating systems happens to be. They are easy to grasp and easy to navigate. If you're using these old text based DOSS systems, they are a little more intimidating. Now I'm old enough that I remember using Doss on computers and loving it. And I actually remember that when Windows rolled around, I hated Windows, not because I didn't think Windows was useful. I certainly recognized how it could be a lot easier for a new person who wasn't familiar with computers to navigate a system that had Windows versus DOS. Right, Like, I knew that that was easier to do. There were times where I felt like it was dumbing things down a bit too much. But really, the reason why I didn't like Windows is that Windows required a decent amount of your computer's resources to run. That meant there were fewer resources are your actual programs. So I resented the fact that so much of my computer's processing power had to go just to running the operating system of all things. I mean, why not just take the time to learn DOSS. It's a much more lightweight operating system, and then your computer runs faster and you could devote that processing power to the actual programs that you want to run. But it turned out I was your typical old man yelling at a passing cloud, and the whole world moved on to guy based operating systems, and eventually all the software that was coming out for PCs required Windows. Like when I would go to an electronics store and look at the computer games and they were all like Windows required. The writing was on the wall. There was just no way for me to get around it. I could not continue to hold out against Windows. I had to get it, and you had to get with the program literally, or just be satisfied with running obsolete software for the rest of your life. And you might be able to tell that I'm still a little bitter about this. Even though it's decades later. Microsoft continued to support DOS and they updated it all the way up until two thousand, that's when they shut down support for MS DOS. But they do still include DOS or DOS like tools in Windows, so you can find little command prompt Windows to help run things sometimes you need to in order to do things like, you know, maybe check a driver or that sort of stuff. And as I said, there are other versions of DOS that are still around. It's not like all versions of DOS died. Microsoft after all, licensed DOS out to dozens of different companies. That's how they made so much bank. Early on IBM, like I said, used a version of DOS that for many years was essentially identical to MS DOS. They had DOS and the two were essentially identical until they finally kind of parted ways many years into that relationship. And as I said, it's one of the reasons why IBM lost the personal computer battle in the first place, right because not only were they using off the shelf components, they were using this operating system that they licensed for Microsoft, and they did not make it an exclusive licensing deal. If they made it exclusive and Microsoft had only been allowed to license to IBM, there would have been nowhere else to go, and this would be a totally different world. But because they didn't do that, it meant that these other companies could attempt to copy IBM by buying those same sort of off the shelf components and then licensing the same MS DOS for Microsoft, and it would be close enough to IBMS to be essentially compatible. And that's where you would get your IBM clones or IBM compatible machines, and you could sell them at a fraction of what IBM was demanding for their PCs. And thus IBM had shot themselves in the foot, and we got all these other companies that came out as a result of that, many of which are no longer around, but some of them still are anyway. That's a look at just a small number of discontinued operating systems. Like I said, there are tons more of these. I haven't really scratched the surface, honestly. I just chose some very high profile, famous ones. So I'll likely do lots more episodes with retrospectives on these older operating systems in the future. Like I said, I need to do one that's just on smartphones or cell phones, because there are quite a few of those as well. In the meantime, I hope that all of you are doing really well. Thank you very much for listening, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you? So chances are if you're listening to the show, you have a handle on what an operating system is. Lots of stuff you use as an operating system. You know, you're a computer, your smartphone, that kind of thing. An operating system's job is to serve as a sort of liaison between a device's hardware, you know, the actual chips and circuits that really make it work, and the software that runs on top of it and gets those hardware things to produce output that you actually want. So operating systems create a starting point or foundation for programmers. If you design an application meant for a specific operating system, then that app should work on pretty much any device that's running that specific operating system sort of. There can actually be exceptions due to various hardware configurations, but you get the idea. So, the operating system manages all sorts of processes like memory management. It also handles data sent to peripheral devices like displays or printers. Before there were operating systems. Computers were