[plug] windows - a rant

[Craig Ringer]

On Fri, 2004-05-07 at 16:48, George Raphael wrote:

> There are clearly some very poor operating systems. Two that come to mind
> are Windows 98 and Mac OS 7. They weren't even good at the time. DOS was
> more stable.

?!?

I would've put OS7 up there with the _best_ when it was released. While
it's reliability wasn't 100%, it was reasonably solid - and otherwise a
very good OS. Even if you did need an add-on TCP/IP stack and PPP
software. Remember, though, that OS7 was around for a long time, and
perhaps didn't age very gracefully. IFIRC, OS7 was initially up against
Windows 3.1.1, before the release of Win95 - and there was just no
contest.

OS9, on the other hand, deserves a place below even Win98 IMHO. No
protected memory, a really shoddy (IMHO) virtual memory system, no SMP
support except through a scary application-level library, etc. Bad fonts
also cause it to fall on its face, often in bizarre and truly unexpected
ways. To top it all off, it doesn't seem to do network disk access
asynchronously - if a program accesses something on a network volume,
almost everything _stops_ until it gets it. If the remote machine
happens to have crashed... you're in for quite a wait.

Craig Ringer