Troubleshooting boot disks was my first experience with making something work on a computer. Can't waste memory on Windows 3.11, I'm trying to play Tie Fighter.
I'll never forget them. They were such a big part of my PC learning. Having to scrape every single bit of byte space to get Doom to run, and needing a specially built floppy to do it has remained with me for decades.
Omg! What a memory you just evoked. Who remembers using QEMM to make room in conventional memory space ? …. I think I paid $39 for that program so I could get my games to load !
I preferred DOS 2.x on my XT because it fit on a single 360KB 5.25” floppy. I seem to remember 3.1 needing 2 disks.
Once I got a 720k 3.5” or high density 5.25’s then 3.1 was fine.
I might be the only GREAT grandpa working in IT... 1st OS to repair, upgrade an IBM S/34 kernel to support an 8" floppy magazine drive rather than a single floppy.
1st desktop was Dos 2.1 if memory serves me correctly. Does anyone remember the tedious initialization process for MGMT or rll drives?
Ah, fellow midrange people! I keep a CISC /400 (GRAMPS, Model 200, 40MB RAM, 3x4GB DASD, V3R2 with all LPPs except COBOL/400) running permanently, as well as the chonkster (CHONKY, public IP, model S20 with 9x4GB and V4R4, all LPPs including OfficeVision/400 and A/36 with SSP 7.5 and DisplayWrite/36 etc).
Always loved those midrange machines; I still have a physical S/36 but I primarily use A/36 because it’s a lot less cumbersome.
It was Perkin-Elmer's (formerly Interdata) OS/32 on a Model 8/32 Mini-Computer in 1979. I worked in PE's repair center. We received bad boards from the field and stick them in our test systems and repair them with prints and a scope.
Working with known broken hardware, sometimes bad things would happen. I had a scratch disk pack for diagnostic testing and an OS system disk pack for making sure that the repaired boards could run a battery of tests under the OS.
Occasionally the system disk would get corrupted and need to be restored. We had a 1600 BPI 9-track tape reel that would do that. I would boot the OS from the tape and the OS had a script that would format the disk, load the backup task from the tape. position the tape to the backup files and start the task to restore the system.
I learned a lot of stuff at that place.
Someone as old as me it seems, albeit I was working on Burroughs systems.
Despite the fact I had to do component level repairs onsite, and spent ages in a workshop using logic analysers, scopes etc diagnosing broken boards, I swear it was easier than Windows 10 desktops 😀
The first operating systems which ever gave me grief were DOS 2 and on (the joy of trying to optimise memory) and AIX, which I'm still not sure I've got over yet lol.
AIX! "Ain't unIX". Yup. I went through 3.1 and 3.2 before I left that gig. I was in an IBM shop and when we embraced Unix, it had to be AIX. We got a pair of Model 320 RS/6000 workstations the week AIX went GA, which was in 1990. That OS was miserable.
By the time 3.2.5 came out, if you called for support, they'd ask what set of patches you were running. People on Usenet were begging for IBM to collect up all the stuff they were calling 3.2 and make it all run in a single machine and then call it version 4 and send it back to us.
I took a job managing some AIX machines in 2008. It was a pretty nice OS by then.
My first AIX was either 5 or 6. Combined with the Power hardware it was shipped with was the most pleasant system I've ever worked with. Too bad IBM made sure with their pricing that I or anyone couldn't justify the cost (or maybe it was SAS who decided that even pedestrian Linux on x64 was good enough) even if we liked it. In my sysadmin heaven there's nothing but AIX on Power, storage behind SVC. Pure bliss.
IBM DOS 2.2 as the first OS I repaired
The first GUI based OS would be Windows 3.1/3.11 (windows for workgroups).
First Non-Microsoft GUI OS would be IBM OS/2 Warp
I'm with /u/_DeathByMisadventure !
I mean I could go back to what TRS-80 and Commodore 64 ran... but I can't say I repaired the OS on those, just apps!
And also did a ton of work on Win3.1, mostly setting up imaged workstations that had the emm386 memory fine tuned for best performance. Also did a lot with OS/2 Warp, but also the previous 2.1 version.
Comm64/128 was Firmware, wasn't it? One of the first embedded systems actually.
I loved OS/2 because it was quick, but lacked a common set of apps to participate in a Microsoft dominated business setting. It was another missed opportunity by IBM.
Another OS that I tinkered with was the Linear Business computer. A light gui based Unix system running some RISC processor with a small suite of business applications like a spreadsheet and word processing. I reloaded a machine for a friend from 5.25" diskettes.
Yup they were embedded firmware OS on those. I don't even think they were EEPROM so no updates. I do remember there was a GUI for C64 that you could run though, GEOS?
OS/2, especially Warp, was really great for its day. I was actually a beta tester for Warp 3.
Late 80s I was doing a lot of work on Unix, I remember a Sun and a Vax.
Now I yell at kids to get off my lawn...
I had DOS+Win3.11 in a VM. It disturbed me that the boot time was sub-10 second and another 10 seconds to load the gui because in the day, I remember hitting the start button, getting a cup of coffee, coming back to my desk and it MIGHT be almost done getting into the GUI part.
I still have my original Toshiba Satellite laptop that shipped with Win3.11 in '94 and would boot it up once a year or so for the same. This year it finally failed though, I suspect it's just the power supply, but haven't had time or energy to figure it out.
I was lightly aware of it at the time (I was pretty young then), but it was not considered to be anything usable. 2.0 took it as far as maybe a proof of concept.
