The Future That Never Was

http://www.os2museum.com/wp/the-future-that-never-was/

by ingve • 2 years ago

130 69 2 years ago

bruce5114• 2 years ago

OS/2 was a massive leap in the right direction. It was well ahead of its contemporaries of the time.

Of course it wasn't all roses, like the contemporaries of the era it had issues, which would be more prominent if more people had used it. It's worth remembering that, by todays standards, in the late 80s, computers were rare. Most businesses didn't have one at all, most homes certainly didn't (and a significant portion of those that did were not-Dos machines.) My Computer Science class of 1990 mostly consisted of folk who'd never touched a computer before. No-one I knew had an Apple Mac, they were expensive.

Windows 95 wasn't as good as OS/2 3.0 (aka Warp), but it marketed the idea of computers to the general public. Only once the 486 shipped did you start to see computers as "normal". But even by the end of the 90s we'd sell hardware when selling software.

I'd argue that we're absolutely in the future that OS/2 envisaged. Ultimately all paths converged and (probably starting with XP) we've been living that future.

tadfisher2• 2 years ago

What's interesting to me is that we ended up with NT's Win32 personality as the default and only userland. I always wondered what an "NT-native" userland would look like, and if that would have been closer to the OS/2 personality that shipped through NT 4.0.

bruce5114• 2 years ago

Perhaps it would look different, in the way that say MacOS and Windows are different, but I doubt it would be "better".

I mean, lots of choices are arbitrary. They're typically "invisible", like the pedals in a car, until you come across a different layout. [1]

visually, OSs like to reinvent themselves (Windows XP, 7, 8, 10, 11) but functionally they behave the same (maximise, minimise, close buttons in top right corner of window).

OS/2 today would look very different to OS/2 then, but probably a lot like Windows 11.

[1] I drove a truck for a bit that forced my left foot to use the brake because of the design. It took a long while to get used to pressing gently with the left foot, as I was used to trucks with a very heavy clutch pedal.

AtlasBarfed• 2 years ago

But... are we in the future that BeOS envisioned? If we're in the future of OS/2, it is still pretty meh.

Windows is inarguably getting worse. OSX treads water out of managerial apathy. Linux treads water by rebuilding things that don't need rebuilding.

BeOS was the world we wanted.

sircastor2• 2 years ago

I've poked around a little at Haiku wondering if it's truly the spiritual successor to BeOS. I don't know, because I only ever saw Be at a friends house running on a PowerMac.

I like the idea that there's still room for more OS', and that there might be reason for them.

lproven15• 2 years ago

BeOS was wonderful and I loved it, as I said in print 24 years ago:

https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorldMagazine/PC...

But it was just the same sort of OS as the mainstream, without all the legacy baggage -- much of which, sadly, the Haiku folks are putting back in.

The world we wanted? I don't know about that.

I played with a Remarkable slate thing a couple of years ago and it nearly made me weep. It is so much less than the Apple Newton was 30 years earlier.

I want the original planned Newton in the Remarkable form factor. I want a thin, light, pocket Dylan workstation that runs for a week on a charge and can wirelessly connect to anything.

I don't just want a BeBox. I wanted that in 1999, sure, but a quarter century later, I want something MUCH more ambitious than that.

VagabundoP2• 2 years ago

Late 80s computers were fairly common in Ireland, 386's and Mac's, although as you say mostly non-Dos, Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari and some other exotics.

We had a computer lab in my very run down school that has Macs and Apple IIs. My family were working class, if you had an interest there was a network of computer enthusiasts who would happy swap stuff, get you hardware etc. We bought a second hand 386 from somewhere, then fucked it up trying to add more memory I think. I was only a kid, but my dad saw me self learning BASIC and would encourage that sort of thing.

If this was happening in 80s Ireland I'd be surprised to learn they were rare in other countries, we weren't exactly doing well at that point.

coldtea4• 2 years ago

It was probably rare in 80s Ireland as well. If it was anything like the rest of Europe, what you remember sounds like a tiny percentage of the population (enthusiasts) as opposed to almost everybody, as it came to be later.

lproven15• 2 years ago

OS/2 was a massive leap in the right direction. It was well ahead of its contemporaries of the time.

