Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2

http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/11/half-an-operating-system-the-triumph-and-tragedy-of-os2/

by jorgecastillo • 13 years ago

329 189 13 years ago

damian20003• 13 years ago

Incredible that companies like Apple (Mac), Atari (ST) and Commodore (Amiga) weren't able to fully capitalise on their leading position in GUI based OSes of the time, which were miles ahead of both MS and IBM.

nl3• 13 years ago

Those of us around then know exactly why this was: PC Clones were too cheap and got better too quickly for other platforms to compete.

Back then we all thought "computers" was a hardware game. Only Microsoft realised the hardware didn't matter, software was the main game. And yes, I realise we have swung back to the "integrated hardware/software platform" thing being important again. Picking winning strategies in platform wars is hard.

kickingvegas2• 13 years ago

To add to what nl said: Not only were MS-DOS compatible PCs cheaper, but also MS-DOS apps had a significant install base by the time OS/2 came out. The concerns of running legacy software on the then new 286 and the "just over the horizon" 386 CPUs was heavily weighted. Also, GUIs on all platforms then took up enough system resources (memory and CPU) that made enough folks pause in thinking that they could get better performance/cost running console-based apps.

laureny• 13 years ago

Only Microsoft realised the hardware didn't matter, software was the main game.

Yes. This was one of Bill Gates' many strokes of genius. After just one year of Traf'o'Data (Microsoft's precursor), Gates saw that the future was in software, not hardware, and he created Microsoft centered around this very vision (while Apple bet the farm on hardware).

kabdib3• 13 years ago

Also, Atari didn't get marketing (Jack Tramiel was very reluctant to spend money there). Atari really didn't get systems software, either, and never hired to the extent needed to make a good impact there. The world was basically safe from Atari being anything other than a low-end consumer computer company.

And the thing that probably saved Apple in the late 80s was the desktop publishing business.

damian20003• 13 years ago

Around 1989 I traded my Amiga 500 for an IBM AT clone running DOS. Each was worth around AUD$1000 at the time. It felt like I was going back in time 10 years - a mono screen and no mouse. The reason was that I needed it for uni.study purposes (Turbo pascal, Turbo C++, etc.) ...

dhughes• 13 years ago

One reason: stigma.

All I recall from childhood/teen years is "IBM compatible PC" a mantra on every TV commercial IBM or others produced.

A PC was for business and you were rich or a fool to spend thousands on something so useless to a regular Joe.

Apple was even more expensive and even less common than a PC and even so Apple was quirky and drew pictures, ATARI and Commodore were for games.

They were in totally different worlds. Back then I wouldn't have even thought to have one computer that did everything.

smacktoward2• 13 years ago

I dunno about that. At least where I grew up, if your family had a Mac or an Amiga, it was like you had domesticated a unicorn. Everybody wanted to see it, play with it. It marked you out as a member of a family possessed of either great sophistication or enormous wealth, either of which translates easily to status.

If there was any stigma, it was for being on the opposite end of the spectrum -- having a computer whose primary selling point was that it was cheap, like a Commodore 64. The C64 was a fine machine for the price, but nobody was going to ooooh and aaah over it they way they would if you took them into your Dad's study and showed them MacPaint.

damian20003• 13 years ago

Agreed, Atari ST and Amiga especially never caught on much with businesses ... they were definitely seen as games machines, even though their capabilities were certainly on par with the IBM clones.

djKianoosh• 13 years ago

And Tandy? :)

InclinedPlane4• 13 years ago

This is slightly counterfactual. The Mac today has a solid unix heart and runs on the best processors and technology out there, but that was not always so, and they were weakest precisely when PCs grew strongest.

The internals of pre OS X Mac OS are horrific and disturbing. They are in no way superior to the internals of Windows 95 and are at best only perceived superior due to a different user experience peppered with a healthy dose of self-delusion, certainly not through stability or performance. They are infantile compared to OS/2. Moreover, over the next few years after Windows 95 was released the PC improved greatly while the Mac mostly stagnated. Around the Power Mac era things were roughly even in terms of capabilities and performance though the Mac was significantly more expensive, by the Pentium and especially Pentium II era the PC began to become objectively more powerful than the Mac.

This put Apple into a freefall that they were only rescued from by the return of Steve Jobs who established style as a foundation the company rested on and pushed them into digital media and mobile devices, as well as forcing a hardware architecture migration (to the formerly hated x86 from the PowerPC architecture developed by a consortium of which Apple was a huge part of) and a complete OS rewrite (transforming Mac OS from an antiquated bucket of kludges into NeXTSTEP in Apple clothing).