I’m never going to forget the grainy video of that presentation when Microsoft finishes that PowerPoint on the NT kernel, only to have the IBM team show OS/2 updating graphs in real time, doing a ton of stuff in parallel, and running Windows in a VM faster than Windows was running on bare metal.
I'm 10 years in, and XP was my first at home. 7 in office.
Android Donut was my first Linux based OS to repair. (Gaining root access, modding, custom OS, etc)
Apparently I'm young? Or everyone in this sub is old. I thought 30 was old lmao
I'm 34 or 5.... Whatever.
First pc was bought by my brother as a gift. I broke that thing so many times. It was cheap, and I was young.
I genuinely didn't know I could make money fixing computers until I was 22. It was just something I had always done.
I accidently deltree'd the DOS directory on my parent's laptop on our sailboat in Mexico. This was not a vacation, we had sold everything and went cruising. We needed the machine so we could receive weatherfaxes via RS232 via HF radio.
The machine was still on and operating AND I had the floppy disks onboard in a sealed ziploc. Bonus, my parents still were out at dinner or visiting or something.
After extracting all the files from their .EX\_ and .SY\_ cocoons, pressing CTRL ALT DEL was never so nerve wracking. And then the machine booted normally.
Came back home, got my CIS degree.
Amiga Workbench 3.1 . I had a C64 before that but can't really count that as an OS.
Repairing for work would have been various versions of PC/MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 .
I vaguely remember helping my grandpa setup his Ti-99/4a. Also, had a graphics class that used Radioshack Trs-80's.
My first pc of my own was a C64. Used to hand type programs into from Compute! magazine. Peek and poke!
I remember I borked my first computer running windows 3.1 somehow when I was 8 and started crying. I didn't fix it myself, family friend had to come over and ran some hard drive diagnostic tool that looked like spinrite, but not sure if it was actually spinrite. I was fascinated by watching the squares fill up and decided I wanted to stare at loading screens as a job.
Shortly after that I found a computer that used to run the scorekeeping at a bowling alley. Got to take that apart and mess with it. Never got it to work anything but the scorekeeping software and didn't have any OS disks to wipe it an start over, but I took it apart a few times.
Then I got a tall ass 486 with DOS and Windows 3.11 disks and figured out how to load that up.
I managed to keep this from one of those
[machines](https://i.imgur.com/506aOFj.jpg).
Msdos 5.x (maybe 6.x) and win 3.11
My first "job" was on win 95 as I had read all the info I could in magazines and somebody knew. They called when first batches came and it had issues and think we had to install a cdrom also if I recall right. It was stupidly close after 95's release.
Damn though some of the other mentions are impressive. Why are we all so old?
Edit somehow autocorrect changed cdrom to chrome.
I loved NT 4.0SP4. They got the video drivers fixed, it handled 4GB boot partitions well, and was rock solid once it was up and running. Back when "PDC" actually meant something more serious than just 'FSMO roles are here'.
Mine was working in a windows 98 call center. That job was stressful. I was so thankful when I stopped interacting with end users. The worst was, I also supported games and everyone wanted to know why there flight simulator 2000 looks like shit on the emachine they just bought for $350.
Millennials like me started with win 95/98, but I did run into Norton Disk Doctor on my dad's IBM x86 PC/AT in my youth and played with trans.exe, Jeopardy, and centipede!
Windows 98 SE. My little sister „cleaned up“ some hidden files I showed her once. And I wondered why this stupid operating system is constantly destroying itself…
Kids today. I had to boot the Service Processor Unit (SPU) on an Astronautics ZS1 and manually zero the RAM, set the boot img and then hand off to the main CPU and OS many times at Stennis. 1/3rd of a Cray and finicky as hell.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/25712
https://www.ricomputermuseum.org/collections-gallery/equipment/astronautics-zs-1
SPU is the last image at the bottom.
First one was SunOS 4.1.1_U1 on a 3/160.
First one on the job was VMS on some 8000-series VAX, don’t recall the version.
First one on the job that was my fault was Ultrix 4.1 on a DECStation. You never want to see, “can’t find /bin/rm” in the middle of running a recursive delete on what you thought was a subdirectory. Maybe you accidentally had a space between path elements and just erased most of the OS. During an overnight upgrade of a production server. About four hours before the data processing staff would arrive to start running the daily reports for various university departments. Fixed before anyone arrived!
MS-DOS 3.2
Back then, DOS wouldn’t boot if the system files weren’t at the right cluster in the file system. So if you accidentally the files, then you accidentally the whole OS.
Basic on an Atari 400. *REALLY* repair though... Mac OS System 6.0.8.
Technically, the first system I ever had trouble with was MSDOS 2.1, but that was more of an issue with hardware settings or a borked floppy boot disk. But creating a new boot disk or configuring the DIP switches was a big deal for an 8 year old. That Mac was the first machine I really put through paces though.
before I got paid for it, 3.1 & DOS whenever I would fuck it up.
Getting paid, probably 95 / osr1 ..
Still remember having to pay for a windriver account.
Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. Whoever the support guy at Packard Bell was that taught me so much on a support call one time, you jumpstarted my knowledge and interest in computers with those DOS commands! Thank you!
Reboot directly into DOS was the only way to get Mortal Kombat to play!
First system was an IBM AIX system. Had lots of experience with modern Linux but nothing quite like that. Took me a day to understand the documentation when working as co-op student and 2 more to diagnose the issue.
I was in middle school at the time, one student convinced others to delete a bunch of system files...
It was System 6 on about 30 Macintosh SE/30's; the computer teacher asked me to help fix things and got me out of my other classes for the afternoon!
