The History of OS/2 (2001)

http://www.landley.net/history/mirror/os2/history/

by Lammy • 5 years ago

94 50 5 years ago

atgreen• 5 years ago

OS/2 was my gateway to Free Software. Eberhard Mattes' amazing emx system enabled ports of many Free Software packages to OS/2, including the GNU toolchain and TeX. My first first Free Software patch was to use OS/2 REXX as an extension language for GDB. Thank you, Eberhard, for my 25+ year career in FOSS that all started on OS/2! http://cd.textfiles.com/hobbesos29411/LIB/EMX/GNU/PATCHES/GD...

beders• 5 years ago

Good times! While memory hungry, it featured really great preemptive multi-threading.

I happily ran 2 DOS apps and X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter at the same time. One of the DOS apps was a BBS node that happily exchanged data when someone called it while I was blasting Tie-Fighters.

emersonrsantos• 5 years ago

I was an OS/2 evangelist among my university friends. We would install and try to run the DOS games and it worked flawlessly, and I even run a BBS on it, on 1995.

Unfortunately, we've all migrated to NT 4.0 as it did the same things but it has better hardware support because of drivers.

Since then, it was a painful decline and I believe the only production system running OS/2 nowadays are IBM mainframe consoles, as IBM migrated away desktop enterprise machines to Linux.

protomyth• 5 years ago

Unfortunately, we've all migrated to NT 4.0 as it did the same things but it has better hardware support because of drivers.

I got a free copy of NT because of IBM's lame device support [ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6792616 ]. To this day, I still do not get why they wanted me to sign an NDA to get the S3 driver.

zozbot234• 5 years ago

ArcaOS is still providing "production use" support for OS/2, and AIUI they've added a few more features as well.

the-dude• 5 years ago

There must be some ATMs left.

moonbug• 5 years ago

they're all running Windows xp now

throw0101a• 5 years ago

IIRC, OS/2 was very popular with multi-line BBSes back in the day for its accessible multitasking on x86-based systems (x86 Unix wasn't really a thing yet), especially since you could run DOS in emulation. (Though there was a number of BBS software systems for OS/2.)

DESQview was the other popular software if you wanted to stick with something more DOS-based. (Running QEMM to squeeze the most of your memory was also a thing.)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BBS_software#MS-DOS_an...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMM

space_ghost• 5 years ago

My best friend spent the '90s running a BBS with two modems on an OS/2 machine, running two instances of the BBS package (Wildcat?) via MSDOS emulation. Good times.

axiolite2• 5 years ago

OS/2 was very popular with multi-line BBSes back in the day for its accessible multitasking on x86-based systems (x86 Unix wasn't really a thing yet),

It was before my time, but according to Wikipedia:

"SCO XENIX for the PC XT shipped sometime in 1984"

"The first version of OS/2 was released in December 1987"

mongol• 5 years ago

It was outside of most people's awareness at that time

atombender• 5 years ago

For those curious about this, SCO XENIX for PC was $595 back in 1984, but development tools came extra. $1,350 for the whole thing. The later SCO UNIX, released in 1989, pretty much kept that pricing.

[1] http://bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/lisa/xenix/SCO_Price_List_Dec...

mdip3• 5 years ago

The quote is a little misleading. It was popular with multi-line BBSes back in the day for its accessible multitasking of DOS-based software on x86-based systems.

The software that many BBSes ran in the 90s (at least in my area code and the surrounding) was one of (a) Telegard[0] (b) T.A.G. or (c) a Forum hack of some kind[1]. These were all DOS-based and were impossible to get working in a two-node setup under Windows. Desqview and Desqview/X worked relatively well but still meant I had to shut down the BBS when my Dad wanted to use Lotus 123. Everyone I knew that had a multi-node setup ran OS/2 for a while. It was easily pirated, and inexpensive enough for the relatively honest amongst us compared to commercial UNIX offerings but the important reason was that it easily ran my current BBS software.

[0] And its many hacks, Renegade being a large one. Ironically, I don't think the original Telegard was multi-node. I ended up re-writing Telegard, myself, and added multi-node support using some of the leaked, I think 2.25, version.

[1] Run by the "Elite" :P

benjimouse• 5 years ago

I started on OS/2 as well, in the days of 1.1. Some thoughts:

- 1.3 was a gem, never crashed, never bogged down.

