BeOS and QNX remain to this day some of my favorite OSs, in terms of being designed rather than grown (people often say this about BSD, but BSD is based on Unix, and Unix was grown) and complete (ie, packaging, window management, all tools implemented with accompanying control panels, etc).
Yep. I've used many of the operating systems throughout computing history, and BeOS still remains my favorite, in terms of its design and usability. It's a damn shame it died such an early death.
I keep hoping that someday modern operating systems will catch up to it. ;-)
And I’m frustrated every day that several years after he started at Apple, BeOS still does a much better job w/r/t user-extensible metadata than OS X does.
The computer my family got in 1996 had 8 MB of memory and (I believe) 512 MB of disk space. Some IBM beige box running windows 3.1, if I recall correctly.
Edit: I also remember that upgrading it to 16 MB of memory cost us a couple hundred dollars. Fun times.
My PC I had for University, bought in late 1994, had 16MB RAM (which was huge), typical PC in that era ('92-94) was 4MB RAM, which was considered the minimum to run Window 3.1. I think the 8MB figures are a little wide of the marque, by 1997 most machines I saw were already hitting 32MB upwards, by 1998 many were hitting 128MB at the upper end to run Windows NT 4.0.
Mine was an Atari 520ST. First DOS computer was a 286-12, which we upgraded to 286-16. Yes, 4mhz was an upgrade!
I sometimes wish I was about five years younger (I'm 29) - when I first got into making stuff on computers the languages were too much effort for even the tiniest result.
