Strangest OS you have seen out in the wild?

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YoRHa No. 2 Type B

YoRHa No. 2 Type B

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Over the years, I have seen operating systems in use in various public places, such as Windows or Linux.
The most obscure OS I have personally seen in the wild is my local bowling alley running on SCO OpenServer 5.
The one time I saw an OpenVMS server running a crucial government agency might top that.
Can any kiwis top that?
 
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The closest thing I can think of that I remember is seeing an old Sun Microsystems workstation running JavaOS years ago in my old college library.
 
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Not a strange OS, but I once saw a Windows Server 2003 computer as part of a rack that should have been collecting trends for critical building equipment. When I logged in after powering it, I got bombarded with errors from mid-2017. The last time the server's program had been accessed was when Ted Cruz was still running. Incredibly, the building equipment had no communication or operational issues despite not having been looked at in 8 years.
 
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It's not strange but most people are not aware that many ATMs run on OS/2. That and OpenVNS are still used in banking/public services because of stability.
But if you want to see some real obscure application specific OSes look at medical devices. Solaris, QNX, BeOS...
Embedded XP also runs a lot of consumer facing interfaces if they haven't been replaced in a while. POS terminals, information screens at museums, it's XP.
 
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I don't know if it counts, but for years I've seen doctors and dentists use an interface that is some dos era bios looking thing. All blue and yellow, purely keyboard controlled, the resolution of teletext. I assume it's some propriety system from the 80s or 90s that was in use for years.
 
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Fae Supremacist said:
It's not strange but most people are not aware that many ATMs run on OS/2. That and OpenVNS are still used in banking/public services because of stability.
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OpenVMS is a bizarre OS. I've had a chance to play around with it a little bit, it behaves a lot like an early version of Windows NT (even using stuff like .exe files) but also a lot like old Unix systems. If you install a GUI on it, it uses an X window manager like Unix does.
The closest thing I can compare OpenVMS to is Windows in a parallel universe, where it was not Jeeted but also became a server OS.
I can see why banks and public services use it, its an absolute tank when it comes to reliability. Even the Wikipedia page for OpenVMS says that uptimes of 17 years have been reported.
I haven't had a chance to play around with OS/2 but it seems like a version of Windows that could exist in a parallel universe as well.
 
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YoRHa No. 2 Type B said:
I haven't had a chance to play around with OS/2 but it seems like a version of Windows that could exist in a parallel universe as well.
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It pretty much is. Microsoft was jointly developing OS/2 with IBM as a successor to DOS, OS/2 and Windows 2.0 would be compatible "flavors" of the same OS like IBM PC DOS and MS-DOS were, but development was delayed, the Windows API could not be made fully compatible with OS/2, and they formally split when Microsoft started bundling Windows 3.0 on desktop computers and sidelined IBM completely.
If you want to play with a modern version of OS/2 try Arca.
 
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At one point most of my job was operating a terminal running on very, very old IBM mystery meat. But not really, that environment had been migrated and was running in an emulator on a DEC Alpha machine. But not really, the Alpha had been migrated and was running in an emulator on an Itanium system.
 
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The CNC machines at one of my old jobs ran on a custom embedded version of Windows xp made by Siemens. I think it was made by Siemens. It had the Siemens logo alongside Microsoft's on the boot screen anyway. It's the only time I've seen a custom version of windows with another company's logo on it like that.
 
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Briefly worked at a company that used OS/2 Warp 4 in a VM, to use their accounting software. The machines themselves were running Windows 7, but this specific piece of software was never ported to any other platform so they had to stick with OS/2. Oddly they never upgraded to its modern variants like eComStation or ArcaOS.
 
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Back in the long-long-ago I noticed a random suburban Blockbuster Video had dual clustered Alphaservers running Digital UNIX for their POS system. That had to be several tens (hundreds?) of thousands of dollars worth of gear doing a job a 486SX could reasonably handle.

I also worked on an actual P9000 running HP-UX in the goddamned 2010s. I had no idea what I was doing.
 
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