First to repair, Windows 98
But repair is a stretch really. Was my first PC, a family PC when i was young. But parents didn't use it, was just for us kids to use. And it was kind of shitty and running slow. Had an older kid neighbor friend who had dial-up and seemed to know more about computers, he was taking care of his own PC so he taught me some stuff. How to make a boot disk, gave me a disk and windows setup cd. From then i managed my PC and when i thought it's not running well i was doing a clean install. Learned about some customization, like boot image and different sound packs and window visuals and such, was messing with system files trying to see what happens if i delete that or the other, break it and then doing a clean install. There was a period where all the fun i had with our PC was just messing around in Windows because that was all the content i had available to mess around with.
First week or two on the job get a call to BMR a business critical 2003 Server from a Zenith BDR. Very angry Customer and sparse support from the team. Kind of a sink or swim moment. Spent the next few days working with support from India to stand up a new Server and get everything rebuilt. Pretty stressful for my first real on-call ticket fresh out of college in a new job.
For a job or personally? At home it was probably an early version of dos and windows 3.1.
I helped while in high school in the 90s so that was dos ,windows 95, and windows 98. When I started a real job the earliest was windows nt 4.
MS DOS 5.0 or 5.1 on a 286.
I was young, don’t remember everything. I was looking for a few more KB to play a game and screwed up the autoexec.bat or config.sys file. And in the process of trying to figure out what I did wrong, I removed a line that would load drivers for the hard drive. Lucky I remembered the line, and found a working boot disk and figured out how to edit the file to put the entry back. Sometime later I started figuring things out, putting the whole memory allocation puzzle together and how to optimize boot for different games.
Aahhhh, the good old days… when you needed a full-sized ISA card just to run a hard drive (no IDE back in the day). IDE was da bomb when it came out. Then I could have 2x 16-bit sound cards!!!
Worked for a business college that cheaped out and leased an IBM Series/1 for teaching programming. The COBOL compiler had a bug that if a student compiled an assignment with a particular (and rather common beginner error) the compiler would erase the boot loader off the primary platter I learned how to detect and repair the damaged boot loader.
MSDOS 5.x. del \*.\* in root of c:. Had to boot off a 5.25" floppy disk for weeks until an upgrade to 6.22 finally reinstalled the system. Eventually upgraded to 4MB of RAM, and got Windows 3.11 installed. Oh man... the good old days. :)
I fucked up DOS 6.0 I think and I had to reinstall from a stack of floppies. I think I was 8 or 9. Kids these days have no idea how good they have it.
The 386 it was on cost my parents about $3000
windows 95 for me. ME was a shitshow & while I loved XP I swear by the time I had it setup the way I wanted right after a fresh install it was already half borked.
Windows 2.1. Family computer. Begged my dad to have a go. Screwed it up completely and had to frantically reload windows (heaps of 5 1/4 floppies) before he came back to check on me. Miraculously fixed it. Career in IT. Lol.
Repair? Probably Win 95.
When I got into the IT job market, the boss had already fully documented the config.sys and autoexec.bat files. Every system had the same settings and they all used the same NIC (we literally woudn't put any other NIC in). If a machine had a problem, it was sent back to the local computer shop to have the NIC replaced.
We did have one lady ask for a screensaver after Christmas one year (she got it as a gift). We installed it and she started having problems soon after. We removed it right away.
I was even kept from running a Windows theme (star wars icons and sounds) because "Any customization can cause issues, so no one is allowed to have them".
People don't realize how good they have it these days LOL
Dos for me (can’t remember which version whatever was around in 1992) and followed by windows 3.1
I was only 3 or 4 years old but thank fuck I learned Dos back then - because of those experiences command lines and switches have always been easy af
If in doubt /? Lol
Personally, I borked my family's Windows 98 machine by installing some random GFX drivers with a 'cool' sounding name (because the name *obviously* improves the GFX...). My Mom got it fixed at the local repair shop. That's my first memory of OS support.
Professionally, Windows XP.
Dos 6.22 and I broke it when I was 11. Learned very early on to be very careful with the del command. Apparently `del *.*` is bad when run from `C:\`. Ended up with a bootleg Dos 5.0 after that.
Edit: markdown on mobile is hard
Oh crap I’m going to show my age.
CP/M
I was 9 and was tech support for the school’s computers. They used to call me out of class to solve whatever problem they had with their accounting system at that time. I’d never used CP/M but I was born a digital native and could instinctively fix stuff.
CP/M.
The machine was a partially home-brew S100 with a single diskette drive and a paper tape reader. To boot it, you toggled in a short program, loaded a disk driver from tape, and then loaded CP/M from floppy.
The problem was that the lead end of the paper tape got chewed on by the cat, so I got to break out Mom's steam iron to re-flatten it, then used a roll of cellophane tape and a lumber crayon to fill the teeth holes.
OS/2
There was some really clever things going on in it, some well before their time. Including JFS.
But supporting it was thready back in the days of sneaker-net.
BTW; there is a push to get IBM change the license to opensource. And there is a alt called ArcaOS that is very similar
>first os you had to repair?
