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 theojo 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 nickname 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
emmy 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 98 se 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 life cycle 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 to 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
it 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 them
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 disks 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 add 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 check disk 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 das 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 to number five we have
one
that you probably have never heard of
before it's called the incompatible
time sharing 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 ask 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 time sharing 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 are 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 if 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 subdirectories
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 to number
four we have java os
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
they were using us
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 atms or like
it said
pagers very small discrete purpose-built
devices
and 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 java station there's
another youtuber
by the name of cameron gray who did a
whole video about the java station 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 java os was a
complete failure that only lasted three
years
and it only ran on pretty much one
computer that was officially built by
sun micro systems
and no one even really used that all
right on a number three you guys knew
this one was gonna 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 had a lot of problems for
example because of the new fancy
graphics with arrow
and a lot of the stuff being upgraded
and improved in the back end
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 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 back end
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 drivers overall
another thing 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 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 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 touch screen 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
touchpad 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 keyboards and mouse for example it
brought back the start button which
would open the start screen
so there was 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
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
gonna 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
all right so finally on to number one in
my opinion the worst operating system
in history we have lindos from 2001.
no i'm not miss speaking no that's not a
spelling error there was actually an
operating system
called lindos and no it wasn't a joke
either it was a legitimate
serious attempt to basically create a
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 they had
to pay for 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
lindo's and actually
lost the court sided with the lindo's
creators
however microsoft eventually settled by
supposedly paying 20 million dollars to
them
to buy the rights to the name lindos 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 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 in the next video