Reboot Page: "unlimited rebooting experience from vintage operating systems"

The Reboot Page features the reboot dialogs, shutdown sequences, and even the magical floppy-disc grinding SFX from a variety of vintage OSes. Rebooting the Amiga was just like being there. I got shivers.

The Restart Page - Free unlimited rebooting experience from vintage operating systems (via JWZ)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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jerwin

I like a machine that can turn itself off. I thought the PowerMac 6100 was a bit clunky compared to the IIsi– which could be turned on with the keyboard, injected floppy disks, and turned itself off when shut down. I’d like to see an OpenLook machine added to to the mix– the widget set has a funky, but clean look.
MelSkunk

They missed my favorite reboot.

http://youtu.be/WBjWCT4NPHI
DewiMorgan

Interesting: the best ones (in my opinion) do not begin with a question. The worst, which is the majority, seem to begin with an implication that the user hasn’t any idea what they’re doing: it look like “Are you sure you want to…” are six words that should be removed from UI designers’ repertoires.
- http://bhtooefr.org/ Eric Rucker
  
  But what if the user really doesn’t have any idea what they’re doing?
  - dnebdal
    
    A question as old as the field itself, that. :D
    To quote Babbage:
    
    On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
- Petzl
  
  What sentence would you prefer that achieves the same ends? “Please confirm…” sounds too military/tech. “Press ENTER to stop shutdown in XX seconds” is too much like a countdown/launch. “Are you sure…” is simply being direct and friendly, in line with Mac’s traditional style. It’s not unusual to realize right after you hit restart/shutdown that you do in fact have some other task to finish first. The “Are you sure” can jog your memory; a “Confirm this” message tends to make the user confirm mechanically without reflection.
  
  I think I get what you’re talking about when the phrase is “Do you really want to … ” That should not be the way to ask the user for a confirmation, unless he’s attempting to wipe the harddrive or send a mass email to all members in the address book.
  
  If you want to talk about UIs that insult the user’s intelligence, I would go with Windows Vista/Windows 7 multilayers of confirmation when you have the temerity to try to rename a file, let alone delete or actually run an executable.
  - robuluz
    
    If you want to talk about UIs that insult the user’s intelligence, I would go with Windows Vista/Windows 7 multilayers of confirmation when you have the temerity to try to rename a file, let alone delete or actually run an executable.
    
    What are you talking about? Click on the file name. Type a new name. Hit enter.
    - dnebdal
      
      Get this dialog, press enter again.
      - http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby
        
        In all fairness, that’s when you change an extension, not a filename, and you ge the exact same prompt on OSX.
        
        That said, the default setup for Vista does assume that you’re an accident prone 80 year old that neither knows where they are or what they’re doing and that every action taken on the machine is cause for concern.
        
        Win 7 might be the same, but I hope they fixed that stuff. Doing anything seemed to involve 8 security steps.
      - dnebdal
        
        This in reply to Nathan Hornby. (Why does disqus (here?) have a shallow nesting limit?)
        
        True, it doesn’t ask if you only change the non-extension part of the name. I’ve noticed OS X does the same, too. I’m not sure if it excuses anything, but at least it means it’s not a diffference between them. Fair enough.
        
        Win7 is a bit less heavy on the EAC prompts than Vista; it sems to be better at remembering your answers. Running executables from the internet will give you a “signature could not be verified, run (yes/no)” dialog unless it is actually signed, which is a bit annoying. It makes more sense that installers get an EAC prompt, since they typically need some elevated access to install for all users. I can live with that, honestly; it makes sense.
        
        What I do wonder is how Win8 will be – they’ve made some sweeping tablet-ish changes to the interface, so I kind of expect it to be littered with “did you really mean that”-prompts meant to handle accidental touches. We will see.
      - Antinous / Moderator
        
        (Why does disqus (here?) have a shallow nesting limit?)
        
        The alternative is to have comments at the end of a long thread that are one character wide.
      - dnebdal
        
        @Antinous_Moderator:disqus :
        Right- but wouldn’t it be nicer to establish a minimum comment width and just not shrink column width beyond that? The current form means you can’t really continue a sub-discussion for more than a few posts before it’s confusing/impossible to get reply notifications; sacrificing the visual nesting level indication seems like it would be a lower “cost” than sacrificing max comment depth.
        
