What is the most nostalgic OS for you?

[cybherspace]

This is a funny question for me, because I've definitely been using Windows since 95. That being said, none of that has as much nostalgia for me as Ubuntu does. I haven't spent a lot of time in it, but when I used Ubuntu (and Mint) back in college, that was a very fun and memorable little exploration. It does make me want to go back in some ways!

[brisray]

I've been thinking a bit more about my old Amstrad 1640, GEM and what I used it for.

Mine didn't come with a hard drive but had 2x 5.25" disk drives. The system came with 4 disks and that meant a lot of disk swapping! I eventually got a 32Mb drive for it which cost an absolute fortune, but not so much as the 24 pin dot matrix printer did. It came with an EGA monitor that could show a massive 16 colours at a time, but could swap between 4 palettes.

It came with a couple of GEM programs like Paint but my favourite program was Locomotive GEM Basic 2. One of the first things I did was program a driver for the dot matrix printer. The physical key presses to get it to change modes were difficult to remember, but it did come with a list of modes it could be put into along with their ASCII codes which could be programmed.

By the 90s it was nearing the end of its life, but software was still being developed for it. I used to want a copy of GEM  Ventura Publisher but there was no way I could afford the $700 for the basic version, let alone the $1,200 for the pro one.

[Phoenix]

This is a funny question for me, because I've definitely been using Windows since 95. That being said, none of that has as much nostalgia for me as Ubuntu does. I haven't spent a lot of time in it, but when I used Ubuntu (and Mint) back in college, that was a very fun and memorable little exploration. It does make me want to go back in some ways!

Go for it! Let me know how you find it if you try it

[petrichoran]

XP for sure!! i used it at both of my [separated] parents' houses when i was little even though Win 7 had come out. my mom just didn't really know much about computers so she didn't care. my dad didn't have a computer in his house, so we went to his work office for him to get things done while i played on the computer, and they still had XP for budget reasons. Win 7 is pretty nostalgic for me as well because it was on the work laptop that my dad eventually got. i remember playing games at his house that wouldn't work on my mom's computer, like Webkinz's Mazin' Hamsters, and it being pretty special. in hindsight it was probably because they weren't XP compatible.   

[Misanthropic Monster™]

Windows '95 and oddly, WimXP holds a lot of nostalgia for me haha

[xixxii]

hmmmmm... i think it's a tie between windows XP and mac os 9!
i had a gorgeous hand-me-down clamshell ibook (blueberry color!) that i absolutely adored as a kid, it had os9 on it. i used it just for drawing and writing - i think its wifi was broken, which is why it was handed down to me haha. it was lost along with most of my other stuff in a housefire while i was away at college, but it still worked great until then. what a trooper that thing was - i really want to replace it someday! i love that they're kinda trendy now.

my memory of the interface and such isn't super clear as i was pretty small when i regularly played with that computer, but the old wallpapers completely bowl me over with nostalgia when i see them! (i attached one for everyone to enjoy  )

[Wildcat]

Windows XP... 'cause it's what I grew up with.

[Skykristal]

Its Windows XP for me as well! My first steps on the internet happened on this OS. I remember my laptop taking a good 10 minutes to boot and my browser taking another 3 minutes to open. good times.

[Nikodile]

hmmmmm... i think it's a tie between windows XP and mac os 9!

I think this is the same for me, but also a dash of Windows 95.

My dad used to have a Win95 HP back home and I would mess around on it while he was at work. XP and Mac OS 9 were both used in the library and school though so I used that a good amount too.

[WG2k]

Windows 7. I remember going to this website called WildTangent and playing games from there like Penguins!, Polar Bowler, Polar Golfer, and maybe PvZ? been so long man.

[yungwake0]

All of the Windows 7 and before are nostalgic to me, even though I didn't actually experience anything before XP

Ironically enough 9x hits me the hardest, perhaps not having used them in their era makes them more alluring to me?

I remember going to this website called WildTangent and playing games from there like Penguins!, Polar Bowler, Polar Golfer, and maybe PvZ? been so long man.

