Great and Disappointing Operating Systems of the Decade

“Writing about the best and worst in operating system is like a
crap magnet: I’m pressing the big red button. People develop a
personal relationship with operating systems, whether on servers or
their personal machine or phone. The love/hate relationship becomes
anchored with deep emotions about the merits/detractions of the
devices they use– through the lenses of operating systems.

“Great in this case means possibly really great, and
alternatively, really awful. Some made us happy. Others made us
sad, or worse, mad. Some we toiled happily with the winners, while
others burned up precious weekend time in fits of compatibility
issues, installation nightmares, and startling kernel traps and
various blue/black/red screens of death. Some deserved to become
dumpster fodder, and others are still humming away, quietly, and
doing their job. This is about both kinds.

“Disappointing

“Windows Millennium Edition (WinME)

“This was the last version of Microsoft Windows that ran on top
of Microsoft DOS, and it wasn’t well-designed. Microsoft released
it as a stop gap version to address slightly more memory and disk
before the two Windows code bases would be merged together into
Windows 2000 client and server editions. Technically, it arrived
late in the 1990’s, but its inclusion here is to remember the pain
of the name.”

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