Worst OS in history?

[Amaris]

For various reasons that really have nothing to do with the OS itself.

1. People don't like change. Vista works considerably differently from XP.
2. Driver support has been absolutely abysmal. Shame on the manufacturers who won't support Vista. Unbelievable.
3. The overly-complicated pricing model. How many versions of one OS do we really need?!

The only thing it has in common with Me is poor adoption. It's not a marginal improvement over XP, it's a significant change and it requires adjustment. People didn't like the new GUI of Windows 95, either, but they just dealt with it--sometimes they waited until 98 to jump on board, though. We've had the same basic GUI paradigm for Windows since 1995, you know? People just don't like to change, I guess.

Vista did and does have problems in and of itself, but they are far less egregious than the problems, say, 95 or XP had at launch.

Well there the was the whole "Vista Ready" debarcle that's seen Intel on the recieving end of a lawsuit.

I'm not sure if there was ever a lawsuit over it, but something similar happened when Microsoft released Win95. People believed about the minimum requirements which go the OS ticking over, just, but forget actually doing anything with it. Microsoft learnt their leason this time. In order to be Windows 7 Ready a system must be able to run the 64bit version of Windows 7.

An Australian retailer had a big midnight opening for the release of Windows 95 only to be innundated by people who couldn't use it on their computer.

Oh yeah, I forgot about that "Vista Capable" nightmare. That reminds me of the whole other side of the debacle: Microsoft mishandled Vista adoption from day one. The OS itself was fine--if you had the hardware to run it. But way too many PCs were sold that couldn't really handle it. Major screwup on MS' part. Even their own VPs were pissed off and confused about the whole thing.

I was working at Dell at the time. Our software download machines had just been brought in to handle the new Vista OS (these systems had to be Vista capable so they could run the installs with the OEM and image data). We get 80 new Vista capable workstations in to handle the new OS, and the trial run (I was at the switch on this one), and all the systems failed. All of them. They failed because the hardware wasn't up to speed for Vista. We missed about 3000 orders before we were able to jury rig something to work. I laughed, but only later, and not in front of the Engineering Lead.

J.

 

[Mallory]

Boy, you guys should be glad you never had to work on some the minis and mainframes I had to back in the 70's. Everything after that pales in comparison when it comes to defining the word "worst".

 

[Marc]

Boy, you guys should be glad you never had to work on some the minis and mainframes I had to back in the 70's. Everything after that pales in comparison when it comes to defining the word "worst".

yes but no doubt it taught you some good habbits. My dad programmed on mainframes back in the early 70s and only have a few kb of ram to run your programs in taught you to be nice and tight with your code

Closed I've ever come to that was working on an AS/400 - the sucker took 30mins to shutdown so woe betide anyone who cocked the token ring cable up (if there was an interruption to the cable you had to rebook the -400).

 

[Caretaker]

Personally, the worst I've dealt with: Windows ME. I can't remember not having problems with it.

 

[Amaris]

I must have had the only properly working version of Windows ME in the entirety of existence.


J.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Boy, you guys should be glad you never had to work on some the minis and mainframes I had to back in the 70's. Everything after that pales in comparison when it comes to defining the word "worst".

I consider myself highly fortunate to have been born after that era.

The idea of coding in Fortran on punchcards makes me suicidal.

 

[Amaris]

Boy, you guys should be glad you never had to work on some the minis and mainframes I had to back in the 70's. Everything after that pales in comparison when it comes to defining the word "worst".

I consider myself highly fortunate to have been born after that era.

The idea of coding in Fortran on punchcards makes me suicidal.

I believe there is only one known photo of Mallory coding in Fortran, and I believe it looked something like this:

That's brutal, man, but he looks happy.

J.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Punchcards -- nah, paper tape is the future. Splicing is such fun.

 

[John Picard]

Punchcards -- nah, paper tape is the future. Splicing is such fun.

We had a punch card reader when I was on a carrier (late-1980's). Damned thing never worked even when the tech who taught repairs on that unit for the Navy transfered to the ship. He was stumped beyond belief, even after taking all of the boards to the school's unit, swapping them, and getting them to work there. Three months of screwing around with it and one day the techs *finally* listened to the Data Processing Supervisor and checked the communications wires -- they were backwards!

Either way, we still never used it. We did have to process paper tape at times. I hated that thing as it was random/sporadic if it would read paper or not. It seemed to develop amnesia while operating, just chugging along and then stop. I'd run the tape back and forth a couple of times and then it would start again. It was a great day when we actually got the rocks up in Communications to dump the message traffic to floppy disk.

 

[Marc]

Punchcards -- nah, paper tape is the future. Splicing is such fun.

We had a punch card reader when I was on a carrier (late-1980's). Damned thing never worked even when the tech who taught repairs on that unit for the Navy transfered to the ship. He was stumped beyond belief, even after taking all of the boards to the school's unit, swapping them, and getting them to work there. Three months of screwing around with it and one day the techs *finally* listened to the Data Processing Supervisor and checked the communications wires -- they were backwards!