far more limited and much less efficient. If you wanted to run a program on an old computer pre operating system days, first you had to wait until nothing else was running on that computer. Then you would have to directly load your program onto the hardware itself. So the classical version of this was a program designated by, say a long strip of paper tape that has holes punched into it in specific places, or a collection of punch cards, that you would have a program built onto, and you would have to load this on a computer. You would also have to preset physical switches on the computer itself to make certain that the computer began in the proper state before you would execute your program. If it wasn't, then you wouldn't get the result you had intended, and you might not know that until much further down the line. So very complicated. It was a physical activity, like it wasn't just click on an icon or type something into a command line, and it didn't always go smoothly. Either a mistake in the programming or a bug in the computer system itself could cause a crash, and that might require a lot of backtracking to fix it. You would have to identify what went wrong, and then fix the problem. This was not always an easy thing to do, but over time, computer scientists developed programming languages and operating systems in order to enhance the capabilities of computers and to make it easier to use them, and eventually there was an explosion of operating systems. Some were peculiar to a specific type of computer or a specific line of computers. While the operating system made things easier for programmers who were working on those machines, you would still often need to specialize in certain classes of computer systems because of differences between them, Like just because you know how to program for computer system A, doesn't mean you could program for computer system B, because how fundamentally different they were. So today I thought I would talk a bit about a few discontinued operating systems. These were once important, but they are no longer in widespread use today. Some of them live on, at least in part. Sometimes they're partly a legacy element that's still found in modern day operating systems. Some of them are supported by hobbyists. And I could go all the way back to the days of like mainframes and micro computers, but I figured it would be best to kind of limit ourselves to personal computers and that sort of thing. Maybe in the future I could go further back. Also in the future, I might do things like smartphones, because there's some smartphone operating systems that are largely discontinued this today, and it would be interesting to have a conversation about those as well. So it's just important to remember that, even though I'm just really talking about PCs in this episode, there have been a lot of other computer systems that had come and gone by the time we get up to that. I decided to start with PCs because I would argue the PC era is really kind of a transformational point in our world. You know, miniaturization and mass production had made it possible to create a computer that could fit on a desktop and also not cost a bazillion dollars. Although I should point out early personal computers were still really expensive, like if you were to compare them to computers today, far more expensive than what you could get today if you're just buying like a basic system, a basic system back in like the late seventies early eighties would cost you a whole lot more than what you would spend today. Comparatively speaking, you have to take inflation into account. So let's start off with a computer system that launched in nineteen eighty five. So nineteen eighty five was a year after Apple had introduced the Macintosh computer. There was this other company called Commodore International. It had originally started out as this humble business of typewriter repair and reselling. Like it was a business that bought old, busted up typewriters, fixed them up, and then sold them again, and eventually they became more of a computer company. They made the Commodore sixty four, one of the most famous personal computers of all time. But in nineteen eighty five they introduced a new machine that seemed to have a whole lot of promise, and it was called the Amme. Now the Amiga didn't actually start off as a Commodore project. A group of folks who had previously worked for Atari decided that they would strike out on their own and make their own company. So they created a business that they called Hi Toro. I don't know why I gave a little role in the r there Hi Toro, Hi Dash t Ro. It was this group that would receive an acquisition offer from Commodore, and they took it. So the Amiga measured up well against competing computers at the time, computers like the Macintosh and the IBM PC. It boasted superior graphics and sound. The Amiga was incredible in that regard. Games on the Amiga had a tendency to look and sound leagues better than similar titles that you could find on other platforms. Animators and artists were drawn no pun intended to the Amiga, and it was seen as a really powerful tool for creative types in the computer space, very much the way Macintosh computers would be viewed a decade later, even though creatives also like Macintosh computers even back in those early days. But when I think about