Wowzers that's a repressed memory unlocked I remember I had to rebuy Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 at least 3-4 times because I was always losing the password to my WildTangent accounts

[Historia-Q]

Windows XP was literally the first OS I saw in my lifetime. I grew up with Windows 7 and 10, and I remember little about 8/8.1, but XP was the first time I had any experience with the computer (and the internet) at all, thus making it really nostalgic to me.

[Loebas]

The first interaction with computers for me was a old 486 pc with windows 3.11 (which i mistook for windows 95). But that was a very very long time ago

I've got a lot of windows 9x boxes in the past, which where old computers family members discarded.

Later i got a "new" selfbuild pc with components source from everywhere, which was my first XP machine.

The OS with the biggest nostalgia for me was Windows 95.

[VelvetSoul]

It's a toss up between XP, 95, or 7. If I absolutely had to pick I believe probably windows 7 just because of how much time I spent using it. By the time I got my own personal computer we had moved away from XP so that was the family computer to me. I only spent a couple years with 95 so while I have fond memories of it and love the aesthetic, it doesn't really make me as nostalgic as 7 which was the OS for my personal computer for a long, long time.

The fact that 7 is old and we're on 11 now makes me feel old...

[ctrl-shift-esc]

Hmm looking at my OS usage history, here goes:

MS-DOS
---------------------
I didn't really use it back in the day that much aside from very light usage. I mean I was very young so I mostly used it to boot up games and asked my older brother to (happily) do all the configuration stuff for me    During my teenage years I had older machines that were running Win95/98SE and I occasionally booted them to DOS to play some games that weren't so happy to be run from inside Windows, but I was always limited to very basic understanding of DOS, mostly because I could do all the file organisation and stuff from inside Windows.

Windows 95
---------------------
I skipped 3.1 and started straight at Windows 95. Now I liked it a lot but I don't have very much real nostalgia for it because I was so young that the memories are all quite fuzzy.

Windows 98 SE
------------------------------
Now we're talking! I used Windows 98 SE extensively in my pre-teen and early teen years. I would say that this OS I have the 2nd most nostalgia for, and I'm planning to install it on one of my old machines at some point.

Windows XP
----------------------
This is it for me. All of my teenage year memories reside here. All the wonderful video games, my first leaps into music production, the MSN Messenger, the relatively early days of web surfing and forum posting, it all happened on Windows XP. I used it till very late  00's. I still remember the day when my Win XP install got blasted with viruses and I had to wipe it! I accidentally had left my antivirus turned off, which I did routinely to save the precious CPU cycles when playing offline games, then I browsed some sketchy website or another and the whole system got pwned. The horror Which then lead me to install...

Windows Vista
--------------------------
I don't know what it is about Vista, but it never really 'clicked' for me. It felt like it was held together with duct tape and prayers. It was slow & sluggish, there were always some error or another, it was a pain to get old software to run and it always felt unfinished. Even though I was running it on hardware that was well above the recommended system specs. Looking back, to me it feels like an alpha/beta release of Windows 7, that sums it up pretty well I think.

It looked gorgeous though. I eventually moved on from Vista because I got stuck in an infinite boot loop during a failed Windows update  Nothing worked, not safe mode, nothing.

Windows 7
------------------
I can't really say I can feel nostalgic for Windows 7 yet, because I use it currently as my main OS. I can say though that I feel wistful that it is only a matter of time before I have to truly move on and the OS will be shelved for mostly legacy offline specific-purpose machines. There is something about 7, that no Windows has managed to capture since. It has a soul. Just... look at the default Aero theme with the default wallpaper and it's easy to see... it's just so gorgeous. Everything just works. It's at the same time very utilitarian and minimalistic yet it is delightfully aesthetic. It's... it's just perfection. *Sniff* - here I am, getting all teary eyed over an computer operating system 

So uhh, overall, I would say that the most nostalgic OS for me, as of now, is definitely Windows XP. It was with me throughout my awkward teenage years, and the memories are strong. 

Edit: Typos