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The potential advantage of an older operating system is that it has had years of heavy use that has led to greater dependability and fewer bugs and crashes.
Of course, this only applies if the maker of the operating system has put effort into bug fixes.
As an example, the programmers working on LINUX invest huge effort into ridding their operating system of even the smallest bugs, while Microsoft (Windows) has the policy of ignoring bug fixes unless the bugs affect a substantial percentage of their customers. Some cynical observers believe that Microsoft intentionally includes bugs to increase the profitability of their paid technical support services.
Bill Gates, when questioned about the more than 10,000 known bugs Microsoft acknowledged existed in Windows 98, claimed “There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed.…The reason we come up with new versions is not to fix bugs.…It’s the stupidest reason to buy a new version I ever heard.”
Another potential advantage of an older operating system is the existence of a larger library of available programs.
The potential advantage of a new operating system is that it can introduce important new ideas or techniques without the "drag" of supporting legacy software.
BeOS is an example of a new operating system built with the specific intent of being able to incorporate all new ideas and techniques.
NeXT is an example of an operating system that is fairly old but has some of the most modern and advanced features of any operating system available (especially Yellow Box, Web Objects, and EOF). Rhapsody (also known as Mac OS X Server) incorporates the dependability and new ideas of NeXT with the ideas from the revolutionary Macintosh OS.
1.1 MB QuickTime movie of Bill Gates explaining his criteria for selecting the best operating system.
(transcribed below for those who don’t want to take the download time to see the video clip)
The following chart shows the release dates of the first version of each listed operating system, with operating systems listed in chronological order:
1975
1977
VAX/VMS First VAX Ship date (October)e84
1978
1981
IBM-PC (Apr 24)
PC-DOS 1.0 (Aug 12)
1983
1984
Macintosh (January)
1985
1986
1987
OS/2 (April 2) OS/2 1.0 (December)e99
1993
1995
BeOS (October)e79
2002
Syllable 2003 (July)w92
2003
WIndows Server 2003 (April 24)w90
If you know of any additional release dates, please let Milo know.
The following chart shows the release dates of each version of each listed operating system, in chronological order:
1975
1977
VAX/VMS First VAX Ship date (October)e84
1978
1980
1981
IBM-PC (Apr 24)
1982
IBM PC-DOS version 1.1 (May 7)
1983
1984
Macintosh (January)
MicroVMS announced with VAX/VMS 4.0 (December)e84
1985
1986
MicroVMS retired with VAX/VMS 4.4 (December)e84
1987
1988
1989
1990
Windows 3.0 (May 22)
AIX 3.0e67
1991
OpenVMS name change of VMS to OpenVMSe84
1992
OpenVMS Alpha V1.0; based on VAX/VMS 5.4 (November)e84
1993
BSDi BSD/OS initial production release (March)w71
1994
1995
BeOS (October), “Be publicly shows the BeOS for the first time. At that time, Be builds a proprietary hardware called the BeBox (which is a dual PowerPC machine, roughly a boosted PReP machine).”e79
1996
BeOS Dr6 (developer release): (January)e79
BeOS Dr7 (developer release): (April)e79
BeOS Dr8 (developer release): (September)e79
FreeBSD 2.2 (November) — “branched from the development mainline”w48
1997
FreeBSD 2.1.7.1 (February) — “end of mainstream development on 2.1-stable”w48
FreeBSD 2.2.1 (April) — “first full release of 2.2 [series]”w48
BeOS Advanced Access Preview Release: (May)e79
BeOS PR (preview release): (July)e79
AIX 4.3 (October)e67
BeOS PR2 (preview release): (October)e79
1998
BeOS Release 3 for Intel x86: (March)e79
BeOS Release 3 for PowerPC: (April)e79
BeOS Release 3.1: (June)e79
BeOS Release 3.2: (July)e79
Macintosh 8. 5 (October)
FreeBSD 3.0 (October) — “first official 3.0 release”w48
FreeBSD 2.2.8 (November) — “the last release on the 2.2 branch”w48
1999
2000
Windows 2000 1.0 (February 17)w50
Macintosh OS X public beta (September 13)
2001
Macintosh OS X 10.0 (March 24)
2002
Syllable 2003 (July)w92
2003
WIndows Server 2003 (April 24)w90
If you know of any additional release dates, please let Milo know.
“At least Pixar’s second film doesn’t have to be backward-compatible with the first.” —Steve Jobs
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Last Updated: September 12, 2004
Created: August 15, 1998
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