when I first got into media, anyone I knew who worked in media and worked with computers, they had a Macintosh. The mac was seen as the computer for creatives well in the mid eighties. The goal for Commodore was to make the Amiga that type of machine, and for a lot of creatives it was. Now the Amiga operating system was known as Amiga OS, which makes sense, and it had some pretty cool features. For one, it could allow for multitasking. Now not all PCs at this time could multitask. Most would require the user to quit out of one application entirely before they could launch another, But the Amiga OS was different. Now, it wasn't perfect multitasking. The operating syste would have essentially freeze whichever app you were leaving in order to dedicate the resources to whichever app you were switching to. So if you've got app A and app B and you're leaving app A to go to app B, app A just goes into kind of hibernation mode. This method is called preemptive multitasking, and what it means is that you couldn't start a process, then swap to another window and expect the process in that first window to continue while you're doing something else. But still the ability to go back and forth between tests was a big advance over many competitors. Like these days, I think that would I would find that frustrating because sometimes I will start a process in one window and it'll say it's going to take like forty five seconds. I'm like, I don't have time for that. I'm going to go do something in this other window while that completes, and computers today can handle that. The Amiga could not. But you have to remember computational resources were much more limited then, right, We were still in the very early days of personal computers. The operating system also included a disc operating system or DOS. We'll be talking more about the famous MS DOS later in this episode, but this was called Amiga DOSS naturally, and this disc operating system gave the user access to things like the computer's file system and directory, so you can navigate through that way if you didn't want to use the graphic User interface or GUI version of the operating system, and you might normally use Amiga's graphics user interface to get around, but this would give you a much more direct and text based method of navigating the machine. In some ways, it was more efficient and faster if you knew what you were doing, but if you didn't, you could just use the GUY to get around using its various file management systems. Now, one thing a Mega OS did not have was memory protection. Now, as the name implies, the purpose of memory protection is to prevent processing from accessing memory for which they do not have the permission to access. You know, if you're running a process and another process says, oh, yeah, that memory over there, that you're using, I'll have that and takes it. That's not good. You want to have a system in place to stop that from happening. Memory protection helps mitigate malicious processes from causing damage to other processes or even to the computer system itself. Right, you could program a purposefully malicious program or application that would be meant to steal resources from all other applications and essentially shut a computer down. You don't want that to happen, so usually you would have a memory protection method in place with your operating system, but the Amiga OS did not have that. But this shortcoming was not what led to the discontinuation of Amigo OS. It's not like one day some Amiga based malware broke out and ruined all the computers. That would have been hard to do anyway, because networked computers were pretty darn rare during the era of Amiga OS. Now the reason why the Amiga OS operating system was discontinued and I realized I was just repetitive there, But it's because it has to do with business. Commodore, the company that made and sold the computer, hit hard times really really quickly. So in the early eighties, Commodore was measuring up really well against competitors like Apple and IBM. They were selling computers like hotcakes. Commodore was riding high, but then there were dips in the mid eighties, and then there were more crests and then dips again. Like it got pretty rocky throughout the eighties and into the nineties, and in nineteen ninety two things were going okay. But in nineteen ninety three, sales dropped like a rock and the company lost hundreds of millions of dollars, and it wasn't in a financial position where it could recover from that. So in nineteen ninety four, Commodore announced it was entering into bankruptcy and that it would liquidate all its assets. Now it's true to say that Amiga OS faded away. It lost all official support because the company that supported it ceased to be but the operating system itself is not totally gone. Hyperion Entertainment Overseas essentially a descendant of the Amiga OS, and in fact, the most recent update I can see dates back to April of twenty twenty three, and that's when Hyperion Entertainment released a hot fix for Amiga OS three point two point two so I guess you could say it's only mostly dead. There's still hobbyists who very much are into creating things for the Amiga OS, and it is still supported, just not by the company that created it, so that's kind of cool. But as an official operating system, it's more of a curiosity than anything