My personal operating system history
As I find myself using Ubuntu and Windows 8 more these days, it got me thinking about my personal history with operating systems. I’ve often been a multi-OS user, even back int he 1980s. So I plotted out to the best of my recollection what OSs I had on my machines dating back to 1982.
This doesn’t count the number of machines just the OSs running on them. In most cases there were more machines than OSs. In some cases fewer, since I was virtualizing through much of the 2000s. When there are multiple OSs I have listed them in order of most used. I only listed years in which I changed an OS.
1981 – Apple II
1982 – TI 99/4A
1984 – Commodore 64/Timex Sinclair
1985 – Commodore 64
1988 – Windows 286
1990 – Apple System 6/Windows 286
1993 – Windows 3.1
1996 – Windows 95
1998 – Windows 98
2000 – Windows 98/Mandrake
2001 – Windows XP/Mandrake
2002 – Windows XP/Xandros
2004 – Windows XP
2007 – Windows XP/Windows Vista/OS X/Ubuntu
2009 – OS X/Windows XP/Windows 7/Ubuntu
2010 – OS X/Windows 7/Ubuntu
2012 – Ubuntu/Windows 8/OS X
Update: Did I use DOS? Yes. a lot, especially in the Windows 286 years. These are also not the only OSs I ever used. Just the ones I lived in. I experimented with BeOS and OS/2 Warp, OK? Who didn’t? I’m not ashamed.
October 31st, 2012 at 6:50 pm
It’s ok, those were crazy times and people were doing crazy things. At least you didn’t drive a DeLorean.
October 31st, 2012 at 6:59 pm
Awesome list, thanks for sharing. Interesting that you didn’t try Mac OS “1990 Apple System 6” until 1990. I thought you might be an early adopter closer to the ’84 release of the Mac.
October 31st, 2012 at 7:17 pm
Do you still have any 99/4a’s?
October 31st, 2012 at 8:33 pm
MS-DOS or PC-DOS?
October 31st, 2012 at 9:13 pm
That almost mirrors my experience but I would have listed MS DOS and Windows NT. My Linux path was more Redhat, Fedora, CentOS.
Cheers,
Ray
November 1st, 2012 at 12:01 am
So, it was only a brief 99 foray, eh? :-)
November 1st, 2012 at 12:40 am
Tom,
I’m really glad you came clean on this man. I mean, this is the sort of transparency we’ve come to expect from our tech journalists. I think it’s really brave of you to come forward about your Xandros experience. Kudos!
D
November 1st, 2012 at 2:42 pm
You do understand that Ubuntu is just a branding (distribution) of Linux and is not an operating system in itself. All Linux distros put out at the same time share over 99% of the codebase with each other. Ubuntu was targeted at newbies who then don’t seem to grasp that they are actually running Linux.
November 1st, 2012 at 2:46 pm
Yes.
November 1st, 2012 at 9:48 pm
Interesting, Tom.
I started out with:
Apple II
DOS Win 3.11
Win 95
Win 98/Mandrake/Red Hat/Corel
Win ME/Win 2000
Win XP/BeOS/Debian
Win XP/ Longhorn(Early Vista)/FreeBSD/Debian
Win 7/Mac OSX SL\Lion/Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Haiku
Win 8/Mac OSX ML
It’s been an interesting ride.