Have you ever wondered what was the worst
operating system in all of history? That's what we're going to go over today. I'm ThioJoe and
I made this list of the top seven worst operating systems in history. So we're going to go over in
order, at least in my opinion, what they were. Some of these, you may have heard of some of them
almost, definitely not, but still, if you have one that you hate even more, you can always let us
know down in the comments. So starting off with number seven, we have Windows ME, officially
pronounced Windows Me, this came out in the year 2000. And this has such a bad reputation.
It's actually nicknamed, sometimes people say, as "Windows Mistake Edition", although it's
funny because this was such an unpopular operating system that most people saying how
bad it was never actually used it themselves. Technically, the ME stands for Millennium
Edition. And basically this was supposed to be for personal users as opposed to
Windows 2000, which was around the same time, and more for business and enterprise. And most
say that the problem with Windows ME was that it was a rushed attempt, at the last minute,
and never really needed to exist in the first place. It was just kind of there to fill a gap
for people who were personal users of Windows 2000. And it didn't really need to exist because
it came between Windows 98 and Windows 98SE, which was superior before it. And then it
was followed by the far superior Windows XP, which again, obviously became extremely popular.
So there was kind of that weird middle ground. And Windows ME had a reputation of crashing, being
slow and having a lot of performance issues, bugs, and just a reputation
of being terrible in general. So in that super short lifecycle,
there wasn't really any time to improve it or fix it by the time XP came out. And
it had such a small market share that most people, hearing the reputation, just stuck with
Windows 98, didn't even bother using it. I was able to actually boot Windows ME into a
virtual machine. And I think it just looks like any other version that's old, of Windows. So it
looks almost exactly the same, like Windows 2000 that I remember using in school. But Microsoft did
actually add a lot of features to it. For example, Internet Explorer 5.5. It had Windows Movie
Maker, which made it so anyone could edit videos. And it also had a bunch of hideous
Windows Media Player themes and skins. I mean, honestly, what are these? These
are just truly bizarre. So yeah, Windows ME definitely goes down in history
as one of the worst versions of Windows. Moving on to number six, we have MS-DOS
version 4.0. Now the series of MS-DOS operating systems were not actually that
bad. They were considered pretty good, especially version 3.3. But when 4.0
came along, there were some problems. The biggest problem was that DOS 4.0 was found to
crash constantly and freeze by those who used it, or at least some of them. So again,
it had a horrible reputation and also was really buggy with compatibility problems. Even
though it did have such a horrible reputation, though, it did add some significant
features. For example, it had a GUI and it actually had support for mouses
if you actually had the driver for it. And surprisingly, after a bit of digging,
I was again able to install MS-DOS 4.0 onto a virtual machine. And there's not much to
see though. Apparently back then there was nothing pre-installed. So it's basically
just the command prompt, the file system, the ability to change theme
colors, and some DOS utilities. So looking in DOS utilities, it basically just
lets you set the date and time and copy discs. That's pretty much it. Backup and restore and
format. And then the change colors had some ugly, ugly colors. That's all I can
say. You had the file system, which was basically just a file Explorer
program, which kind of shows directories and files within it. And there's not much in the
file system. You can see that there are some old programs you might recognize though, such
as CHKDSK. And then the command prompt is pretty much what you'd expect. It looks really similar to
what we have today. So just even fewer commands. I mean this version of DOS literally
didn't even have the help command, which was introduced in 5.0. So yeah, basically
DOS 4.0 ,was just found to be very buggy, unstable, and most people just stuck with 3.3. All right. On a number five, we have one
that you probably have never heard of before. It's called the Incompatible Timesharing
System, ITS, and this is from the 1960s. Basically it was created by hackers in
the '60s at MIT for use on the PDP-6 and PDP-10 series computers. So these are big old
style computers that are basically mainframes, not the type of personal computers you're used
to. And this operating system was written pretty much from scratch in assembly code. So pretty
close to machine code. If you asked me and I don't know why the name says "incompatible",
maybe it's because it was specifically written for just those computers and wouldn't really work
on anything else. But the timesharing part of it means that it was for computers that are meant
to be shared, remotely possibly, not just a personal computer. So a lot of times, these
old computers were mainframes and then people would be allowed to have access for a certain
amount of time on those computers and use it. Now this operating system being so early in the
computer era was not necessarily bad for its time. However, looking back at it, it was missing a
lot of stuff that we take for granted today and can't imagine not having. For example,
there was a flat directory structure, which basically meant that there were no
sub-directories whatsoever. Every user got one directory. That was it. You had to put
everything in there, no organization whatsoever. Also apparently it only allowed files to have
exactly a six character file name. And it was Mono Case, which means that you couldn't have
different uppercase and lowercase letters. It didn't matter. Another interesting
thing is that security was basically non-existent. There were no passwords initially,
so anyone could log into anyone else's session, but it was apparently polite to apparently
log in so that people could see you wanting to get on. I don't exactly know how it
worked, but there were no passwords. And also that meant that anybody could edit
anyone else's files in their other directories, even the system files and source
code. So if someone was malicious, they could literally just go in
and just delete everything off. But I believe because it was at
MIT and probably everyone using it was faculty or staff and other people
could see the logs to see who did what, it was probably just in everyone's best
interest to behave in there. So yeah, not exactly an operating system that I
think would work out too well these days. All right now on a number 4, we have JavaOS.
