Submitted by An OS Enthusiast created a page displaying the modal restart prompts from many of the top OSes/versions from the last 20 years. It brought back a flood of memories. The best part is when you click on the “ok” button. It “restarts” the web site for you. Gizmodo’s instincts were to make it a game, by asking: how many can you identify?
No BeOS = fail.
Including QNX Photon = win.
Confused.
It’s only Windows, Mac and OS/2. Sure, one version of Amiga, NeXT and QNX as well. No Linux DE. Not even GEM Desktop. Weak.
Definitely would have been nice with some more operating systems, but fun nonetheless. Hopefully this inspires someone else to make a more complete collection.
Well, one of the Apple screens was actually for an Apple IIgs, so, yeah.
Well, with its countless variations and rapid changes, Linux has no “soul” to preserve…
It would be nice to have some distro included here, but which one? It is really hard to agree on an iconic Linux edition everyone remembers fondly. I don’t really care about any particular distro/version that I would like to see emulated here for a touch of nostalgia…
That said, I hope it is understood that I have nothing against Linux as such…
Well, a history of KDE and GNOME restart dialogs would already be a big step in the right direction.
Edited 2012-01-10 07:51 UTC
I always tend to think of Bluecurve as an iconic Linux theme if there was one. It was one of the first attempts at creating a more unified desktop experience in Linux.
When it comes to “iconic” I seem to think like that also about Plastik.
Or is it because this was pretty much the only really good (as opposed to ~over-shaded) looking KDE theme? Anyway, it seemed to be used often enough in more ~serious scenarios – for example on most, if not all, university KDE machines that I’ve seen half+ decade ago.
My most iconic moment with Linux would be Enlightenment DR13, Every single element of that DE was just full of awesome. I wish E17 would finalize.
To be fair, the Atari ST using GEM never had a ‘restart’ or ‘shutdown’ dialog, you just turned the damn thing off, and you didn’t have to worry about your files being lost for random reasons.
I still remember one day that I was over at my friend’s house who had an Amiga (can’t recall if it was when he had his A500 or his A1200 at the time) and another friend was there that had a Windows 3.1 computer. We were going to leave and my friend with the Windows PC started closing all the open windows before turning off the computer, and we were like “what are you doing?” and he said “Oh, in Windows if you have some of the windows opened, you can lose your files, I’ve had it happen to me.” We (My friend with the Amiga and me with an Atari Mega STe) just laughed and said “No, our computers you just turn off.”
Good laughs were had by all. Damn I miss those days.
To be fair, there was simply much less opportunity for losing any “important” files with ~home computers; most such Amigas ever did was “single tasking” games loaded from floppies (oh, and those did have their share of problems), never attached to any HDD…
(plus, most of that “closing things down” was possibly always a pointless ritual anyway, I never had anything lost by reset or such; but I guess it could happen in some cases – and MS manuals and such probably preferred to be safe than sorry, considering PCs had typically more serious roles)
I was a little annoyed that the Requester from AmigaOS is from 2.x or 3.x, but the reboot was from AmigaOS 1.3, they look quite different.
Besides, the 2.x / 3.x Workbench requester text was actually “Do you really want to quit Workbench?” since the OS never had (and still doesn’t possess) a restart / reboot interface.
Overall it’s quite nice alright, good to see them all. Might be expanded on in the future – maybe we can all send the author grabs of the missing ones?
Not to mention, quiting the Workbench is NOT a “restart” request – it’s quiting the Workbench. On the Amiga, apps can, and usually do, open their own screens separate from the Workbench. You have the ability to quit Workbench to free up memory for your app.
I was expecting a Guru Meditation Error for the Amiga restart prompt, not a quit Workbench. The fact that the web page author doesn’t know the difference shows he knows nothing of the Amiga.
and it’s ie only crap page..
maybe the author is chinese or indian and found it very important to support native software pirates
http://www.ie6countdown.com
Umm…what? The restart page works perfectly in Chrome and Firefox here.
Edited 2012-01-10 13:28 UTC
In fact it glitches a fair bit on IE9, could use more testing and tuning on that end.
You think? What kind of outdated browser are you using? Works perfectly here in Chrome under Linux – sound and all!
Who typed “win” at the DOS Prompt to start Windows 3.1? Really??? I always added it to Autoexec.bat to have a more integrated experience.
I did
I didn’t like Windows (still don’t) and because of that, only used it when I had an application that needed it, rather than as my default. Most of the stuff I did with PCs around that time was based on DOS anyway – QuickBasic and QuickC pretty much – and waiting around for Windows to load, only to open a DOS shell just didn’t make sense.
Me too. Plus countless others.
Many with slower machines could appreciate such configuration… (especially if that machine would often load, say, a DOS game anyway)
ohh Id love a screensaver with random OS reboots
This was funny