If you are making the ultimate OS, what features would you choose?
- Mac OS X, Time Machine: Apple introduced Time Machine backup software with the Mac OS X 10.5 in 2007. You can back up to a local drive connected via USB or Fire wire, or even to network storage via Ethernet or Wi-Fi. As long as your backup volume is available. Time Machine creates hourly, daily and weekly incremental backups of your system.
- Unix, The Shell Terminal: There's always tension between command-line and graphical interfaces, and for the last decade or more, GUIs have been the dominant face of most OSes. But as Max Steenbergen writes in his article "Commands Lines: Alive & Kicking" for UX Magazine, the command line is making a comeback via app launchers like Alfred, Launchy and GNOME Do.
- Ubuntu, Simplified Linux Setup: Ubuntu aims for easy installation and configuration, and that's been my experience so far. You can download a live CD ISO or a Windows installer to get going. It doesn't require much of a commitment if you just want to give Ubuntu a try. Burn the ISO to CD and boot from that, or install it in a virtual machine using VirtualBox, Virtual PC or VMWare Player
- BeOS, 64-Bit Journaling File System: When Jean Louis Gasse left Apple, he founded a new team that created the charming and forward-looking BeOS in 1991.The file system included with BeOS, however, is one of its truly cool features. Called BFS (BeOS File System), it was a 64-bit journaling file system using file attributes, or metadata. The ability to query and sort against file metadata gave BFS some relational database-like quality similar to what we may finally see via WinFS in Windows 8. The 64-bit address space gave BFS the theoretical ability to support volumes of more than eight exobytes and files over 30 GB. This at a time when 30 GB hard drives were hardly commonplace.
- IRIX, SGI Dogfight: The first components of what would become the Dogfight demo were created by Gary Tarolli in the early '80s. OK, technically Dogfight wasn't an OS feature like some of the other items we've discussed here, but it was designed specifically to highlight the advanced (for the time) 3D rendering capabilities of SGI's systems.
- NeXTSTEP, Right-Click Context Menu: While the Mac OS didn’t embrace the right-click context menu until much later, it was an OS feature from the start in NeXTSTEP.
- MS-DOS, BASIC: MS-DOS was undeniably the dominant desktop operating system throughout the '80s, and every one of those computers running MS-DOS included the Microsoft BASIC programming language in one form or another. In fact, the version of BASIC created by Paul Allen and Bill Gates predates even MS-DOS, originating as Altair BASIC in the '70s
- Windows 3.0, Alt-Tab Task Switching: Pressing the Alt and Tab keys brings up a window that displays an icon for each open window present on the system (even if minimized). The currently active window is highlighted by default. Holding down the Alt key, you release and press the Tab key to move the highlight to the next window, thereby making it the active window and bringing it to the front.
- iOS, Multi-Touch: The introduction of what we now know as iOS for the iPhone in 2007, however, represented the first chance for many of us to have a hands-on experience with multi-touch
- Windows 7, Start Menu and Taskbar: The Start menu and taskbar as we know them in Windows today debuted in Windows 95. With each new release of Windows, new features have been added: integrated search, pinned applications, recently used files and one-click access to often used folders and system configuration tools. Vista added the ability to type a string into the search box and get a list of files and applications matching that string. Windows 7 made that feature actually work properly (mostly through more efficient file indexing) and added per-application recently used file listings.
These are captured from blog of Terrence Dorsey, who is the editor of MSDN Magazine.