else. And that's why I decided to start off the episode with that one. Now we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, I'm gonna talk about a pair of operating systems that are deeply entwined with one another and all the drama that comes with it. That's what's coming next. But first let's take this quick break. All right, we're back, So next we have next sort of all right, Like I said, this is a really a two for one entry, and it involves a whole lot of drama. And I have talked over this story before in other episodes of Tech Stuff, but it's such a juicy story we're gonna have to rake the coals once more. Now, this story starts back arguably in the late seventies, but really the tipping point is in nineteen eighty five, that same year that the Amiga came out, and this was due to something that was going on over at Apple, because things were getting rough, all right. The reason things were getting rough, or one of them, is that Steve Jobs had become a bit of a handful. Now. Jobs had co founded Apple along with Steve Wozniak. Wosniak was the actual programmer and engineer of the pair, and the two had grown the company very quickly, but they really weren't the right fit to lead a growing tech corporation right. Investors were a little leery of backing a new bayle tech company run by a couple of college dropouts, and if they wanted to get support from their investors, they needed to make sure they had a quote unquote real leader. And they got a few real leaders in those early years. First up was a guy named Michael Scott, not the guy from the office, and the next was an early Apple investor named Mike Markula. Markula would actually step up to be the chairman of the board of Directors, and a new leader named John Scully the third would come in to take over as CEO of Apple or President of Apple originally now number three here. Scully he had previously served as the president of Pepsi COO so clearly he was the perfect pick that had a computer company anyway. The point is Steve Jobs wasn't the one calling the shots. He was not the executive ultimately in charge of Apple, but occasionally he would act like he was. In the late nineteen seventies, a computer engineer named Jeff Raskin proposed a project that ultimately would become the McIntosh, and apparently Steve Jobs thought this wasn't really a worthwhile pursuit. I should also mention that Raskin's version of the McIntosh was a very, very different thing than what would emerge from Apple in nineteen eighty four. The Raskin's Macintosh was. It could not have been more different. Really, It was a text based, utilitarian workspace as opposed to what the Macintosh would become. Anyway. Jobs wanted the company to back the project he had been working on, which was the Lisa personal computer, and he lobbied to have the Macintosh killed off, but leadership sided with Raskin, and Jobs got angry. The Lisa would end up being pretty much a forgotten failure of Apple. It did not do so well, but by that time Jobs was even angrier because in nineteen eighty two, the rest of the Lisa team forced Jobs off the project. They just felt his demands were kind of making things go askew. So Jobs got kicked off of the project he was running. And that was a tough look because arguably Lisa took its name from Steve Jobs's own daughter, or maybe it didn't, because stories vary on that one. Some stories say no, no, no, it was never meant to be named after Steve Jobs's daughter. That was a coincidence. It was an acronym. But most of the stories seem to say, like, yeah, it was kind of named after his daughter, and then the acronym stuff came later. It was acronyms, not acronyms. It's people like, how can we let's come up with an acronym to justify the name, and then we can argue that we never named it after his daughter in the first place. Anyway, Jobs then honed in on Raskin's team because now he had an ax to grind. He had a grudge against the Lisa team, and so he sort of waded into the Macintosh project and sort of took it over. And like I said, originally that Macintosh project was a text based, keyboard centric machine, and Jobs kind of turned it into a sort of a Lisa clone. It was another computer with a graphic user interface and a mouse, which he had lifted from Xerox Park. And he was now in secret competition with the Lisa team, which meant he was furiously working to prove that they were wrong and that he was right. And maybe you could argue he also lost sight of the fact that they were all actually working for the same company and arguably for the same results. So the Macintosh would actually come out in nineteen eighty four looking very different from what Raskin's original nineteen seventy nine concept was, and this would be the birth of the classic mac OS operating system. That's important because macOS, the classic version of macOS, is one of the two operating systems that I'm really focusing on in this section. But Jobs' behavior was seen as being really disruptive and counterproductive to most of the teams that he interacted with, and Scully and Jobs clashed numerous times, and Markola, the chair of the board and the former head of Apple, sided with Scully against Jobs. So Jobs left the company in nineteen eighty five or he was fired. Interpretations on this vary as well. It's clear that Scully did his best to distance Jobs from any meaningful