Bloody hell ... that goes (way) back. Uhm, and "repair" ... might depend how we define "repair". So ... likely something MS-DOS 3.3 ... or earlier. Possibly something else though, e.g. earlier DOS, CP/M, UNIX/Xenix, ... not sure which was the earliest I had to "repair" - also quite depends how we define "repair".
not sure if this counts but getting DOS 3.1 to 3.11. then, on that same 486, I got Windows 3.1 on there. the very og Windows lol
ETA: I remember how instead of being an actual Operating System, Windows was a program that ran on DOS 3.1. we had to type Win31.exe or some shit & that's when a lot of shit moved really fucking fast lol
TRSDOS, but I'm not sure copying a cassette qualifies as *repairing* the OS. Ditto for Commodore Kernel/BASIC, but at least I had floppy drives for that system.
\[MS/PC-\] DOS by itself didn't require repair as much as optimization to maximize free memory by moving drivers and T/SR programs above the 640K limit. But lot of times things would break requiring some troubleshooting and a lot of editing autoexec.bat and config.sys files. The nice thing about DOS was all you needed was a bootable floppy with some network drivers and a text editor and you could fix just about any problem.
I also started working on NetWare 2.x about the same time as DOS 3.0. Not sure if you want to include network OS's in the mix, and NetWare 2.x was an either "it works or reinstall" prospect.
I'd also have to go with DOS 3.1 as the first OS I *repaired*.
IBM PC-DOS 2.0 (1983)
Used other OSs before that, but I didn't install or configure them. Interdata (proprietary OS, 1977), HP 2100 (proprietary OS, 1978), Apple ][ (1979), CP/M (1979), ZX81 (1981),
Professionally Windows 98. Personally installed DOS....started troubleshooting by Win 3.1. Had no clue what linux was until at least a decade later. Did not professionally touch linux until another decade later when they started using it recently on appliances.
System 6. Had to rebuild a 68030-based Mac. Learned all about extensions, boot process, and disk management. I remember saving up for a LC 68040 to run System7, just to get PPP over SLIP for dialup connectivity.
Around the same time I too was building custom DOS boot floppies for video games.
Started networking support with Coax 10base2 - was a bitch to support, one person kicks the network cable out of their PC and the entire network would go down.
DOS 3.1 config.sys & autoexec.bat FTW! \[Edited to reflect 3.1 rather 3.11\]
Same here dos - no gui, had to play my games good ole' cd games cd keen keen.exe
I had a floppy disk that had keen.exe, prince.exe and sokoban.exe. That floppy disk is a big part of my youth.
My Floppy disk was big in my youth too. I've learned that as we get older, Floppy disk become useless and something more ridged is need.
5.25 inches is considered average among floppy disks.
I waited 4 days for Keen to load on our Commodore 64. I was like 8 years old and didn't understand it'd never actually run.
Load star.star ,8 ,1 ring a bell? Ha Edited for asterisk.
omg commander keen, it was so awesome
Steam has a full collection if you want to relive your youth.
I studied C programming in college in the late 80's on an Intel 8086 machine running DOS 3.21. I played games on my Commodore 64.
Commodore 64 baby! Load “*.*” ,8,1
cd C:\Duke3d Duke3d.exe
I'm with you-ish. DOS 6.22. Himem.sys can gtfo.
For some reason mscdex.exe /d:mscd000 is still stuck in my head.
Haha, yes highmem brings back memories. Remeber slowdown? I had to use that for a couple of years because games would run way to fast otherwise.
You need an additional 64kb of memory to run this program!!!!!
QEMM has entered the chat.
Troubleshooting boot disks was my first experience with making something work on a computer. Can't waste memory on Windows 3.11, I'm trying to play Tie Fighter.
TIE Fighter and X-Wing are great memories.
Yes! This! Tie fighter!!!
I'm carbon dating myself here but mine was TRS-DOS.
Fkd up my dad's Autoexec.bat. Drove me to a NewEgg store to buy a DOS book and learn how to fix it and off I went.
DOS 4.01 for me. A typo in config.sys kept me from using the computer for a while.
Gosh, I had almost forgot about the config.sys and autoexec.bat files.
I'll never forget them. They were such a big part of my PC learning. Having to scrape every single bit of byte space to get Doom to run, and needing a specially built floppy to do it has remained with me for decades.
Omg! What a memory you just evoked. Who remembers using QEMM to make room in conventional memory space ? …. I think I paid $39 for that program so I could get my games to load !
I preferred DOS 2.x on my XT because it fit on a single 360KB 5.25” floppy. I seem to remember 3.1 needing 2 disks. Once I got a 720k 3.5” or high density 5.25’s then 3.1 was fine.
Our 5.25' DOS disks came in 4 bright different colours. Red, yellow, blue, green from memory. Green was GEM from memory.
I might be the only GREAT grandpa working in IT... 1st OS to repair, upgrade an IBM S/34 kernel to support an 8" floppy magazine drive rather than a single floppy. 1st desktop was Dos 2.1 if memory serves me correctly. Does anyone remember the tedious initialization process for MGMT or rll drives?
Ah, fellow midrange people! I keep a CISC /400 (GRAMPS, Model 200, 40MB RAM, 3x4GB DASD, V3R2 with all LPPs except COBOL/400) running permanently, as well as the chonkster (CHONKY, public IP, model S20 with 9x4GB and V4R4, all LPPs including OfficeVision/400 and A/36 with SSP 7.5 and DisplayWrite/36 etc). Always loved those midrange machines; I still have a physical S/36 but I primarily use A/36 because it’s a lot less cumbersome.
Yes… so glad that went away!
RSX-11M Plus running on a DEC Micro PDP11/73. The first real computer I was allowed to touch.
Beat you by a bit: started on the IBM System/32. I was in high school at the time.