Either way, we still never used it. We did have to process paper tape at times. I hated that thing as it was random/sporadic if it would read paper or not. It seemed to develop amnesia while operating, just chugging along and then stop. I'd run the tape back and forth a couple of times and then it would start again. It was a great day when we actually got the rocks up in Communications to dump the message traffic to floppy disk.

I guess it was relic from when the ship was commissioned as I'm surpised that they would of persisted with something so tempremental on the warship.

 

[John Picard]

Punchcards -- nah, paper tape is the future. Splicing is such fun.

We had a punch card reader when I was on a carrier (late-1980's). Damned thing never worked even when the tech who taught repairs on that unit for the Navy transfered to the ship. He was stumped beyond belief, even after taking all of the boards to the school's unit, swapping them, and getting them to work there. Three months of screwing around with it and one day the techs *finally* listened to the Data Processing Supervisor and checked the communications wires -- they were backwards!

Either way, we still never used it. We did have to process paper tape at times. I hated that thing as it was random/sporadic if it would read paper or not. It seemed to develop amnesia while operating, just chugging along and then stop. I'd run the tape back and forth a couple of times and then it would start again. It was a great day when we actually got the rocks up in Communications to dump the message traffic to floppy disk.

I guess it was relic from when the ship was commissioned as I'm surpised that they would of persisted with something so tempremental on the warship.

Are you serious? The USS Carl Vinson was commissioned in the early 1980's and was using ASW gear from the USS Oriskany! She didn't get an upgrade until her 1990/91 overhaul to something more modern.

The real military isn't *anything* like you see in the movies or on TV.

 

[Vance]

Does Vista take the proverbial biscuit? I can't imagine a worse OS, it just fails spectacularly, but I'm sure there are ones out there.

Vista, for all it's malignment, is by no means the worst OS. Heck, even ME easily goes farther in the 'suck' pile than that. But, you know, it's older than two years so people may not remember it.

You also have several versions of Linux, BeOS, PC-OS, and a myriad of others over the years. Many of the absolute worst were the MS-DOS ripoffs that came out in the mid 1990s to make use of 'extended memory'... usually at the cost of something far more basic.

 

[USS KG5]

Are you serious? The USS Carl Vinson was commissioned in the early 1980's and was using ASW gear from the USS Oriskany! She didn't get an upgrade until her 1990/91 overhaul to something more modern.

The real military isn't *anything* like you see in the movies or on TV.

Ever tried writing about it? I mean putting a few stories online, would probably interest quite a few posters on here, myself included.

Personally I'd have loved a career in the RAF but asthma ruled me out!

 

[Marc]

We had a punch card reader when I was on a carrier (late-1980's). Damned thing never worked even when the tech who taught repairs on that unit for the Navy transfered to the ship. He was stumped beyond belief, even after taking all of the boards to the school's unit, swapping them, and getting them to work there. Three months of screwing around with it and one day the techs *finally* listened to the Data Processing Supervisor and checked the communications wires -- they were backwards!

Either way, we still never used it. We did have to process paper tape at times. I hated that thing as it was random/sporadic if it would read paper or not. It seemed to develop amnesia while operating, just chugging along and then stop. I'd run the tape back and forth a couple of times and then it would start again. It was a great day when we actually got the rocks up in Communications to dump the message traffic to floppy disk.

I guess it was relic from when the ship was commissioned as I'm surpised that they would of persisted with something so tempremental on the warship.

Are you serious? The USS Carl Vinson was commissioned in the early 1980's and was using ASW gear from the USS Oriskany! She didn't get an upgrade until her 1990/91 overhaul to something more modern.

The real military isn't *anything* like you see in the movies or on TV.

Well I couldn't remember if you'd said why Carrier you were on and well when you said paper tape I immediately thought of one launched in the late 60s through to the mid 70s.

Though yes I did guess I have watched too much tv and expect that a new ship would launch with current techology (yeah I know that sometimes tried and true is better than latest and greatest but still paper tape over either magnet tape or diskette?).

Did they ever work out how the the wires got crossed?

 

[Kaziarl]

probably already been said, but my only problem with vista was from when I got my computer. It was brand new, vista pre-installed, and I was told it would handle the OS just fine.

Now, granted, it wasn't an expensive computer. ($500 laptop 3 years ago) But when you get told it will handle the OS you kind of expect it to... oh... I dunno.... handle the OS.

Yeah, not in the slightest. Their "Vista Capable" laptop had an 80gb hard drive, of which the OS alone seemed to take half. 512 mb of ram, soaked up by the OS whenever you wanted to open the start menu.

I liked the look, even a couple of features that I got to toy around with, but in the end I actually downgraded to XP. Now, that was also a mess, but thats a story for another thread.

 

[Broccoli]

I must have had the only properly working version of Windows ME in the entirety of existence.


J.

I had ME and I never had a problem with it beyond issues that I created due to my own computer ignorance.

 

[Amaris]

I must have had the only properly working version of Windows ME in the entirety of existence.


J.