- The product we developed was eventually picked up by IBM. Mid 90s at a trade show, even the IBM employees were stunned to see an OS/2 program which didn't look terrible.

- When Windows NT 4.0 came out, it was game over.

Lammy• 5 years ago

This site only covers the IBM era of OS/2, but after Warp 4 it became "eComStation" and now ArcaOS since 2017:

http://ecomstation.com/

https://www.arcanoae.com/

Arca Noae recently released their NVMe driver, and USB3 support is on the way! No free demo unfortunately due to ${REASONS} such as the bundled copy of Windows 3.1.

edit: It also has Wi-Fi support and some fairly modern software ports like Firefox https://i.imgur.com/XuJ5Jdn.png

hakfoo• 5 years ago

I've looked at it a few times, but $130 for the personal-use copy is a bit steep for a hobbyist interest. My budget for this particular novelty is about 50 bucks.

I have positive nostalgia for the platform. Back in 2003, I decided to start taking notes in college on a a salvaged 486 laptop. I tried running OS/2 3.0, installed from a boxed copy bought on eBay where the discs were degrading as I was installing them. The pack-in software was pleasantly featureful compared to the placeholder stuff Windows 3.1 came with, but it was a little poky on a DX2/40 with no L2 cache.

Raineer• 5 years ago

I worked for IBM during these times. I loved OS/2 2.1, it was so great to use for work at the time. Warp was too little, too late, and not as stable as the earlier releases.

YZF• 5 years ago

OS/2 was great... The Windows Networking stack was a complete mess and OS/2 has a real stack. Rexx. Multi-tasking. Imagine an alternate universe where OS/2 won against Windows - I think we'd be better off ;)

Nice boxes for OS/2 Warp as well IIRC...

Ice_cream_suit• 5 years ago

It was memory hungry.

I remember how shocked the computer shop was when I asked for 2 MB of RAM, so that I could run OS/2.

Bad times....

whoopdedo• 5 years ago

I remember talking to my friend about alternatives to DOS. (I had just found out about 386BSD.) He tells me he got this thing called Warp for Windows. "But it still needs Windows" I say. He then has to explain that it really doesn't and the name only means that it will import your old settings as it replaces the operating system. It struck me then, and still does, as a dumb name and bad marketing move.

Turns out he didn't stick with OS/2 very long after getting into the beta program for NT 3.5.

kitd• 5 years ago

Both IBM and Microsoft fully realized the problems inherent in the real-mode DOS architecture and worked on solutions throughout early and mid-80's. There were two significant products that made it to the retail shelves:

IBM TopView. This was a text-mode multitasking shell for DOS ...

I was an intern at IBM when TopView was brought in by the original devs to demo to the execs.

I remember being dumb struck that you could copy from one window and paste it into another. That was just science-fiction AFAIWC.

billygoat• 5 years ago

Ah yes, I was an OS/2 evangelist for years, trying to get all my coworkers and friends to switch to it after 2.1 came out, I guess around 1992-1993ish.

We used OS/2 almost exclusively at the civil engineering firm I worked for at the time, building computer simulations of traffic flow and transit ridership models for cities around the U.S.; our clients all had regular PCs on their desktops and we needed to run clean 32-bit software since the simulations required a flat memory memory model. Programming for OS/2 (using Fortran, lol) was such a revelation back then. It was my first job out of college and I was so naive and enamored with this amazing tech and couldn't understand why everyone around me was using these clunky and crash-prone OSes from Microsoft!

OS/2 with its new UI and great compilers was a dream. And no one ever mentions how you could make the window for each individual folder have a different background color! I spent a lot of time playing with this instead of writing code :-)

I can't even recall how many weekends I spent at friend's houses trying to get display drivers and printer drivers to work on friend's home computers. It was one of my first real tech disillusionments.

Of course we all know how it worked out in the end: by late 1994 this weird thing linux (slackware I think?) captured my attention, and in 1995 we could compile 32-bit programs at work for our clients that targeted Windows 95.

Together those two things meant the end of OS/2 for me, and like so many others I didn't much think about it ever again.

p_l• 5 years ago

I remember treating folders with custom backgrounds as "multiple desktops" when maximalized, though that might have been 2.x specific thing as I don't think I used it in 3.0 and 4.0.