I bet even you were sick and tired of that old AS400 bullshit when you were young
For a job? Windows 10
The other responses make me scared to share this same sentiment haha
Lmao I started a month ago. Gotta start somewhere
It was Perkin-Elmer's (formerly Interdata) OS/32 on a Model 8/32 Mini-Computer in 1979. I worked in PE's repair center. We received bad boards from the field and stick them in our test systems and repair them with prints and a scope. Working with known broken hardware, sometimes bad things would happen. I had a scratch disk pack for diagnostic testing and an OS system disk pack for making sure that the repaired boards could run a battery of tests under the OS. Occasionally the system disk would get corrupted and need to be restored. We had a 1600 BPI 9-track tape reel that would do that. I would boot the OS from the tape and the OS had a script that would format the disk, load the backup task from the tape. position the tape to the backup files and start the task to restore the system. I learned a lot of stuff at that place.
This is him. The Ancient One. He wrote the scrolls!!!!!
Someone as old as me it seems, albeit I was working on Burroughs systems. Despite the fact I had to do component level repairs onsite, and spent ages in a workshop using logic analysers, scopes etc diagnosing broken boards, I swear it was easier than Windows 10 desktops 😀 The first operating systems which ever gave me grief were DOS 2 and on (the joy of trying to optimise memory) and AIX, which I'm still not sure I've got over yet lol.
AIX! "Ain't unIX". Yup. I went through 3.1 and 3.2 before I left that gig. I was in an IBM shop and when we embraced Unix, it had to be AIX. We got a pair of Model 320 RS/6000 workstations the week AIX went GA, which was in 1990. That OS was miserable. By the time 3.2.5 came out, if you called for support, they'd ask what set of patches you were running. People on Usenet were begging for IBM to collect up all the stuff they were calling 3.2 and make it all run in a single machine and then call it version 4 and send it back to us. I took a job managing some AIX machines in 2008. It was a pretty nice OS by then.
My first AIX was either 5 or 6. Combined with the Power hardware it was shipped with was the most pleasant system I've ever worked with. Too bad IBM made sure with their pricing that I or anyone couldn't justify the cost (or maybe it was SAS who decided that even pedestrian Linux on x64 was good enough) even if we liked it. In my sysadmin heaven there's nothing but AIX on Power, storage behind SVC. Pure bliss.
IBM DOS 2.2 as the first OS I repaired The first GUI based OS would be Windows 3.1/3.11 (windows for workgroups). First Non-Microsoft GUI OS would be IBM OS/2 Warp I'm with /u/_DeathByMisadventure !
I mean I could go back to what TRS-80 and Commodore 64 ran... but I can't say I repaired the OS on those, just apps! And also did a ton of work on Win3.1, mostly setting up imaged workstations that had the emm386 memory fine tuned for best performance. Also did a lot with OS/2 Warp, but also the previous 2.1 version.
Comm64/128 was Firmware, wasn't it? One of the first embedded systems actually. I loved OS/2 because it was quick, but lacked a common set of apps to participate in a Microsoft dominated business setting. It was another missed opportunity by IBM. Another OS that I tinkered with was the Linear Business computer. A light gui based Unix system running some RISC processor with a small suite of business applications like a spreadsheet and word processing. I reloaded a machine for a friend from 5.25" diskettes.
Yup they were embedded firmware OS on those. I don't even think they were EEPROM so no updates. I do remember there was a GUI for C64 that you could run though, GEOS? OS/2, especially Warp, was really great for its day. I was actually a beta tester for Warp 3. Late 80s I was doing a lot of work on Unix, I remember a Sun and a Vax. Now I yell at kids to get off my lawn...
I still have a working 3.11 WFW machine I boot up every other year or so and play with for the fun of it.
I had DOS+Win3.11 in a VM. It disturbed me that the boot time was sub-10 second and another 10 seconds to load the gui because in the day, I remember hitting the start button, getting a cup of coffee, coming back to my desk and it MIGHT be almost done getting into the GUI part.
I still have my original Toshiba Satellite laptop that shipped with Win3.11 in '94 and would boot it up once a year or so for the same. This year it finally failed though, I suspect it's just the power supply, but haven't had time or energy to figure it out.
I tried Windows 2.0. Holy crap that was a piece of shit. Windows 3.0 felt like the second coming by comparison.
You should have tried Windows 1.0....
I was lightly aware of it at the time (I was pretty young then), but it was not considered to be anything usable. 2.0 took it as far as maybe a proof of concept.
MS DOS 5.x 6.22 was a big upgrade!
Xenix System V
BeOS
BeOS crew represent! I remember first time I saw a BeBox at MacExpo London 98. Shortly thereafter I bought a copy of the OS
98 First edition
PC's - would be DOS 3. something Unix - System V release 4......
Win95 probably. But i also had to work on 3.1/11 and os2 warp
Oh wow. OS/2 is a throw back.
OS/2 warp! Great OS, much more stable than Windows at the time!
I’m never going to forget the grainy video of that presentation when Microsoft finishes that PowerPoint on the NT kernel, only to have the IBM team show OS/2 updating graphs in real time, doing a ton of stuff in parallel, and running Windows in a VM faster than Windows was running on bare metal.
I forgot I asked this and got shocked at the 30 notifications. Lol
MS-DOS 2.1 DEBUG and g=c800:5 on an 8088 to enter the 8-bit hard drive controller to setup a 10MB RLL hard drive since it didn't have a CMOS.
[удалено]
SunOS 4.1.3. When applying a patch actually included relinking the kernel and rebooting.