projects, So I guess it all comes down to semantics, Like you could argue that, Okay, Jobs wasn't fired, he was just removed from operations to the point where he wasn't really doing anything, so he decided to leave. Fun fact, years later, Marcula would actually be instrumental in forcing Scully out of Apple. So I guess what goes around comes around. Anyway, Jobs went off to found a different company. This would be the next company. Now, the focus of the next company was to create hardware for education. Jobs saw an opportunity to design computer workstations specifically meant for the education sector, so like professors and researchers, that kind of thing, not like necessarily your average teacher, because, as it would turn out, the next system would be very expensive and beyond the reach of a lot of say, you know, smaller schools. But people in those fields were already using personal computers. The problem was that PCs are general purpose machines, so they're supposed to be, you know, pretty good at everything, but they're not necessarily really good at any one thing. So Jobs's aim was to create a computer that would be ideally suited for education. Several former Apple employees went with jobs to create this company and they got to work designing the next computer. The operating system for this computer would be called next Step one word. It would take several years to bring this computer to market. So, like I said, starts in nineteen eighty five, and the original hope was to have a machine ready to launch in nineteen eighty seven. But in reality, the next computer wasn't ready until nineteen eighty nine, and even then it was a small number of test machines that were ready. And that initial batch cost six thousand, five hundred dollars per computer. Now, if we adjust that for inflation, because remember this is nineteen eighty nine, today, a computer like that would cost you sixteen thousand, five hundred dollars. Right, That's how much this initial batch, the test batch of next computers cost when they actually were ready to launch the computers in nineteen ninety For realsi's and make it a larger batch. It went for an eye wateringly high nine thousand, nine hundred ninety nine dollars. So again, if we adjust that for inflation, brace yourselves. Those computers cost twenty four thousand dollars a pop. So yeah, this was not a computer aimed at the consumer market. In fact, even universities would look at that sales price and say, who, that's steep. It didn't take long for Jobs to reconsider NeXT's role in the industry. So the funny thing is when he was first thinking about this, originally his plan was to create hardware that was meant for the education sector and not to create software, like he was going to license the software from someone else, but then ultimately changed his mind and created a hardware and software combined approach. But at these computer prices, it was clear the company wasn't going to sell that many units. It just couldn't. These educational institutions just you know, they couldn't afford these incredibly high prices, and he made the decision to gradually shift over to become a software focused company, with the heart of that focus being the next Step operating system. Next Step was built on top of a Unix operating system. It also it featured an object oriented application layer. It had had a graphic user interface or GUY. It could handle multitasking, and it was interesting. It didn't exactly set the world on fire at the time, but it did gain the interest of certain folks in the tech and research and education spheres, so people realized there was value in it, even though it wasn't exactly becoming the next big thing. All right, But now we've got our classic Mac operating system or macOS, and we've got our next step operating system. To continue our story, we actually have to go back to Apple and back to the nineties and see what happened with the company. So Scully had effectively pushed jobs out of Apple. Under Scully, Apple took a path that wasn't very Apple like. One of the things that had set Apple apart from IBM is that when IBM made their personal computers, they used off the shelf parts to do so, and that meant that competitors could build their own IBM style computers also known as IBM compatibles or IBM clones, and they would just use the same or similar parts that IBM used, and they would get an operating system that was compatible with IBMS. Because IBM had failed to secure an exclusive agreement from the provider of their operating system, which I'll talk about later on in this episode. So this ended up being really bad news for IBM's personal computer division, because suddenly the company was facing competition from numerous upstarts, most of which were offering computers that were comparable to IBMS but at a much lower price point. Apple, by contrast, had traditionally developed its own hardware and software in house and jealously guarded its proprietary approach, so if you wanted an Apple computer, you had to go to Apple. But under Scully, that began to shift and began to change. He pushed the company to build a version of its operating system to run on the power PC microprocessor architecture. This was later on seen as a huge mistake. There was also then a move to license Apple technology to other companies, leading to what were called Mac