The old versions are listed in the 'Purchases' list within App Store app on my Mac. But when I hit the 'Download' button a message appears refusing to start the download because my MacBook Pro is too new and does not support that OS. 10 Great Features in 10 Different OSes If you were making the ultimate operating system, what features would you choose? Here's one take on the best of the best from Mac OS X, Ubuntu, Unix, iOS, Windows and more. • By Terrence Dorsey • I've been fortunate to use a pretty wide range of OSes over the years -- some by choice, others by necessity. I'm no fanboy, but some of those systems left a better impression than others. Almost every OS, though, has something about it that's unique or revolutionary or just helps you get the work done and on to other things. And sometimes a feature of the OS just grabs your attention and forces you to dig further, understand how it works, and master all it can do. Each OS has some nugget that we can enjoy, learn from and build on. So here, in no particular order, are 10 different features I love in 10 different OSes. Mac OS X, Time Machine. Configuring backups has, traditionally, been one of the least fun things about computing. It's perhaps only slightly less frustrating than trying to recover your system from said backup. If you don't have too many files to back up, services like Dropbox, Sugarsync, and Windows Live Mesh work quite well. In fact, for several years I used Live Sync (formerly Foldershare, now called Live Mesh) to create real-time offsite backups of my most important files. But you can't back up and recover an entire system that way. Apple introduced Time Machine backup software with Mac OS X 10.5 in 2007, and I have to say it's one of the more brilliant tools I've used. Time Machine is easy to configure and pretty much operates as a set-and-forget service. You can back up to a local drive connected via USB or Firewire or even to network storage via Ethernet or WiFi. As long as your backup volume is available, Time Machine creates hourly, daily and weekly incremental backups of your system. When trouble strikes, you can go into the Time Machine and recover previous versions of individual files or even the entire system. It's not perfect, but so far I've been successful in all of my attempts at recovery with Time Machine. I've even used Time Machine backups to restore all of a user's files from an older, failing machine to a new one. Unix, The Shell Terminal The terminal was my first experience of computing.and by terminal I mean a teleprinter terminal: typewriter keys and a continuous roll of paper scrolling up line by line. The shell was also, for a long time, my portal to the Internet. Then there was MS-DOS. Command line computing lives on, and is even making something of a comeback among users of graphical UI operating systems. Linux and Mac OS X still have their terminal fanboys. And of course you've got a selection of shells, from the original Bourne shell to bash, C, dash, Korn and Z, not to mention fish, psh, rc, scsh, wish and zoidberg. Windows had its roots in the MS-DOS command line, and continues to this day with the 'DOS box' command prompt, cmd.exe. There's Windows PowerShell if you want a more robust scripting environment in Windows, and Cygwin if you prefer something more in line with the traditional Unix terminal. There's always tension between command-line and graphical interfaces, and for the last decade or more, GUIs have been the dominant face of most OSes. But as Max Steenbergen writes in his article 'Commands Lines: Alive & Kicking' for UX Magazine, the command line is making a comeback via app launchers like Alfred, Launchy and GNOME Do. Even applications like Google Chrome and Wolfram|Alpha are blurring the line between textual search and command-line scripting. Bringing the command line full-circle, a clever coder even built a personal Web site that hosts a command line in the browser window. Retro, or a step into the future?
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