For me, OS/2 ended around the time my father finally switched full time to NT4, and sometime later I got my own PC with Win95 OSR2

wdb• 5 years ago

Same here :)

We had Delphi for OS/2 named Sibyl, we used Describe/2 as word processor, we had ObjectDesktop for prettier Desktop. The excitement that Navigator became available and would replace IBM WebExplorer. I had great times with OS/2.

t43562• 5 years ago

I may have the story wrong but it seemed to me like the "problematic" versions of OS/2 were all written by Microsoft and IBM sorted it out. So the sort of pro-Windows OS/2 bashing later on seemed very ironic to me.

qwerty456127• 5 years ago

One can only wonder what would happen if IBM had spent those billions on the Intel version of OS/2 in the first place.

One can only wonder why did it take billions to develop an OS, let alone failed. There probably was more skyscraper-paid managers than developers in the project.

Just look at what and how fast a small team has achieved developing Serenity OS from scratch for free. Sure, they stood on the shoulders of giants of modern C++, modern hardware etc but I doubt the difference of how hard it is to develop an OS today and then is SO big it is worth billions.

WalterBright• 5 years ago

I used early OS/2 a lot for development simply because it was a protected mode system. I'd get things to work there first, and port to real mode DOS last. Saved me a lot of time.

tzs• 5 years ago

I knew OS/2 was effectively dead when I read something by (I think) Jerry Pournelle reporting on a visit to either COMDEX or CES.

He visited the IBM booth where they were showing off OS/2. He asked them what it would take to develop applications for OS/2. They gave him some forms to fill out to apply for their developer program.

The forms asked for information on what he wanted to develop and his business plans, and of course there was a high application fee. If he provided all that information and paid the fee, then IBM might deign to sell him developer tools and documentation.

He visited the Microsoft booth where they were showing a beta of the upcoming Windows 95. He asked them what it would take to develop for Windows 95.

They handed him right there, no questions asked and for no cost, a CD-ROM with developer tools and documentation.

mcculley• 5 years ago

I seem to remember that the MS C/C++ compiler cost money back then. Was it free?

msh• 5 years ago

It cost money, but they did give it away for a variety of reasons or at events.

squarefoot• 5 years ago

They thought the brand alone would be enough, and probably they have been right for a while, so they could sell both the razor and the blades at high prices, but many things changed between the early and late 90s, and the fact that PCs weren't anymore labeled as "IBM compatible" should have raised some flags. The speed at which they embraced Linux from the late 90s on (*) is an indicator that they were becoming aware of it, but probably have been too slow to adapt to the rest of the industry; I recall in maybe 1999 their C development suite for AIX on AS/400 hardware still cost a boatload of money (like the OS and iron were cheap...) and we already had GCC running on it, but for some problems (possibly with the db interface, can't recall for sure) the company was forced to shell out that money and buy their suite.

(1) I gave a talk at an internal IBM conference in 1997; they were fully aware of Linux and wanted to know more. Word is that Lou Gerstner, then IBM chairman and CEO, asked to some IBM engineers what was all that buzz about Linux about, and some of them replied something like "we are making a huge error we will deeply regret if we don't take it seriously asap", and the rest is history.

john373862• 5 years ago

I recalled OS/2 Warp in the mid 90's. Anyone knows why they called it OS/2 Warp in that era and not just OS/2?

fredoralive• 5 years ago

Warp was the codename for OS/2 3.0, IBM used Star Trek related codenames like Riker (2.0.1) and Borg (2.1) for OS/2 at the time.

As for it becoming part of the name? Not sure, it’s marketing, I suspect they thought it made the OS sound fast or something

john373862• 5 years ago

I recall having 8 MB of RAM and a lot of swap or whatever they called it in OS/2 Warp. It was really beautiful graphically and felt ahead of its time. But, it was not fast and far from warp speed. Thanks for explanation about codename Warp.

lproven• 5 years ago

It got named Warp as a marketing thing from v3.0 onwards.

Apparently it was a codename that went public:

https://microsoft.fandom.com/wiki/OS/2#1994.E2.80.931996:_Th...

OS/2 2.x included a lot of 16-bit code in an allegedly 32-bit OS. 3.x replaced most of this, was supposed to be faster and more stable as a result, and it also included the ability to incorporate your existing install of Windows 3 and run it under OS/2 in place of the previously-bundled "WinOS2".

So it could take your existing 16-bit OS and apps and warp them into a new 32-bit OS that could use hundreds of megs of RAM and multitask dozens of apps.

It was meant to indicate "warp speed", Star Trek style, but IBM didn't get permission first...