clones that didn't exactly match Apple's own quality standards. This was seen in retrospect as a really big old pair of booboos, bad enough that the board of directors decided to give Scully the boot in nineteen ninety three. They replaced him with a guy named Michael Spindler. Michael Spindler had previously been the chief operating officer, but Spindler also didn't impress the board that much. He led some massive cost cutting measures. While he was at Apple, he shut down several R and D projects. He laid off a lot of folks. But Apple was in a chaotic mess at the time, and the board lost its confidence in Spindler just after a few years, so in nineteen ninety six they swapped him out with a guy named Gil Emilio. So Emilio inherited a really rough situation. Things were in a real mess at Apple. One of the things that was going really poorly was this evolution of the classic Macintosh operating system aka the original mac OS. Because you see, there was a team at Apple that had been working on a next generation operating system for the Mac and it was code named Copeland. But this project had languished in development and was rife with feature creep. So that's when a team gets bogged down by a product. When they add more and more features that don't necessarily contribute to whatever the end purpose of the product is, it just gets bloated. And on top of that, there were also personality conflicts within the team, especially at the leadership level. Project management was in a shambles. It was just a total mess. So Copeland was intended to be macOS eight. It was intended to replace classic Mac operating system and become the new standard, but it was in such a mess that when Apple brought on Emilio, he said, I need to have somebody come in and try and get this into shape. He brought on a woman named Ellen Hancock to try and get Mac OS eight to a point where it could ship, and she essentially said, Yo, this thing is busted. Not in so many words I'm paraphrasing, and she concluded that the project was so mired in issues that it would actually make way more sense to scrap it than to attempt to salvage it. And Emilio didn't really have any other options. He said, I guess that's what we have to do, because it was a real mess. So Apple switched gears and released a far more modest evolution of the classic Mac operating system, and then they called that Mac OS eight. And in the meantime, Emilio was looking outside of Apple to try and find a solution to create an actual next generation operating system. At one point he was said to be looking at a company called be Incorporated. This was led by a guy named Jean Luis Gesse, and I ironically Gass had formerly been an executive at Apple. In fact, you could say he was Scully's choice to replace Jobs back in the eighties, but that deal with b Incorporated fell through, and instead Emilio looked to drum roll please Next Computers and next Step. So that's right. Apple's solution to the problem of having no next generation operating system strategy was to negotiate with the former co founder of Apple. So Emilio convinced the board of directors to pursue an acquisition of Next Computers, and Steve Jobs would more or less come along for the ride, essentially at least initially as a consultant. And Emilio's real goal was to get hold of the Next Step operating system and use that as a foundation for the next generation version of the Mac operating system. So this acquisition happened in early nineteen ninety seven. Apple would release another modest Mac OS update, called fittingly macOS nine, but the plan was to merge next Step with elements from Copeland and other work done at Apple, and so eventually the next generation operating system would come out and it would be this kind of mishmash's combination, and this would be macOS ten, or you might call it mac OSX, because they switched from using you know, the numbers that we would be familiar with and went to Roman numerals for ten. By the time mac OS ten launched, Jobs had convinced the Board of directors to give Amelio his marching orders, so Emilia was no longer the head of Apple. Jobs initially took over as interim CEO of Apple, but he became way less interim over time. He also alienated Ellen Hancock, you know, the woman who came over to evaluate Copeland and determine whether or not could ship. She did not want to use next Step as the found for the next generation Macintosh operating system. She had argued against that, so Jobs obviously did not like her at all because the next Step OS is what brought Jobs back into Apple's fold. So he pretty much made sure that she didn't have a whole lot to do, so she ended up resigning, you know, not long after he kind of took power. But mac OS ten, despite a somewhat slow launch, did become the bedrock for Apple's operating system strategy moving forward, and it would take a few years for Jobs to get things turned around, and it was helped tremendously by some creatively you know, designed products courtesy of Johnny Ive and the legacy operating systems of the classic mac os and next step would kind of ride off into the sunset, and mac OS ten would end up taking their place. All Right, I'm gonna take another quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about another discontinued operating system, this one coming courtesy of Microsoft. But first let's take this