Agreed. But...

in the late 80s, computers were rare

I'd dispute that. At the time, I was British. PCs were rare, as in, IBM PC-compatibles. Computers were everywhere.

One view of OS/2 2 in the context of the time was that it made a 386 PC into what the Amiga, Atari ST and Acorn Archimedes already were: full-GUI multitasking computers with sound and decent full-colour graphics, and a fairly rich desktop.

Because Windows 3.x was none of those.

No-one I knew had an Apple Mac, they were expensive.

Agreed. Businesses only. I met one (1) private owner in that time.

Windows 95 wasn't as good as OS/2 3.0 (aka Warp)

"Good" is much to narrow a word here.

As an OS design, better? Yes. Better multitasking, better memory management, better filesystem.

As a desktop? No way. Win95 had a much better desktop. Note how every Linux desktop except GNOME 3 and Pantheon is an inferior knock-off of Win95.

Better for ordinary users? No. Win95 was much more compatible, with more hardware and more software.

Better for networking? No. Win95 had a full network stack as stock, dialup and LAN. OS/2 made that an expensive optional extra.

Better for developers? No. MS had lots of cheap dev tools.

Sadly, mostly, OS/2 2.x was only "better" in academic, almost theoretical terms. In the real world for real people, Win95 was better in every way that counted.

It banes me to say it, because I paid for OS/2 2 with my own money, something I've almost never done for software, as I work in the industry.

actionfromafar• 2 years ago

I used OS/2 Warp which was admittedly very late to the party. I don't remember the desktop being at all worse than Win95. It had TCP/IP, a dial-up stack, Ethernet drivers etc. Silky smooth multi-tasking and didn't crash.

OS/2 had no new games though, no DirectX, only older DOS games worked, and eventually most Windows programs wouldn't run anymore on OS/2 and then I switched to Linux.

But during the Doom era it was pretty standard to boot DOS on a floppy before starting Doom, so what OS you had on the HDD didn't matter too much.

couchand• 2 years ago

Better for ordinary users? No. Win95 was much more compatible, with more hardware and more software.

Not sure about the hardware side, but my understanding of the canonical story why OS/2 lost is exactly because it supported running all Windows software natively?

pjmlp2• 2 years ago

A few things it had better was Smalltalk already doing the ".NET" role of OS/2, great CSet++, and SOM was and still is, much better than COM.

Not that much of that mattered to the general public.

AlbertCory2• 2 years ago

Most businesses didn't have one at all, most homes certainly didn't

I think this is wrong. The PC industry had been through a massive stock market boom in the early 80's, and "desktop publishing" was a real thing, not just for early adopters:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_publishing

There was also a TV show on public television:

https://archive.org/details/Computer_Chronicles

why would they do that if it was such a niche?

As for OS/2, Gates stabbed IBM in the back by pushing Windows, as is well documented. He continued to give lip service to OS/2, but anyone with eyes could see that Microsoft's heart was with Windows.

I'd argue that we're absolutely in the future that OS/2 envisaged

Everyone had the same "vision" back then. Actually bringing it to market is something else again.

bluGill3• 2 years ago

Computers had made large inroads in many different businesses. Newspapers all were done on computers because desktop publishing was so obviously better than the manual processes. Finance and the like were also computers. Scheduling was done on computers (thus the doctor's office had them for the staff but the doctor had not clue how to run them). Most word processing was on a computer, so low level staff had them - but the executives worked with hard copies and never touched the computer.

Nothing was on the internet. So even though airlines did scheduling on a computer you needed to call a travel agent to get tickets as you didn't have access to schedule flights yourself. Even if you got access, there was no usability so you couldn't figure out how to do this without a week training.

You might have had email, but the messages from the CEO was sent out via hard copy as not everyone in the company had it.

When I started as an intern in the mid 1990s everyone was excited that we had a new system and now you could schedule your own meetings instead of asking a secretary to do this. This was at a computer company where the people wanting a meeting spent hours every day staring at a terminal, and had access to the scheduling system - but the system was so complex they couldn't figure out how to use it.

The above is office jobs. There are a lot of non-office jobs that now have computers. When I had my garage door fixed the tech pulled out a tablet to sign off and pay for the work when done. Even 10 years ago this would have been handled by paper.

