Originally posted by NocturnalPS
Wow 
well thanks for the even more input on this . Well one more question? Is DOS used in anyother OS other than older ver. of Windows?
Well, no. Bill Gates wrote the early versions of DOS as a college student. He founded a little company called "Microsoft" with his buddy Paul Allen. Their army of coding minions made MS-DOS, then started working on this thing called "Windows".
Operating systems are restricted mostly by the hardware. DOS requires an IBM compatible X86. The most popular being the Intel Pentium family, and predecessors. Apple also uses an IBM processor. Here's some brain tricks for you ... the PowerPC is a Motorola processor. Motorola is owned by IBM. IBM wrote OS/2 Warp (the little operating system that couldn't get up the hill) which ran programs with the win32.dll instruction set, just like Windows does, which means it could run Windows applications. Problem was, it wasn't marketed worth a darn so no one knows about OS/2, which is a shame. Windows used to be able to install on X86, Alpha, and PPC processors. Microsoft began rewriting Windows so that it would only run on X86 (Intel) hardware, and this also left OS/2 out of the shared application market, really shutting the door. IBM started it all. Xerox invented the GUI, but let it slip away to some guys from California named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniack (Tha Woz), who previously formed a little company called Apple and had made home computers. With the gui they mad the Lisa (which bombed) and later the Macintosh. Microsoft also stole the gui from Xerox and made their own pretty interface called Windows. There were lawsuites, no one really won, and now Microsoft (from what I understand) is forced to make software for the Macintosh operating system. Ha ha. So Microsoft tries to screw IBM out of hardware sales by moving away from their processors, but they have to make software for another company that buys from IBM. At least, that's the way I see it.
BSD Unix, True64 Unix, Solaris, SunOS, Linux, NeXT, AmigaOS, IRIX, BeOS, Minux ... are all 'stand alone' operating systems. No crummy DOS here baby! Problem is ... they were all written by groups of incredibly smart people who didn't care how pretty it was, so none of them caught on for the average user. BSD, True64, Solaris, and Linux are best suited for server environments for this reason. They are hardcore operating systems that can do things that Windows and Mac OS only dream about. SunOS, AmigaOS, NeXT, BeOS, and Minux have all gone the way of the Dodo. Either phased out because of better products or just got lost in the shuffle of marketing. BeOS, AmigaOS, and NeXT are three of the greatest operating systems to ever be conceived ... it's a true shame to see them whithering away. Amiga is still around, doing what they can to improve quality in programing, but Be and NeXT have been 'liquidated' for features of their programs, but not their operating systems. NeXT was actually Steve Jobs's attempt at a UNIX-like OS during his away time from Apple.
Sun (
http://www.sun.com ) is the maker of SunOS and Solaris. Solaris basically runs the Internet. The computers that store the information about which computer "is gtplanet.net" are all Sun servers. Their flagship computer right now is the SunFire Enterprise 15,000. A fully loaded E-15K holds 72 processors (64bit) running at 900MHz with 8mb cache, and over half a terabyte (512GB) of RAM. An Intel Pentium 3 900mhz processor has 128kb of cache and is only 32bit. Bit rates are exponential, so going from 32bit to 64bit allows you to process exceding huge chuncks of data. And processor cache is used to store whatever processes the computer is currently working on, the more the better. Compare 256kb to 8mb .... that would be 1/32 the amount of cache. Sheit! I've never actually done the math on that ... that's a lot of cache.
Linux is a rare OS. It has been 'ported' to every conceivable hardware configuration. There is not a processor that Linux can't be compiled to run on. Heck, it can even run a Dreamcast, PS, PS2, XBox, and GameCube. Packaged installs include: Anything that Windows runs on, all Macintosh hardware, all Sun hardware, all SGI hardware, all NeXT hardware, all IBM hardware, all Amiga hardware, all Be hardware, ... what am I leaving out? Oh, people have even had it running on old mainframes. Now that is some seriously cool stuff. The major companies that are using Linux - IBM, HP, Compaq, Dell, and all the "we do Linux only" shops like Penguin Computing. Did you know that Google is powered by a fleet of little Linux boxen? They're about like your personal computer, only there are about a thousand of them. When one dies, they drop in a new one and it begins filling its hard drive with cached websites.
People talk about the latest and greatest all the time, and how much faster it is than the previous latest and greatest. They rarely think about computers that A) didn't even run a windowized interface, and B) weren't measured in GHz, MHz, or even low KHz, but just Hz. That's when it all started my friends. And Microsoft and Apple were still pooping their pants while DEC, HP and IBM were making the world go`round.
But that doesn't mean anything to anyone here, I'm afraid ... hey if you're looking for a kick ass computer to purchase this season, get a Sony MX workstation. They're PIMP!
http://www.vaio.net/mx_overview.htm
My second choice would be anything haus from Dell. I'm digging the Inspiron 8100 right now (: I mean, 15" display that does 1600 x 1200? BEAT THAT ANYBODY!
Man, I am such a geek ....
~LoudMusic
) This the primary reason why 3.1, 95, and 98 are so unreliable.
) You get to the screen that displays drives on the website.... There are so many choices. In my case there are 6 ALL In Wonder cards to choose. Every try picking the wrong one 
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