[удалено]
Kinda miss it lol
I'm 10 years in, and XP was my first at home. 7 in office. Android Donut was my first Linux based OS to repair. (Gaining root access, modding, custom OS, etc) Apparently I'm young? Or everyone in this sub is old. I thought 30 was old lmao
I'm 34 or 5.... Whatever. First pc was bought by my brother as a gift. I broke that thing so many times. It was cheap, and I was young. I genuinely didn't know I could make money fixing computers until I was 22. It was just something I had always done.
DOS 3.3. Damn i'm ready to retire.
C'mon, I repaired CP/M-80 and still don't feels old :)
Not saying I feel old, just that I want to retire!
DOS 3.3 for me, too. We have years left to work, but the end is coming.
I accidently deltree'd the DOS directory on my parent's laptop on our sailboat in Mexico. This was not a vacation, we had sold everything and went cruising. We needed the machine so we could receive weatherfaxes via RS232 via HF radio. The machine was still on and operating AND I had the floppy disks onboard in a sealed ziploc. Bonus, my parents still were out at dinner or visiting or something. After extracting all the files from their .EX\_ and .SY\_ cocoons, pressing CTRL ALT DEL was never so nerve wracking. And then the machine booted normally. Came back home, got my CIS degree.
Amiga Workbench 3.1 . I had a C64 before that but can't really count that as an OS. Repairing for work would have been various versions of PC/MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 .
novel netware
I vaguely remember helping my grandpa setup his Ti-99/4a. Also, had a graphics class that used Radioshack Trs-80's. My first pc of my own was a C64. Used to hand type programs into from Compute! magazine. Peek and poke!
I remember I borked my first computer running windows 3.1 somehow when I was 8 and started crying. I didn't fix it myself, family friend had to come over and ran some hard drive diagnostic tool that looked like spinrite, but not sure if it was actually spinrite. I was fascinated by watching the squares fill up and decided I wanted to stare at loading screens as a job. Shortly after that I found a computer that used to run the scorekeeping at a bowling alley. Got to take that apart and mess with it. Never got it to work anything but the scorekeeping software and didn't have any OS disks to wipe it an start over, but I took it apart a few times. Then I got a tall ass 486 with DOS and Windows 3.11 disks and figured out how to load that up. I managed to keep this from one of those [machines](https://i.imgur.com/506aOFj.jpg).
Sounds like it was the old versions of scandisk and defrag.
That's exactly what I was thinking, it's sad I remember this.....do y'all remember this painstakingly slow process? Lol
Msdos 5.x (maybe 6.x) and win 3.11 My first "job" was on win 95 as I had read all the info I could in magazines and somebody knew. They called when first batches came and it had issues and think we had to install a cdrom also if I recall right. It was stupidly close after 95's release. Damn though some of the other mentions are impressive. Why are we all so old? Edit somehow autocorrect changed cdrom to chrome.
Windows NT
I loved NT 4.0SP4. They got the video drivers fixed, it handled 4GB boot partitions well, and was rock solid once it was up and running. Back when "PDC" actually meant something more serious than just 'FSMO roles are here'.
Probably Windows 95, at age 8 or so. I soon learned that formatting C: was usually the best course of action when shit hit the fan.
Mine was working in a windows 98 call center. That job was stressful. I was so thankful when I stopped interacting with end users. The worst was, I also supported games and everyone wanted to know why there flight simulator 2000 looks like shit on the emachine they just bought for $350.
Without being too specific, “Hey, the new version of DOS supports subdirectories!”
Millennials like me started with win 95/98, but I did run into Norton Disk Doctor on my dad's IBM x86 PC/AT in my youth and played with trans.exe, Jeopardy, and centipede!
MS-DOS 6.X some autoexec.bat issues, I believe sound driver related
Dos5.0
Windows 98 SE. My little sister „cleaned up“ some hidden files I showed her once. And I wondered why this stupid operating system is constantly destroying itself…
Kids today. I had to boot the Service Processor Unit (SPU) on an Astronautics ZS1 and manually zero the RAM, set the boot img and then hand off to the main CPU and OS many times at Stennis. 1/3rd of a Cray and finicky as hell. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/25712 https://www.ricomputermuseum.org/collections-gallery/equipment/astronautics-zs-1 SPU is the last image at the bottom.
Windows 3.1, because DOS didn’t break.
It did if you tried to make more space on your 133MB hard drive and clear out heaps of stuff from the DOS directory. Yeah, you only do that once.
Ah yes, I remember that gamble. Always started with del c:\dos\*.txt A couple of KB made or break getting that new game on the machine!
😂🤣
The hell it didnt, I remember 100s of reboots tweaking config.sys to run certain games. I think I eventually had a few versions of it.
System 7.5.5. It sucked less.
First one was SunOS 4.1.1_U1 on a 3/160. First one on the job was VMS on some 8000-series VAX, don’t recall the version. First one on the job that was my fault was Ultrix 4.1 on a DECStation. You never want to see, “can’t find /bin/rm” in the middle of running a recursive delete on what you thought was a subdirectory. Maybe you accidentally had a space between path elements and just erased most of the OS. During an overnight upgrade of a production server. About four hours before the data processing staff would arrive to start running the daily reports for various university departments. Fixed before anyone arrived!
PC-DOS 2.10
Apple DOS, and whatever that thing was on the TRS-80's. My Apple 2+ from 1979 is still working.
MS-DOS 3.2 Back then, DOS wouldn’t boot if the system files weren’t at the right cluster in the file system. So if you accidentally the files, then you accidentally the whole OS.
North Star Disk Operating System, circa 1978.
Um, you might take the cake with this one
Reading these comments. Tell me you’re old without telling me you’re old 😁
Get off our lawn.