In conclusion: computers had a lumpy start. I think that it is fair to say most businesses didn't have one. However many of them did. They were expensive, but affordable.

sircastor2• 2 years ago

My first job in tech was as a support rep for an ISP (a massive phone company that has been since consumed by an even larger phone company)

I must have answered thousands of phone calls, but one that sticks out in my memory was a guy who had selected Mac support not because he had a Mac, but because he was running OS/2 Warp and he didn't want to deal with a Windows support person - who might try to help him fix Windows instead of just giving him the information he needed (whatever ISP specifics). I'm pretty sure he related that information a couple of times, which made me feel that aside from wanting the specific info, he also just wanted to tell someone that he was running OS/2 Warp. Or maybe have someone to appreciate how hard it was to be an outlier.

Those of us running non-MS Operating systems were of a type - thrown together because of our non-conformance. I shared a bit of camaraderie with my girlfriend's dad once because he was so excited about his Amiga.

flemhans• 2 years ago

Whenever someone with outlier software comes to us for help, I take great care to download and install it, make screenshots etc, just to pretend it's a normal occurrence.

bombcar5• 2 years ago

Reminds me somewhat of the tricks you'd use to get Linux support up and running; claiming it was NT, claiming it was Solaris.

Fun times, when all you wanted was the PPP settings.

bdamm• 2 years ago

Yes, I remember OS/2.

I was a middle school kid. A family friend provided the installation media and said it was the future. I was excited! I saw the pictures of the desktop! I tried and tried to install it, but time after time ended up with failures. The best I ever got was to progress all the way through the hours long installation only to get an error about memory without parity bits on the first boot. I messed with BIOS. I messed with the RAM chips, swapping out some. It seemed to me that it needed very specific hardware, and the hardware I had wasn't inside of that envelope.

DOS worked fine on that machine.

I never saw OS/2 again.

lproven15• 2 years ago

It was a total pig to install and it mostly still is.

But I ran OS/2 2.0 for years and it was a thing of beauty for 1992. It made Windows 3 look very sad indeed.

bombcar5• 2 years ago

The cost was so damn high - IIRC we got Warp 3 for a 386 for some reason, but by then it was already too late.

WalterBright• 2 years ago

I used OS/2 in order to develop Zortech C++ further. Its great advantage was protected mode. When there were memory bugs, instead of scrambling my hard disk it would seg fault. I'd get everything working perfectly on OS/2. Then, I'd port it to Rational's 286 DOS Extender, which also operated in protected mode. This would purge all the bugs in the compiler related to the mixed 16 bit memory model. Then the last step was to port it to real mode DOS.

OS/2 saved me an enormous amount of debugging time.

I always laugh when people complain about null pointer seg faults. Those are a feature, not a bug. Finding bugs in your code immediately, rather than a few miles further down the road, is a great attribute.

Writing through a null pointer in real mode DOS meant overwriting the interrupt vector table. Probably the worst CPU architectural mistake of all time is locating that table at address 0. If you were lucky, DOS would just freeze up, and you could reboot it. If you were unlucky, it would scramble your hard disk, and you'd have to re-install the operating system and all your files.

The ROMs (i.e. boot address) should have been located at address 0, and the interrupt table at FFFFF.

irdc• 2 years ago

Probably the worst CPU architectural mistake of all time is locating that table at address 0.

That’s not something unique to x86; eg. the PDP-11 also had its interrupt vector table starting at address 0. This only became a real problem when languages that treated address 0 as a sentinel value became popular.

Tuna-Fish2• 2 years ago

Ironically, C originally used 0 as a sentinel address precisely because it could not hold a real value, because that's where the interrupt table was.

dspillett• 2 years ago

Probably the worst CPU architectural mistake of all time is locating that table at address 0.

I don't know if it persisted into 16-bit era CPUs & OSs, but early on the bottom of the memory map was faster to access, so things like interrupt tables¹ were often located there. The 6502 family even had specific load and save instructions for zero-page so not only was the actual operation faster once read & decoded, it took two bytes not three to store so was read faster² and took less space.

[1] you generally want the response to an interrupt to be as fast as possible, shaving a few clock cycles off could be pretty significant

[2] so a double time saving

rep_lodsb• 2 years ago

It was only faster because of the shorter encoding, something that doesn't matter when the CPU itself is generating the address like on an interrupt. On the 6502, there is a single vector for maskable interrupts, and another for NMI, both of them at the top end of address space.