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/11/half-...

michaelcampbell• 5 years ago

I loved this OS, as a user. Was really sad to see it go down the way it did.

zwieback• 5 years ago

We used OS/2 for a research project in the late 80s, it was a great experience when it was a big step ahead of Windows in every way. That got me my first job out of college, we ended up writing the Mac connectivity SW to LAN Server as a contractor to IBM. I was surprised they would give that job to a little startup.

ToddWBurgess• 5 years ago

People keep talking about OS/2 in the past tense. It is still very much alive. It never really died. There are still a lot of mission critical apps out there that are still running on OS/2. OS/2 is still being supported and getting modern updates except it is not known as OS/2 anymore. It is now called ArcaOS.

brk• 5 years ago

I suppose it depends on your definition of 'dead'. What percentage of devices are running OS/2 / ArcaOS? Is it's overall marketshare growing or shrinking?

Many archaic systems are not truly dead, I know of things still running COBOL77, but for all practical purposes we can describe them as 'dead'.

mdip3• 5 years ago

I get your point and thanks for the info -- I wasn't aware that ArcaOS was out there. It's a testament to how long it truly takes to make a technology go completely "extinct".

Like a lot of technology, once it's embedded into something important, it becomes hard to get rid of. But for 99.999% of us, it's a relic of the past (tense).

I'm not sure where OS/2 is used in production, today. I was surprised in the late 90s that the 2.x version was deployed at my first job more than DOS/Windows or Windows 95+ was. I remember finding out in the mid-00s that OS/2 was used in many ATM machines (and at one point may have been very common there)[0].

For most of us, it became past-tense when IBM stopped marketing it to consumers, later not marketing it to businesses and ultimately IBMs exit from the PC/server business. It's still alive much like AmigaOS is still alive. It died when large organizations, a lot of which were sold on the idea that it was "the next Windows" in the late 80s -- ones that believed "nobody gets fired for recommending IBM[1]" started deploying Windows 95.

[0] I'm guessing this is due to banks being large consumers of IBMs mainframe business, this didn't surprise me. The first company I worked at had a large liquid cooled mainframe that took up a floor of a datacenter, investment in COBOL programs/programmers and a whole department dedicated to supporting said device, its jobs, its software and its upgrades.

[1] This later became "Microsoft" but it originated, there.

mdip3• 5 years ago

I was young when the first two versions of OS/2 were released[0] but worked at a large (US) national computer retailer around the time Windows 95 and OS/2 Warp were at war. I ran Warp on my home PC. And I replaced it with Windows 95 when it came out despite being a fanboy at the time. At the end of the day, Win95 ran more software that I owned and ran the things that OS/2 Warp ran. It did so a little faster and about as reliably.

One of the strangest moments at that time happened at -- I think -- at an airport in California returning from a family vacation. While walking to our gate, passing various subway-station-like ads which were all technology related[1].

I recall a computer-nerd stereotype figure posed next to a quote along the lines of "OS/2 Warp obliterated my PC"[2]. The advertisement was, surprisingly, not paid for by Microsoft. I'd like to say that the advertisement didn't affect my fanboy-ism, but my affinity for the product ended that day. In a moment, the "cool OS" that was 32-bit, somewhat Windows compatible, ran relatively stably (compared to the options available for my PC[3]) became the Steve Buschemi meme. The veil was lifted. IBM was a phony. They were clearly trying to use the word "obliterated" as a compliment. I could imagine a group of suits in a room trying to come up with a word "the kids use" to mean "cool", focus-grouping that word with a bunch of middle-aged adults while patting each other on their backs for a marketing job well done. And I pictured myself as that nerdy character they provided as the typical user of their software. It was not a look I liked.

I don't know that I've ever had a marketing campaign affect me as much as that -- certainly not one that's affected me that negatively when the opposite was intended. I'm guessing this was a small campaign, as I've only seen the one poster and references to it in magazines at the time. It was the Gold Standard of stupid, reminding everyone that "Yup, it's still IBM; the behemoth that tried to kill 'the clones' with lawsuits and over-priced PS/2 PCs with over-priced peripherals that they took royalties from".

[0] Oddly, the first well paying salaried job that I had in the late 90s was at a company with a large number of PS/2 machines running OS/2 2.x -- well after the (effective) death of Warp on the consumer front.