This was a operating system built entirely, or mostly on Java by Sun Microsystems or the
subsidiary JavaSoft. This operating system was announced in 1996, but it only lasted three
years before being discontinued in 1999, because apparently, basically nobody used it. And because there were basically no computers
that actually did run on it. I did have some trouble finding some screenshots. But you can see
some examples of programs that were using this. Now in the initial press release announcing
this operating system, it described it as, "a highly compact operating system designed to
run Java applications directly on microprocessors, in anything from net computers to pagers." So
basically it was designed to be very compact and be able to run on "embedded devices". So
these aren't necessarily personal computers, but also be able to do on ATM's or like it said,
pagers, very small discrete purpose-built devices. And it was actually licensed by several major
companies, but apparently they never actually used it, even though they licensed it. Also
from what I've read because the operating system was written in Java as opposed to C,
which was like most other operating systems, people said that this operating system
would have tended to run a lot slower than the other operating systems. So
that probably didn't help anything. Based on what I could find, really the only
computer that ever did actually run on it was the Javastation computer, which was created
by Sun Microsystems themselves. And this thing was even so unpopular that I could really only
find a few grainy screenshots from ancient documentation files. But I would recommend
if you're interested in this Javastation, there's another YouTuber by the name
of Cameron Gray, who did a whole video about the Javastation. He was able to get
it to boot up. So rather than, you know, steal his screenshots and stuff, I will direct
you to go check out his video. It's very cool. He's able to boot it up and you can see
the whole interface and stuff on his video. So basically JavaOS was a complete failure that
only lasted three years and it only ran on pretty much one computer that was officially built by
Sun Microsystems and no one even really used that. All right, onto number three, you guys knew this
one was going to be on the list. It's Windows Vista from 2006. Now I should point out that
eventually, after some service packs, Vista did turn out okay. But on launch and for a while, it
was pretty much a disaster. A lot of people just have a lot of problems. For example, because of
the new fancy graphics with Aero and a lot of the stuff being upgraded and improved in the backend,
it was very hardware intensive. So a lot of people who were maybe upgrading from their current
computer to Vista from XP, they would notice that Vista would run a lot slower on the equivalent
hardware. So they thought that "Well, Windows Vista just sucks." But really it was probably just
their computer. But at the same time, it wasn't exactly their fault, because you kind of expect a
certain level of performance if you're upgrading. Also because a lot was redone on the backend,
there was compatibility issues which relied on equipment manufacturers to update the drivers that
you could download. And sometimes they were slow to do this, or didn't do it at all. So maybe your
keyboard or mouse, if it didn't get an update, you wouldn't be able to use it, as well. And
apparently even more central device manufacturers for core components like NVIDIA for graphics
cards, even though they did update the drivers, they caused crashes and stuff. So there was
just a lot of problems with the drivers overall. Another thing that people didn't like is the User
Account Control. This was a really great feature in terms of security, but it was so new and
people just found it very annoying and intrusive, because every time you would try to do something, it would pop up a prompt to do
it. And it would just be annoying. And perhaps it was too intrusive
because even now these days on Windows 10, I think it's a lot better. I
even have my UAC set to maximum on Windows 10. And I believe that pops up way less frequently
than it did on Windows Vista back in the day. And there were some features that I actually
really liked. For example, the Gadgets pane. I was kind of sad when that was removed
in later versions. And after about a year, Service Pack One was released, which fixed a lot
of things. And then a year later Service Pack Two. But by that time, Windows 7 was just around
the corner. People were using the beta of that, seeing how great it was. And because
Windows XP was already so popular before, a lot of people saw the reputation
of Windows Vista and just said, "You know what? I'm never going to even
bother using that. I'm going to stay on XP and then maybe upgrade to Windows 7." So Windows
Vista never really got even a chance to recover. All right, on to number two, you probably knew
this one was coming as well. It's Windows 8, from 2012. Basically at the time, Microsoft
was trying to really blend desktop and mobile tablet interfaces. I guess they saw that mobile
devices were becoming more popular and they said, "You know what? We should have the same exact
interface on a desktop with a keyboard and mouse as a touchscreen tablet", which did not exactly go
over too well. And in my opinion, this is because they really shifted too far towards the being
touch friendly part of it. For example, they did a lot of things that were horrible on a desktop.