        Oh well, at least it has a practical and fairly sensible reason. :)
      - Antinous / Moderator
        
        Feel free to buy Disqus and implement. When we switched over to nested comments, I assumed that the limit was just visual, but no. The options are to leave it as is, have comments one character wide or go back to flat chrono threads.
      - dnebdal
        
        @Antinous_Moderator:disqus :
        Fair enough, I guess we can hope they’ll do something elegant in a future version. It’s not a huge problem, anyway. :)
http://www.youtube.com/user/ziccup akbar56

Not nearly enough extensions on the mac reboot.
http://twitter.com/mwseniff Matthew W Seniff

The Amiga reboot sounded just like old times. Maybe I should dust them off and give em’ a try. Thanx for the link.
- http://manywordsforrain.blogspot.com/ Mr Baker
  
  Don’t do it, you’ll end up playing Out of the World, which is a total time suck.
  - Nathan Black
    
    In case you didn’t know, there is a PC compatible version available, I played through it again a couple years ago for old times sake.
    http://www.anotherworld.fr/anotherworld_uk/
    - http://manywordsforrain.blogspot.com/ Mr Baker
      
      Oh yes, I know. There is an iPad version, too (downloaded, played it through).
      
      Where is the remake of Dune?
  - benher
    
    That or you’ll end up staring at a bouncing red and white ball for hours on end.
    
    Also, Guru med!!
dagfooyo

Haha this was so awesome. I’d used at least 3/4 of these OSes at one point or other in my life. My girlfriend was laughing at how excited I got seeing all the restart sequences again.

It’s funny since when I watched them all originally I was just impatient for them to restart.
Karloskar

I find it interesting that what was, up until June last year, the most prevalent operating system in the world is classified as “vintage”. :)
- Melinda9
  
  Yeah, I was laughing since it’s still only a click away on my computer.
- alxr
  
  It’s kind of stunning to note that Windows XP is (almost) as old now as Windows 3.1 was at the time of XP’s release.
kekko

The funniest thing happened, when Firefox 9.0.1 crashed during the fake OSX reboot on my Windows XP machine.
- allium
  
  Kind of like back in the day when you could run a Pentium emulator on a PowerPC Mac, but not vice versa.
  - http://aqfl.net Ant
    
    Or if you had a DOS card (486 DX speed IIRC) with that PowerMac or PowerPC. I forget which. It was back in the mid 1990s/90s.
http://twitter.com/matcatastrophe mat catastrophe

I don’t remember them being that fast.
chaopoiesis

Anyone on the historical authenticity of the typo in the Amiga startup message (i.e., “All rights reserverd”)?
bobcorrigan

Anyone capture the boot sequence of a PDP/11?
teapot

This is all kinds of awesome.
twency

What, no GS/OS?
- twency
  
  Ah, my mistake. It’s right there. How could I not have instantly recognized my old friend, even after all these years…
univac

Very nice nostalgic romp. I smiled.
How about BeOS boot?
- cantsp3ll
  
  Yes, please. Heck, booting BeOS 4.5 only took about 11-12 seconds on a dual P3 in 1999.
  
  Oh, baby, you’ve been gone so long. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlOi-L-N0X4
Daniel Latta

What, no KDE? No Gnome?
http://twitter.com/Olifiers Henrique Olifiers

Guru Meditation.
rocobo9

i love the simplicity and thinking behind the dialogue in the top-right (where each button represents an answer to the question) compared to the example in the top-left where they print an explanation of each buttons function.

simplicity is all too often overlooked by professional designers
http://jhhl.net jhhl

On my Amiga, I replaced the hand-holding-Floppy with my own “Amiga 1800″ image, and on many floppies, I replaced the normal boot code with an antivirus “canary in a coal mine” boot track that played a shortened version of the Looney Tunes theme “Merrily we Roll along”, using a program I wrote called BootTune. The idea being when an SCA virus or one of its variants overwrote the boot track with the tune, its absence would notify you so you could clean it out. In true open fashion, I provided source code.