[1] I was young enough that I can't remember which airport, but I want to say LAX or SFO; the vast majority of the ads were technology focused and many were for products I had not heard of -- much like the Detroit airport has advertisements for automotive suppliers many would not have heard of, targeting business travelers.

[2] This was long ago enough that I'm sure I have the details wrong -- Gooble searches yielded an "Obliterated my Software" campaign, but no direct references just an obscure comment from a user (who's not me) and an archived magazine. I want to say the letters were wavy to go along with it and that the person appearing in the ad was meant to portray what most people think Star Trek fans look like.

[3] Admittedly, the main reason I ran it was to keep a multi-node BBS working -- it had multi-tasking support that functioned well with the DOS-based BBS that I ran in the background meaning I didn't have to shut the whole thing down when my Dad wanted to use the family PC.

msluyter• 5 years ago

Random OS/2 stories.

My first real technical job was doing OS/2 support as a co-op (sorta like an intern). Our team supported larger clients, who'd send us questions via IBM's mainframe system (RETAIN, or PROFS, iirc). I'd say the answer to half the questions was roughly "install the latest driver from $HARDWARE_VENDOR, and/or, contact $HARDWARE_VENDOR to see if they have a driver that supports OS/2." The other half were OS/2 / Windows compatibility issues. Because, while in theory you could run Windows apps in OS/2, it was typically pretty flaky.

We had to type our answers into this antiquated mainframe editor, where if you typed past the character limit, you'd end up typing into like a command buffer and end up garbling your message, so you couldn't paste into the mainframe editor! So if you wanted to simply quote an existing solution, you had to retype it.

I spent my spare time writing a little app in VX Rexx that provided a native text box (like the one I'm typing in now) and that would then splat the message (with correct line breaks) into the mainframe editor via something called HLLAPI, iirc. Made life incredibly easier because you could cut&paste and whatnot. Still pretty proud of that one.

The types of questions we got made it pretty clear to me that OS/2 was doomed to failure. Not even IBM's own laptops had drivers to support it adequately! And while preemptive multitasking is nice, most people didn't need 10 terminal windows open at a time. They just needed to run Excel and Word or -- and I think this was a critical factor -- play games.

neverartful• 5 years ago

Ah, the memories of OS/2! I was into OS/2 in a big way. I was probably even passionate about OS/2. I was all-in on it.

OS/2 Productivity apps: DeScribe (word processor), Lotus 1-2-3 (spreadsheet), IBM DB2/2 (database), Golden Compass (CompuServe offline reader that would do online sync), etc.

OS/2 Development apps: IBM C Set++ (C/C++), IBM VisualAge C++ (C/C++), Borland C++ for OS/2, Watcom VX-REXX

Windows apps: WordPerfect for Windows, Borland C++

DOS apps: Turbo Pascal, Turbo C++

One of the most impressive things folks would do with OS/2 was format a disk (3.5" or 5.25") while simultaneously playing a game (without any hiccups in the game). This was essentially unheard of at the time.

It wasn't all fun and games though: - You want to write code for OS/2 using sockets? IBM will sell you their IBM TCP/IP Development Kit for OS/2 for $75 - OS/2 PM (graphical desktop) had a fundamental flaw with its synchronous input queue (SIQ) that could lock-up the graphical desktop with a misbehaving app. The base OS was still running just fine, but the graphical desktop was hosed. There were some hacks like using a joystick button to try to reset PM. Occasionally it worked. - IBM's marketing was inept at best. A common tag-line from frustrated OS/2 developers was: "Annoy IBM, support OS/2!" - The "better Windows than Windows" was mostly true. This caused most application developers to just create Windows applications since both Windows and OS/2 users could run it.

I spent countless hours in the 'Canopus' room on CompuServe where OS/2 advocates (and some detractors) would discuss current happenings in the OS/2 community.

When my OS/2 world crashed and burned I had nothing else to fall back on because I was all-in on OS/2. This was a painful and valuable lesson to me about putting all my eggs in one basket. It was also a painful lesson about being a passionate developer. From that point on, I refused to be passionate about any one technology. I concluded that it was foolish to do so -- everything comes and goes. Additionally, passion clouds rational judgment.

sigzero• 5 years ago

I had the exact same experience. I even had VX-REXX. I got a job building a satellite NOC based on OS/2 because I had it on my resume at the time. Loved it. Really loved it.

ChrisArchitect• 5 years ago

Previous discussion just a year ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22919044

The History of OS/2 (2001)

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