I had ME and I never had a problem with it beyond issues that I created due to my own computer ignorance.

Hooray, that's... two!


J.

 

[John Picard]

Are you serious? The USS Carl Vinson was commissioned in the early 1980's and was using ASW gear from the USS Oriskany! She didn't get an upgrade until her 1990/91 overhaul to something more modern.

The real military isn't *anything* like you see in the movies or on TV.

Ever tried writing about it? I mean putting a few stories online, would probably interest quite a few posters on here, myself included.

Personally I'd have loved a career in the RAF but asthma ruled me out!

Mmmm, that's better left to a pub crawl or the like. We often had to sign non-disclosure forms before deployments regarding what we did/didn't/would/wouldn't see.

I guess it was relic from when the ship was commissioned as I'm surpised that they would of persisted with something so tempremental on the warship.

Are you serious? The USS Carl Vinson was commissioned in the early 1980's and was using ASW gear from the USS Oriskany! She didn't get an upgrade until her 1990/91 overhaul to something more modern.

The real military isn't *anything* like you see in the movies or on TV.

Well I couldn't remember if you'd said why Carrier you were on and well when you said paper tape I immediately thought of one launched in the late 60s through to the mid 70s.

Though yes I did guess I have watched too much tv and expect that a new ship would launch with current techology (yeah I know that sometimes tried and true is better than latest and greatest but still paper tape over either magnet tape or diskette?).

The paper tape was for message traffic. Believe me, the military keeps some equipment for a long, long time. Our data processing shop used the old Miltope vacuum tape drives, which dated back to the 1960's or so. Old? Sure. Temperamental? Hell yes. Durable? Definitely! It took quite a bit of bitching and fighting to get the Communications Department to understand that the message tape could be replaced with a floppy diskette.

Did they ever work out how the the wires got crossed?

Oh, I forgot about that. Yes, it seems that the wires were crossed when the ADP shop was moved during a refit. It stumped everyone that the CRPU (Card Reader Punch Unit) worked great at the old location, but once the shop was moved, it wouldn't work.

 

[Marc]

Are you serious? The USS Carl Vinson was commissioned in the early 1980's and was using ASW gear from the USS Oriskany! She didn't get an upgrade until her 1990/91 overhaul to something more modern.

The real military isn't *anything* like you see in the movies or on TV.

Ever tried writing about it? I mean putting a few stories online, would probably interest quite a few posters on here, myself included.

Personally I'd have loved a career in the RAF but asthma ruled me out!

Mmmm, that's better left to a pub crawl or the like. We often had to sign non-disclosure forms before deployments regarding what we did/didn't/would/wouldn't see.

Sometimes think that secrecy isn't to stop the Russians but to stop those who dig the big machinery etc etc. Stuff the Russians - the rest of want to know what makes those carriers tick

Well I couldn't remember if you'd said why Carrier you were on and well when you said paper tape I immediately thought of one launched in the late 60s through to the mid 70s.

Though yes I did guess I have watched too much tv and expect that a new ship would launch with current techology (yeah I know that sometimes tried and true is better than latest and greatest but still paper tape over either magnet tape or diskette?).

The paper tape was for message traffic. Believe me, the military keeps some equipment for a long, long time. Our data processing shop used the old Miltope vacuum tape drives, which dated back to the 1960's or so. Old? Sure. Temperamental? Hell yes. Durable? Definitely! It took quite a bit of bitching and fighting to get the Communications Department to understand that the message tape could be replaced with a floppy diskette.
[/quote]

But how much of that was the Comms.Dept not actually wanting to get off their arses and actuall do something that would help another division?

 

[John Picard]

Ever tried writing about it? I mean putting a few stories online, would probably interest quite a few posters on here, myself included.

Personally I'd have loved a career in the RAF but asthma ruled me out!

Mmmm, that's better left to a pub crawl or the like. We often had to sign non-disclosure forms before deployments regarding what we did/didn't/would/wouldn't see.

Sometimes think that secrecy isn't to stop the Russians but to stop those who dig the big machinery etc etc. Stuff the Russians - the rest of want to know what makes those carriers tick

Well I couldn't remember if you'd said why Carrier you were on and well when you said paper tape I immediately thought of one launched in the late 60s through to the mid 70s.

Though yes I did guess I have watched too much tv and expect that a new ship would launch with current techology (yeah I know that sometimes tried and true is better than latest and greatest but still paper tape over either magnet tape or diskette?).

The paper tape was for message traffic. Believe me, the military keeps some equipment for a long, long time. Our data processing shop used the old Miltope vacuum tape drives, which dated back to the 1960's or so. Old? Sure. Temperamental? Hell yes. Durable? Definitely! It took quite a bit of bitching and fighting to get the Communications Department to understand that the message tape could be replaced with a floppy diskette.

But how much of that was the Comms.Dept not actually wanting to get off their arses and actually do something that would help another division?

About 100%. Some people are good about building Fiefdoms, and even back then they shunned technology or anything they thought would increase their workload. (Key word: thought)