Atari TOS 2.06/3.06-TT
I was one of the last of my crowd to switch to Windows.
I was a die-hard Atari ST/TT user (after the Sinclair and other kits that were basically curious toys,
back then if you wanted to be connected you had to have a college/university account and go through
their mainframe via telephone, later came local sysops but they were specialised, one would be Atari,
another IBM, MS-DOS and so on, with a limited number of newsgroups and a one hour time limit but with a reader you downloaded new posts/uploaded yours then waited 24 hours) even after the Tramiel brothers
trashed the company by not listening to their users I held on until late 1998. Then with the purchase of an
early big box special(486), the bundle [bare drives..no pre-load] came with Windows 98 [first ed] and Mandrake 6 CDs along with free and starter software but I chose that over the pre-loads available.
Totally missed the Atari eight-bit era, for awhile I thought the Ataris were all 16/32 bit (Motorola 68000-68040 CPUs) and one PowerPC clone.
CP/M ... an oldie but a goodie!
the Atari operating system was based on CP/M, plus the GUI..GEM,
Graphical E
nvironment Manager, by Digital Research I don't remember its' origins.
Yet today 7 has just about everything a user could want and is better, or got better
over time than those old historical OSs.
i liked Windows 98 Plus! has a Included a tons of Themes and Screensavers.
....and the Plus! pack still works, I've used it in 2000 Pro and XP to get my '98 themes ported, mainly the
colours and font set-ups but in Seven I've only moved the mouse pointers into the cursor folder, ditto with the sounds/event folder, along with custom sounds found on the web, with reference to the former,
I like my pointers red, for 'working in background' the red pointer with spinning CD, alternate select , green
vertical arrow from another theme and for link select the blue version from another theme and the travel clock for busy though I'm looking for another clock .ani to use, right now there's just that and the stop watch.
At the time IBM OS/2 ran rings around Windows 3.5.
I felt the same way about the Atari, Wordperfect 4.1/4.2 with a full GUI interface vs. the local community
colleges' same version number, but with only a blinking cursor on screen [far less expensive too].
Windows 98...
But I thought Windows 98 Was Cool
To this day I wonder what the Atari could have been but Apple from 1984..on.... put more money into advertising and North America was a tough nut to crack, the average Joe or Jane knew about IBM clones and Macintoshes but only thought of Atari as a game company. They were kind of right, when Time-Warner sold off those assets in or around 1982 they created two companies, one game, one computer, both with rights to the trademark. Today only the games division exists as a software company occupying
floorspace in an office building some where in California [OK, I forgot where, but I don't care anymore].
With that old bundle in 1998 [on a 4gig Fujitsu that still runs] I loaded 98 and Mandrake, which has since forked into Mandriva and PCLinuxOS.
In the Windows Arena 2000 Pro was my favourite, rock solid it never BSOD on me, though 7 hasn't either.