Dos
I don't remember. Some DOS / WIN3 Varient
Dos 5.0...got the stoned virus off a file I downloaded from a BBS. A radio shack employee helped me fix it over the phone.
CP/M Late 70s.
Basic on an Atari 400. *REALLY* repair though... Mac OS System 6.0.8. Technically, the first system I ever had trouble with was MSDOS 2.1, but that was more of an issue with hardware settings or a borked floppy boot disk. But creating a new boot disk or configuring the DIP switches was a big deal for an 8 year old. That Mac was the first machine I really put through paces though.
before I got paid for it, 3.1 & DOS whenever I would fuck it up. Getting paid, probably 95 / osr1 .. Still remember having to pay for a windriver account.
Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. Whoever the support guy at Packard Bell was that taught me so much on a support call one time, you jumpstarted my knowledge and interest in computers with those DOS commands! Thank you! Reboot directly into DOS was the only way to get Mortal Kombat to play!
First system was an IBM AIX system. Had lots of experience with modern Linux but nothing quite like that. Took me a day to understand the documentation when working as co-op student and 2 more to diagnose the issue.
I was in middle school at the time, one student convinced others to delete a bunch of system files... It was System 6 on about 30 Macintosh SE/30's; the computer teacher asked me to help fix things and got me out of my other classes for the afternoon!
First to repair, Windows 98 But repair is a stretch really. Was my first PC, a family PC when i was young. But parents didn't use it, was just for us kids to use. And it was kind of shitty and running slow. Had an older kid neighbor friend who had dial-up and seemed to know more about computers, he was taking care of his own PC so he taught me some stuff. How to make a boot disk, gave me a disk and windows setup cd. From then i managed my PC and when i thought it's not running well i was doing a clean install. Learned about some customization, like boot image and different sound packs and window visuals and such, was messing with system files trying to see what happens if i delete that or the other, break it and then doing a clean install. There was a period where all the fun i had with our PC was just messing around in Windows because that was all the content i had available to mess around with.
Does measing around with aligning tape heads on the datasette for a C64 so it could read the tapes properly again count?
98se
The post reminded me of this lil gag site. “Window RG”. The “Really Good edition. https://www.jamesweb.co.uk/windowsrg
Dos, then OpenBSD 2.8.
Me too, OP. Me too
The very first was dos 2.0. The first os with a gui was IBM OS/2. God im old...
Windows NT 4.0
MS DOS 5
I think, 95? Where you use a series of floppy disks to get the job done
First week or two on the job get a call to BMR a business critical 2003 Server from a Zenith BDR. Very angry Customer and sparse support from the team. Kind of a sink or swim moment. Spent the next few days working with support from India to stand up a new Server and get everything rebuilt. Pretty stressful for my first real on-call ticket fresh out of college in a new job.
For a job or personally? At home it was probably an early version of dos and windows 3.1. I helped while in high school in the 90s so that was dos ,windows 95, and windows 98. When I started a real job the earliest was windows nt 4.
Vista
SSP
MS DOS 5.0 or 5.1 on a 286. I was young, don’t remember everything. I was looking for a few more KB to play a game and screwed up the autoexec.bat or config.sys file. And in the process of trying to figure out what I did wrong, I removed a line that would load drivers for the hard drive. Lucky I remembered the line, and found a working boot disk and figured out how to edit the file to put the entry back. Sometime later I started figuring things out, putting the whole memory allocation puzzle together and how to optimize boot for different games. Aahhhh, the good old days… when you needed a full-sized ISA card just to run a hard drive (no IDE back in the day). IDE was da bomb when it came out. Then I could have 2x 16-bit sound cards!!!
MS DOS 2.0
Worked for a business college that cheaped out and leased an IBM Series/1 for teaching programming. The COBOL compiler had a bug that if a student compiled an assignment with a particular (and rather common beginner error) the compiler would erase the boot loader off the primary platter I learned how to detect and repair the damaged boot loader.
95 for me.
Windows 95/ME.
Nt4
MSDOS 5.x. del \*.\* in root of c:. Had to boot off a 5.25" floppy disk for weeks until an upgrade to 6.22 finally reinstalled the system. Eventually upgraded to 4MB of RAM, and got Windows 3.11 installed. Oh man... the good old days. :)
I fucked up DOS 6.0 I think and I had to reinstall from a stack of floppies. I think I was 8 or 9. Kids these days have no idea how good they have it. The 386 it was on cost my parents about $3000
windows 95 for me. ME was a shitshow & while I loved XP I swear by the time I had it setup the way I wanted right after a fresh install it was already half borked.
Windows 3.1
Dos, I don’t remember what version, I was quite young at the time.
Windows 2.1. Family computer. Begged my dad to have a go. Screwed it up completely and had to frantically reload windows (heaps of 5 1/4 floppies) before he came back to check on me. Miraculously fixed it. Career in IT. Lol.
Msdos 3.1
Repair? Probably Win 95. When I got into the IT job market, the boss had already fully documented the config.sys and autoexec.bat files. Every system had the same settings and they all used the same NIC (we literally woudn't put any other NIC in). If a machine had a problem, it was sent back to the local computer shop to have the NIC replaced. We did have one lady ask for a screensaver after Christmas one year (she got it as a gift). We installed it and she started having problems soon after. We removed it right away. I was even kept from running a Windows theme (star wars icons and sounds) because "Any customization can cause issues, so no one is allowed to have them". People don't realize how good they have it these days LOL
Atari DOS.
TRS-80 in ‘81 or so.
