Parts of it live on in MacOS and iOS to this day.īeOS was a failure to launch. They would have probably been a contender, except Apple rehired Steve Jobs who got Apple to buy NeXT and turn it into MacOS X. Next was niche, and was only ever used by a few professional graphics companies that would normally be using SGI workstations running IRIX. Novel Netware was the de-facto standard until Windows NT 4 or so. DR-DOS was fairly widely used until the mid 90’s. It was still used in niches for another decade, especially in ATMs. The ability to run Windows software made it a no-brainer, until Microsoft screwed IBM over with Win95. OS/2 was a big contender in business computers between Win 3.1 and 95. I remember they were a very vocal minority, but I knew several Amiga fans in real life, and a lot of highschools had Amigas with Video Toasters for videography classes, even up into the late 90’s. Is the retro crowd on to something or just stuck looking at the past through rose colored glasses?Īmiga was pretty big. Beyond that it was always Windows and MacOS or DOS and some sort of Apple depending on the decade.ĭid I just grow up in some unusually drab, low variety neck of the woods or did these other systems never really have their day outside of a few enthusiasts. Typically everyone was afraid to touch those computers as no one knew how to set it up again if something went wrong. I remember a few rare businesses having OS2 machines that no one really used except to control one specific machine each. And in the pre-internet days I used to read all the computer magazines the local libraries carried. Posted in Software Hacks Tagged application, BeOS, compatibility, cross-platform, emulator, linux, macOS, retro, run-time environment, sheepshaver, windows Post navigationįrom the wistful reminiscences of today’s retro computing enthusiasts one would think that the computer OS market was once wide open where one could check the computer in any office or home and not make a good guess as to what OS they would find before they got there.Īmiga, NeXT, BeOS? I don’t remember running into any of these until first reading of them in what was basically their obituaries. Even if all you are hanging on to is an old BeBox. SheepShaver has been around since the late 90s, too, so we’re surprised that we haven’t featured it before since it is such a powerful tool for cross-platform compatibility for computers of this era. As for the name, it’s a play on another piece of software called ShapeShifter which brought a Mac-II emulator to the Amiga. Certain configurations allow applications to run natively without any emulation at all, and there is plenty of hardware support built-in as well.įor anyone running retro hardware from the late 90s or early 00s, this could be just the ticket to get an application running that wasn’t ever supported on one of these machines. Unix and Linux are both supported, as well as Mac OS X, Windows NT, 2000, and XP, and the enigmatic BeOS. But SheepShaver does allow you to run software written for MacOS 7.5.2 thru 9.0.4 in a different environment. It’s not the sort of virtualization that we’re used to in the modern world, with an entire operating system running on a sanctioned-off part of your system. If you’ve still got a box running one of these retro systems, SheepShaver might be able to help expand your software library. Amiga, Unix, OS/2, MacOS, NeXT, BeOS, as well as competing DOSes, were all on the table at various points. This relatively stable state hasn’t always existed, though, as the computing scene even as late as the 90s was awash with all kinds of competing operating systems and various incompatible hardware. The world of desktop computing has coalesced into what is essentially a duopoly, with Windows machines making up the bulk of the market share and Apple carving out a dedicated minority.
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