Free unlimited rebooting experience from vintage operating systems | Hacker News Reader

Free unlimited rebooting experience from vintage operating systems

therestartpage.com

144 pointsyankcrime53 comments

Nice one. The Amiga one (the one with the Workbench dialog) is slightly incorrect.

The disk drive reader head doesn't sound right, at least for an Amiga 500, which it ought to be seeing as it's using the 1.3 kickstarter.

It's also not mechanically checking if there's a floppy disk in the drive at the kickstarter screen after the workbench has shut down, which the Amiga needs to do to detect if there is a floppy disk in the drive. The checking mechanism manifested itself as a slight "clicking" sound.

Very cool though!

While we're talking about important mistakes, [CLI 2] should in square brackets, not round ones. :)

So, when the author reads this, we want:

  Irix
  Solaris + OpenWindows
  Solaris + CDE
  AIX
  HP/UX
  BeOS
  PC/GEOS
  VMS/DECWindows

;-)

Funny thing: I never saw a QNX desktop restarting in real life. The thing was always connected to some piece of big and dangerous machine and restarting would be terribly dangerous. It was the first time I saw machines with a 5-year uptime.

Yup, I was looking for

    #reboot

and did not find it :-)

Seriously, excellent. I'll be using this with teenagers on an interactive whiteboard for giggles on Friday.

This actually reminded me of the old "It is now safe to turn off your computer" orange text that would come up on older versions of Windows.

Eventually computers began being able to turn themselves off.

Does anyone know what prevented older computers from doing this? And if it was possible, why the design decision was made to make the users turn the computers off themselves? Was it some sort of "feel in control of this new thing in your house" thing?

Older computers had a mechanical on/off switch, rather than the soft power buttons we have these days

With AT motherboards the power button on the computer was linked directly to the power supply. There was simply no option of turning the computer off through software. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATX#Power_switch

I suspect it wasn't so much a decision as a lack of one. Every appliance up until then had a simple power switch: an actual switch, that physically disconnected the power feed to/from the device. Why would a computer be any different?

Software power-off is a feature of ACPI, which didn't even exist when Win95 came out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Configuration_and_Powe...

Auto shutdown (and wake-up) was an improvement of the ATX form factor standard introduced in 1995, replacing the previously AT form factor:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATX

>Does anyone know what prevented older computers from doing this?

Your master power switch was actually just that, a master power switch within the power supply. Your computer was shocked to life by having this switch turned on, and your computer was turned off by literally having this turned off.

It was just easier to design around this. Also bios functionality was incredibly limited at the time, normally being configured via DIP switches on board and hardware control via OS was a long way off, typically the only hardware control was to assign interrupts and handle them.

Fun fact about that "It is now safe to turn off your computer" orange text: you were actually dumped to a DOS prompt even though the display was set to a graphics mode. You could type commands and switch the display to text mode.

You mean in Win95? What would you type in?

In WinNT 4 the same text is displayed in a window. Though, afaik it is displayed by kernel mode and not from Win32 subsystem.

Yeah, Win95 (and subsequent versions to ME). It was a DOS prompt, so you could type anything. I believe typing CLS<enter> would clear the screen and show you the prompt.

Fun!

I spent way too much time watching the systems reboot after I understood that the dialogs were active. Very nice collection. Curious how this was done. Screen captures, recreated from videos?

I was impressed that the mouse changed then I read your comment and spent way ...

Appropriate username :)

Did anyone else hit DEL or Fx to see if they could get in to a functioning BIOS config?

My laptops firmware has mouse support and an IPv6 network stack. It's terrifying.

Oh, the page is interactive; drop downs work, which makes this better than a bunch of static images. Ironic that a page demonstrating ui/ux variation has low usability.

Not just drop downs, but you can click on, e.g, restart and the page will restart. Took me a couple of minutes to get it.

Unfortunately GEM on Atari ST didn't have a restart dialog. Otherwise I'd be loudly complaining the page being badly incomplete.

Neither did the Amiga, but that didn't stop it appearing. Note, the "restart Workbench" dialog there was for restarting the gui, not the operating system. It you wanted to reboot, you just did a three finger salute.