break. Okay, it's time to talk about DOS. This one, also, you could argue, has some pretty significant drama associated with it, and this one predates the other operating systems we mentioned because the family of DOS operating systems, beginning with eighty six DOS and ending with MS DOS eight point zero, starts in the early eighties and stretches on until two thousand. Now, to be clear, there have been lots of other DOS versions since MS DOS eight. The family of operating systems has a few branches, more than a few. So I'm specifically talking about MS DOS here, But DOS itself is still alive and well, it's just it's no longer that particular line of DOS. So this family of operating systems ties in with the history of the eighty eighty six microprocessor, which came from Intel. There was this company that was called Seattle Computer Products, and there was a guy who worked there named Tim Patterson who was a pretty brilliant computer engineer and programmer. Patterson built a primitive eighty eighty six based CPU card, and he actually worked with Microsoft in order to get a version of Microsoft Basic, the programming language, to run on this card, along with an extremely primitive operating system. Patterson also became acquainted with an earlier operating system from Microsoft that sometimes it's called m DOS, sometimes it's called MIDAS, but this was an operating system designed to actually run on an older generation of processors, not the eighty eighty six family, but it did give Patterson some ideas. So Patterson then goes back to Seattle Computer Products and gets to to create a suitable operating system to run on top of the eighty eighty six based computers, or at least their computer motherboards. So this is in nineteen eighty. Within half a year he's got one and he calls it q DOS, which he said stands for a quick and dirty operating system, but Seattle Computer Products rebrands it as eighty six DOS, meaning it's a disc operating system that runs on top of eighty eighty six architecture. The company reaches out to Microsoft to create a cross licensing deal. Microsoft would get access to the operating system if Seattle Computer Products could adapt Microsoft Basic for it. Now. This eventually leads to Patterson joining Microsoft. He leaves Seattle Computer Products and joins Microsoft, and then Microsoft outright buys the rights to eighty six DOS from Seattle Computer Products the following year. And here's the thing, this is why there's some drama here. Microsoft buys those rights and then proceeds to go on a crazy licensing deal with this operating system. So while they paid like seventy five grand initially at least for the rights, they made so much money licensing it to all these other companies that folks felt that Microsoft had kind of screwed over Seattle Computer Products. That especially since the perception was that Microsoft had developed MS DOSS when in fact they had purchased it from another company. They did tweak it, like, they didn't just keep it exactly the same and sell it. They did make changes, they made advancements to it and everything and improvements. But the heart of that work came from a totally different company, and so there's some who feel that it was like reverse robin Hood, steal from the poor and give to the rich. Anyway, that all depends on who's story you really want to listen to, I suppose. But Microsoft around this time also signs a deal with IBM, and IBM had wanted an operating system from Microsoft that it could run on its eighty eighty six based machines, specifically its personal computer line, which it was launching. So Microsoft then decides that it will license eighty six DOS to IBM, but they rename it to MS DOS. Now again, if you didn't look further, you might think Bill Gates designed all of this, but he didn't. Again, it came from this other company, although the guy who made it for the other company was now working for Microsoft, So I guess there's some argument to be made there too. So if you've never used MS DOS, let me explain what it was like. And you still can use at least a facsimile of MS DOS if you're using a Windows machine. It's a text based command line operating system. So when you would boot up your computer back in the olden days, you might actually be using a floppy disk to boot your computer up if you didn't have a hard drive, because back in the olden days hard drives were not standard either, and the operating system would be on your desk. It would load into computer memory. Once it loaded in, you would be presented a command prompt and you would type in commands on the command prompt, and then the operating system would execute those commands, assuming that you did it correctly. So you might list in a command to do something like list out all the file directories that are on a disc, whether that's a hard drive or a floppy disk or whatever, and this would be so that you can just see what's on there. Right. There were times where I would have a floppy desk, there'd be no label on it. You put it into a drive, and you would have to, you know, navigate through the file directories just to see what the heck is on this thing, what kind of files? You know? Maybe maybe the organization would give it away right away, or maybe you'd have to dig in to figure it out. Those are the days, man, You would use commands to navigate through