They removed the start button, for example. They had the start menu become just a full screen
start screen. And while yes, this may have played out well, if you were using a touch pad device,
on a desktop it really just didn't translate. Windows 8 also had the new Metro style apps, which
are now known as Universal Windows Platform Apps. And these were a bit confusing as well,
because they would open in full screen, but they had no way to minimize
or close out. There was no close out or minimize button on these. So
people were really confused by them. There was also the Charms Bar, which had
to be accessed by swiping from the right or moving the cursor over. But it was
not really intuitive. There were no real instructions on how to use anything. So if
someone came up to the computer and didn't know how to access those things, they
would just not be able to access them. Another really weird thing was that
you could get to the desktop interface, but only by clicking on the desktop tile on the
start screen. And there was no way to boot to the desktop by default. And once you were
there, there was no start button. So it was not exactly clear how to get back to the start
screen. You had to basically press the Windows key on your keyboard, which is not intuitive
at all. I almost never use that key anyway. Now eventually Microsoft did release Windows 8.1 in 2013, which improved a lot of the Windows
interface for keyboard and mouse. For example, it brought back the start button, which would
open the start screen. So there were still no start menu, but at least the button was there.
It also allowed you to boot to the desktop by default. And also they later added the close
and minimize buttons to Windows Store apps. So obviously a lot of people found this
super confusing coming from previous versions of Windows. Though, it wasn't all
necessarily bad, there were actually some good additions. For example, the Fast Startup
feature, which allowed much faster boot times. There were task manager improvements.
There was an upgraded Windows Explorer. It also included Windows Defender built-in,
which was a reasonable antivirus. There was also a support for DPI scaling if you have
different monitors of different sizes. And there was also cloud syncing settings. So a
lot of features, but because it was so unintuitive and just had such a bad reputation, a lot of
people didn't even bother upgrading. I know I didn't. I just stuck to Windows 7. I was like,
"I am not even going to touch that." I did try, I think one computer that was using it. It was
so bad that I didn't even want to use it at all. So finally, on a number one, in my opinion,
the worst operating system in history, we have Lindows From 2001. No I'm not misspeaking.
No, that's not a spelling error. There was actually an operating system called Lindows. And
no, it wasn't a joke either. It was a legitimate serious attempt to basically create an operating
system based in Linux that had a Windows-like interface and also supported running major Windows
applications through use of Linux's Wine API. The problem was... It didn't work. And apparently
after just a few months of trying to develop it, the creators eventually scrapped the initial
idea and focused on just making an operating system that would make it very easy
to install Linux applications on it. But there were actually some interesting features
they did add to it, for example, a so-called "click and run" software distribution service,
which was GUI based, which made it very easy to install any number of Linux software packages.
Keep in mind, this was back in 2001, when that was sort of a novelty. The service apparently
had over 30,000 apps that could be installed through this. However, it wasn't free. There was
a basic service, which was about 20 bucks a year, which allowed you to use it. And at the
time it actually received a lot of criticism from the Linux community for having paid
proprietary software in there that you had to pay for it to use, which was kind of against
the whole idea of the Linux community I guess. Also Microsoft wasn't exactly happy about
this whole thing either because of the name, I guess. So they actually sued the
creators of Lindows and actually lost. The court sided with the Lindows
creators. However, Microsoft eventually settled by supposedly paying $20 million to
them to buy the rights to the name Lindows. So then the operating system was renamed to
Linspire, which is what it's still called today. So it wasn't like this was just some random hobby
project. It actually did get a sort of amount of recognition and actually companies bought it.
And it has changed hands in terms of ownership over the years. So it is a legitimate operating
system. It just never really became popular because of all the criticism, and well,
it's just kind of a weird concept. And there's plenty of other way more popular
distributions of Linux, such as Ubuntu. So it really just never took off, which
is probably why you've never heard of it. So let me know down in the comments, if you have
an operating system that you think should have been number one, or you think that should
have been on the list in the first place, let me know down there. If you guys want to
keep watching, the next video I'd recommend is one I made recently talking about Windows
features that you probably didn't know that you could disable. So I'll put that link
right there. You can just click on it. So thanks so much for watching guys
and I'll see you in the next video.
windows me bad