The 8086/8088 microcode that handled interrupts used a special "segment 0" to provide the address, I don't think it would have been difficult to have some other hardwired value instead of 0. And on later x86 chips there is an actual register for it (IDTR) that can be changed by software - even in real mode, though for reason of backwards compatibility this wasn't usually done.

tadfisher2• 2 years ago

The 6502's interrupt vector is located at the _top_ of the memory map, but the reasoning is the same; you can simplify address decoding and shave clock cycles.

martiniturbide• 2 years ago

Hello. What happened to Zortech ? Any chance that Zortech C++ for OS/2 can be open sourced ?

flohofwoe• 2 years ago

I saw OS/2 in action once for a couple of minutes around the mid-90s on the company laptop (IBM Thinkpad?) of my aunt, who was an insurance agent for the German Allianz insurance company. Being used to the Amiga UI, OS/2 looked incredibly clunky and not much better than Windows 3.1 tbh. I'm kinda glad that it wasn't the future ;)

criddell• 2 years ago

You're kinda glad Windows beat OS/2 because OS/2 was only a little bit better than Windows?

I was a big OS/2 fan. The Workplace Shell may have been a bit clunky, but under the hood it was pretty neat. Everything was an object that you could manipulate with Rexx (and other languages). In a way, it's what PowerShell eventually grew into.

qrybam• 2 years ago

This evokes some strong nostalgia. My formative years were spent playing Doom IPX on LAN (DOS), Trials of Battle (OS/2) on LAN, and Galactic Civilizations, learning to code with REX, and spending time on internet chat rooms. We had an Windows NT 4 box in the house which was for my dad's work, and I didn't touch it much as DOS games either didn't run or were a real PITA to get working, so OS/2 Warp 3/4 and DOS were where I resided most of the time.

Good memories. Thanks for the post.

TazeTSchnitzel• 2 years ago

After staring at instruction traces for a little while, I found the rather unexpected cause. In the DOSKRNL file (the DOS 4.0 kernel running inside OS/2 DOS boxes), Microsoft tried to be clever and used an invalid instruction as a fast path to access protected mode services. But there was a fatal problem: Microsoft used the 0F 7F opcode, which is not undefined on Pentium MMX and later — it is the MOVQ instruction. For that reason, launching DOS boxes in build 6.78 fails miserably on Pentium MMX and later Intel processors (except perhaps on the Pentium Pro).

Perhaps this is the origin of that anecdote about a meeting between Microsoft and Intel: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20041215-00/?p=37...

watersb2• 2 years ago

$2600 for the OS/2 2.0 SDK in 1990

That was a standard price structure for a platform SDK at the time.

I purchased the NeXTStep SDK for $3000 in 1993, and I believe in 1995 I got the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) subscription, which had stacks of CDs for their entire platform collection, that was $2000 each year.

These Software Developer Kits were massive, representing a significant percentage of the total effort of the company behind it. The printed documentation was 25 kilograms of paper. That AT&T C++ compiler shipped with the documentation in three-ring binder notebooks, I literally had to get another bookshelf for it.

Thousands of dollars.

Dracophoenix• 2 years ago

How did developers like yourself afford paying l hundreds to thousands of dollars (in the '90s no less!) for software and documentation without going bankrupt? I still find it strange that individuals spent the price of a used car on software that would became obsolete within a year or so.

pjmlp2• 2 years ago

Easy, we only bought what we actually needed to develop, and stayed with that until there was an actual reason to buy something else.

It certainly made it easier not to worry about a new framework or programming language every single month.

At least for those that wanted to stay legal, there were also tons of ways to get pirated software if one wanted to, including openly selling it on street bazaars.

watersb2• 2 years ago

My platform hopping was very unusual... and not a business strategy. I had always been fascinated by the NeXT platform, and when it became available for (very expensive configurations of) 80486 PCs I had to try it. I did manage to get the dev kit half price from another programmer who had purchased it but then got a lucrative contract in a different direction.

But I wrote a book about the Microsoft stuff. It didn't generate any royalties, but it landed me a couple of jobs, and I figure it worked for me.

I wouldn't recommend it as a strategy.

The Future That Never Was

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