I like how the mouse pointers change according to which window you are hovering over.

Funny detail about Amiga/Workbench in this page: Restart dialog is from version 2.x, but in reboot scene you'll see version 1.3.

Big ups from the 1040ST part of the peanut gallery!

A few years ago I pulled my ST out of the closet, hooked it up to a hard drive and turned it on.

Blammo. Within about a second I was looking at the desktop.

This was so much fun to see that I hit reset about 30 times in the next minute or so. Reset. Desktop. Reset. Desktop. Wheeee!

Most BIOS-based computers won't get to a single desktop in that amount of time. I don't know what they're doing, but most of it is not useful to me.

I wish I had a hard drive for my Atari back in the day :) Had to survive with extra SF314 drive. Fortunately there was a SM124 monitor to accompany my Philips CM 8833 at least.

1040STFM is still stored inside a waterproof plastic box along with few hundred floppy disks and extra floppy drive. Seemed to be working a few years ago.

Why is it that looking at those old computers fill me with the hope of what can be (the oldest of the set), and as the things get newer, I loose that feeling?

QBasic was killed when? When was it that a computer became a thing that did a list of stuff and not a thing that I could make do anything?

Nice!

Seeing this page made me notice the professional look of Windows 2000 Professional. I wonder why. I don't think it has to do with the word 'professional' but with the blue color and the white top. Also the gray is warmer than most Windows versions.

I would still trade the XP or Aero themes for WINXP2K look any day.

I remember those days at the library, where one could browse the internet, download stuff, but could not run any of the downloaded files. I then figured out that if you renamed an executable into SETUP.exe, it would run without questions. Then the library computers got cluttered with warez, music and games.

I partially agree. I really like the way Windows 7 Aero feels, but that classic look and feel of Windows is a wonderful blend of functional minimalism and nostalgia...

It also really reminds me of the 90s and my first computer, an IBM with a Pentium clocked @ 200Mhz with 64MB of RAM and running Windows 95. I got good use out of that thing.

Aptiva series? My first computer at home was an Aptiva C6E, 133MHz Pentium with 32MB RAM (8MB for video) and Win95. Also had the Mwave card, which was IBM's interesting and novel combination modem/sound card. Got it in 1997 and only got rid of it last year. :P

Actually - yes. It was an Aptiva S. Actually I still have the Joystick and keyboard that came with that computer, they are pretty solid.

I played a lot of MechWarrior 2 and SimCity 2000 on that thing. I was still a kid in the 90's. It kicked around in my house until 2000/2001 when it was finally replaced with a Dell Dimension.

Windows 2000 was a fantastic operating system. My favourite still.

Agree. I'd love to see that look (and several more of these designs) in a high-DPI "Retina" style.

Tried to reboot Windows ME but it crashed.

From my vague memories of running Windows ME, that's expected behavior.

Would love to see one dedicated to OS install processes one day, my highlights are the OS X intro videos and "helpful hints" provided during an install of Windows XP.

Surprisingly this is actually really interesting.

Nice to see OS/2 in there!

My thought when I saw MS OS/2 1.3: "Hey, an old version!"

its like seeing a lost friend in a picture sniff

It's funny that OS shutdown time has seemed to be increasing over the years, despite Moore's law.

(I admit I sometimes just hold down the power switch rather than go through the agony of a proper reboot on my MacBook)

> (I admit I sometimes just hold down the power switch rather than go through the agony of a proper reboot on my MacBook)

Please don't do that! Try with an SSD instead.

Why should I let kernel panics have all the fun? :)

oh, I am missing XP now

Wow nice touch with the cursor image changes! This is cool, I love old computer stuff.

I know when I'm feeling old when XP is called 'vintage'.

Time waits for no OS?

Terrifically realistic in Full-screen mode. Nice one.

Beautiful. Needs way more unices.

Nice!

Suggestion: BeOS, old (~1998) Linux distros RedHat/SuSE

I'm not seeing SGI Irix!

2nd vote for Irix. Thanks.

I feel like XP wins this one. Too much text on the others.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com