the directory, like if you wanted to switch to specific folders and drilled down you would have to do that by typing it in and typing in the command and changing directories that way. You might want to switch to a totally different drive. Maybe you don't want to look at the flobby disk, Maybe you want to look at the hard drive. Maybe you just want to execute a program, or you would have to type in the command to that too, So you would have to memorize a list of commands that you would type in. You could get by just by knowing like half a dozen of those or so, maybe not even that many if you really want to just basic operations for folks who don't work on command line systems. When you first look at this, it looks really obtuse and challenging, like it's got a huge learning curve to it. But it really wasn't that hard. You just had to get some basics down. It just wasn't intuitive the way that a graphics user interface was. That's what the beauty of guy based operating systems happens to be. They are easy to grasp and easy to navigate. If you're using these old text based DOSS systems, they are a little more intimidating. Now I'm old enough that I remember using Doss on computers and loving it. And I actually remember that when Windows rolled around, I hated Windows, not because I didn't think Windows was useful. I certainly recognized how it could be a lot easier for a new person who wasn't familiar with computers to navigate a system that had Windows versus DOS. Right, Like, I knew that that was easier to do. There were times where I felt like it was dumbing things down a bit too much. But really, the reason why I didn't like Windows is that Windows required a decent amount of your computer's resources to run. That meant there were fewer resources are your actual programs. So I resented the fact that so much of my computer's processing power had to go just to running the operating system of all things. I mean, why not just take the time to learn DOSS. It's a much more lightweight operating system, and then your computer runs faster and you could devote that processing power to the actual programs that you want to run. But it turned out I was your typical old man yelling at a passing cloud, and the whole world moved on to guy based operating systems, and eventually all the software that was coming out for PCs required Windows. Like when I would go to an electronics store and look at the computer games and they were all like Windows required. The writing was on the wall. There was just no way for me to get around it. I could not continue to hold out against Windows. I had to get it, and you had to get with the program literally, or just be satisfied with running obsolete software for the rest of your life. And you might be able to tell that I'm still a little bitter about this. Even though it's decades later. Microsoft continued to support DOS and they updated it all the way up until two thousand, that's when they shut down support for MS DOS. But they do still include DOS or DOS like tools in Windows, so you can find little command prompt Windows to help run things sometimes you need to in order to do things like, you know, maybe check a driver or that sort of stuff. And as I said, there are other versions of DOS that are still around. It's not like all versions of DOS died. Microsoft after all, licensed DOS out to dozens of different companies. That's how they made so much bank. Early on IBM, like I said, used a version of DOS that for many years was essentially identical to MS DOS. They had DOS and the two were essentially identical until they finally kind of parted ways many years into that relationship. And as I said, it's one of the reasons why IBM lost the personal computer battle in the first place, right because not only were they using off the shelf components, they were using this operating system that they licensed for Microsoft, and they did not make it an exclusive licensing deal. If they made it exclusive and Microsoft had only been allowed to license to IBM, there would have been nowhere else to go, and this would be a totally different world. But because they didn't do that, it meant that these other companies could attempt to copy IBM by buying those same sort of off the shelf components and then licensing the same MS DOS for Microsoft, and it would be close enough to IBMS to be essentially compatible. And that's where you would get your IBM clones or IBM compatible machines, and you could sell them at a fraction of what IBM was demanding for their PCs. And thus IBM had shot themselves in the foot, and we got all these other companies that came out as a result of that, many of which are no longer around, but some of them still are anyway. That's a look at just a small number of discontinued operating systems. Like I said, there are tons more of these. I haven't really scratched the surface, honestly. I just chose some very high profile, famous ones. So I'll likely do lots more episodes with retrospectives on these older operating systems in the future. Like I said, I need to do one that's just on smartphones or cell phones, because there are quite a few of those as well. In the meantime, I hope that all of you are doing really well. Thank you very much for listening, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. 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