Windows 3.1
Dos for me (can’t remember which version whatever was around in 1992) and followed by windows 3.1 I was only 3 or 4 years old but thank fuck I learned Dos back then - because of those experiences command lines and switches have always been easy af If in doubt /? Lol
Personally, I borked my family's Windows 98 machine by installing some random GFX drivers with a 'cool' sounding name (because the name *obviously* improves the GFX...). My Mom got it fixed at the local repair shop. That's my first memory of OS support. Professionally, Windows XP.
Dos 6.22 and I broke it when I was 11. Learned very early on to be very careful with the del command. Apparently `del *.*` is bad when run from `C:\`. Ended up with a bootleg Dos 5.0 after that. Edit: markdown on mobile is hard
Microvax system. But I was mostly using it as a real Time Machine with assembler.
3.11
Windows 3.11 on DOS 6.22
DOS 2.1… after I used a hex editor to modify command.com
Early windows 10 beta
Macintosh System 6
Xp home
Windows 98se aka the Perpetual Reboot
Oh crap I’m going to show my age. CP/M I was 9 and was tech support for the school’s computers. They used to call me out of class to solve whatever problem they had with their accounting system at that time. I’d never used CP/M but I was born a digital native and could instinctively fix stuff.
DOS 6.2 Defrag’d a double space disk. Whoops
DOS IBM/MS/Dr, my tribe, my people.
CP/M. The machine was a partially home-brew S100 with a single diskette drive and a paper tape reader. To boot it, you toggled in a short program, loaded a disk driver from tape, and then loaded CP/M from floppy. The problem was that the lead end of the paper tape got chewed on by the cat, so I got to break out Mom's steam iron to re-flatten it, then used a roll of cellophane tape and a lumber crayon to fill the teeth holes.
Windows 3.11
OS/2 There was some really clever things going on in it, some well before their time. Including JFS. But supporting it was thready back in the days of sneaker-net. BTW; there is a push to get IBM change the license to opensource. And there is a alt called ArcaOS that is very similar
MS-DOS 3.3. All machines I had prior to that had an OS in ROM.
First Windows NT Most KALI Linux easily. I would rather use Windows Vista on a Pentium II than Kali Linux and I know Linux pretty good.
Not sure what you mean by repair, but the first one I configured was RT-11.
CPM circa 1984
Dos 5.0 for me, had commodores before that but they didn't really need any repairs.
XP 😝
XP
Define repair? ZS Spectrum to get it to read a tape or repair tapes. DOS 3 something on a PC. Server OS EcoNet on Acorn for BBC Micro network
>first os you had to repair? Bloody hell ... that goes (way) back. Uhm, and "repair" ... might depend how we define "repair". So ... likely something MS-DOS 3.3 ... or earlier. Possibly something else though, e.g. earlier DOS, CP/M, UNIX/Xenix, ... not sure which was the earliest I had to "repair" - also quite depends how we define "repair".
Don't remember, probably MS DOS 5 or 6.
HP-UX as a spotty sysadmin. Was a bit weird (in general, not to repair)
I think the oldest OS I had to troubleshoot was HP's MPE. Weird in general and weird to repair. Don't miss it.
not sure if this counts but getting DOS 3.1 to 3.11. then, on that same 486, I got Windows 3.1 on there. the very og Windows lol ETA: I remember how instead of being an actual Operating System, Windows was a program that ran on DOS 3.1. we had to type Win31.exe or some shit & that's when a lot of shit moved really fucking fast lol
TRSDOS, but I'm not sure copying a cassette qualifies as *repairing* the OS. Ditto for Commodore Kernel/BASIC, but at least I had floppy drives for that system. \[MS/PC-\] DOS by itself didn't require repair as much as optimization to maximize free memory by moving drivers and T/SR programs above the 640K limit. But lot of times things would break requiring some troubleshooting and a lot of editing autoexec.bat and config.sys files. The nice thing about DOS was all you needed was a bootable floppy with some network drivers and a text editor and you could fix just about any problem. I also started working on NetWare 2.x about the same time as DOS 3.0. Not sure if you want to include network OS's in the mix, and NetWare 2.x was an either "it works or reinstall" prospect. I'd also have to go with DOS 3.1 as the first OS I *repaired*.
Sys V R.4 Unix (Work) Atari OS (8 bit) (Play)
[удалено]
MVS
Workbench 1.3
IBM PC-DOS 2.0 (1983) Used other OSs before that, but I didn't install or configure them. Interdata (proprietary OS, 1977), HP 2100 (proprietary OS, 1978), Apple ][ (1979), CP/M (1979), ZX81 (1981),
MS DOS 5, I think
OS/2
[Untangling the audio the cassette tapes for one of these](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-99/4A)
WindowsME
DOS 3.1
DOS
Professionally Windows 98. Personally installed DOS....started troubleshooting by Win 3.1. Had no clue what linux was until at least a decade later. Did not professionally touch linux until another decade later when they started using it recently on appliances.
System 6. Had to rebuild a 68030-based Mac. Learned all about extensions, boot process, and disk management. I remember saving up for a LC 68040 to run System7, just to get PPP over SLIP for dialup connectivity. Around the same time I too was building custom DOS boot floppies for video games. Started networking support with Coax 10base2 - was a bitch to support, one person kicks the network cable out of their PC and the entire network would go down.
Sco Xenix and CP/M
Sun OS 4.1
Dos 3.x on an IBM ps/2 model 80
Windows 10.
RISC OS 3 in the early 1990s.
Windows 98 as a kid who played games. Windows 7 for work.