At the time in question though Apple was pushing old, slow hardware at a price premium in a market that was rapidly passing them by.

npsimons5• 13 years ago

Very spot on! Not many seem to remember, but OS/2 truly was technically superior to just about everything else out there in consumer computer land, excepting maybe things like 386BSD (which many of us didn't know about at the time, and probably would have peed our pants at setting up X ;). OS/2 had pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection; Apple and Microsoft didn't even come close in their offerings. Say what you will about how IBM fumbled the marketing, licensing, etc, or how the upstarts(!) won against the Evil Empire, but OS/2 was the better operating system, and Microsoft honed it's FUD by attacking IBM and OS/2, whilst offering a truly awful alternative.

gaius2• 13 years ago

An excellent book that studies that is The Future Was Here http://www.amazon.co.uk/Future-Was-Here-Commodore-Platform-e...

michaelhoffman• 13 years ago

IBM licensed Commodore’s AREXX scripting language and included it with OS/2 2.0.

I find this hard to believe, given that Rexx was developed by IBM.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rexx

galonk• 13 years ago

Ars Technica isn't exactly big on fact checking. These days most of their short articles are rewritten press releases, and most of their long articles are personal opinion/recollection written as if it was reportage.

wglb7• 13 years ago

While they may got the part about the history of AREXX wrong, most of the article is spot on.

rodgerd3• 13 years ago

Indeed. And IBM do, in fact, still make other OSes, contrary to the subhead of the story: zVM/CMS, zOS (MVS), AIX, and whatever they're calling AS/400 these days.

whatusername• 13 years ago

AS/400 is now "IBM i".

Which leads us to the great set of names where we have: IBM i, Apple iOS, Cisco IOS

pjmlp11• 13 years ago

OS/400 is very interesting OS for those interested in OS architectures.

The complete userspace is bytecode based, regardless of the language.

Applications are compiled on installation phase, or when the generated code is deemed not to be valid any longer.

When there was an architecture change for the PowerPC, many installations only required a regeneration of the installed software.

A concept that Microsoft tried with Longhorn and Windows Phone 7. Or we could even say, the model Android almost has as well.

Native Oberon and Inferno also tried a similar approach, to certain extent.

wglb7• 13 years ago

I am wondering if the tagline got changed--it now says IBM doesn't make consumer, desktop operating systems anymore for a reason.

atombender• 13 years ago

They probably misread the Wikipedia on OS/2, which says:

In addition, IBM once made a deal with Commodore to license Amiga technology for OS/2 2.0 and above in exchange for the REXX scripting language.

In other words, IBM licensed REXX to Amiga in return for something else (we don't know what).

But who knows if this is true. Apparently IBM and Commodore already had an IP cross-licensing agreement at the time, and had access to their patents. And AREXX apparently did not contain any IBM code.

cturner• 13 years ago

    In other words, IBM licensed REXX to Amiga in return for
    something else (we don't know what).

I think it was for technology used in the workplace shell (WPS).

lbarrow• 13 years ago

Great read. In the end, it seems like a classic failure to resolve the innovator's dilemma. IBM decided that the future of computing would revolve around mainframes because they liked mainframes, not because that's where the facts led them. And ultimately they paid the price for it.

smacktoward2• 13 years ago

I think it's a bit more complicated than that.

Put yourself in the shoes of someone who'd grown up on mainframes. The systems you're used to are fabulously expensive, sure, but their operating systems have sophisticated architectures that allow them to easily juggle multiple users running multiple programs while maintaining the security of the system overall. They are the completest expression ever realized of forty years of progress in the field of information technology.

Then, one day, someone drops a PC in your lap. You are horrified. It's a single-user, single-tasking system with absolutely nothing stopping the user from trashing everything by running the wrong program.

To you, this new... thing, whatever it is, is barely worth the name "computer." It feels more like a toy -- like something you would give to a child to play with. Certainly nobody would ever run critical systems on it, you think.

And here's the thing. You're absolutely right! All your concerns are one hundred percent valid. But it turns out that nobody cares; the PC is much, much cheaper, and it lets everyone have their own dedicated hardware right on their desk running any software they care to install, instead of time-sharing a mainframe and begging for permission each time they want to try a new program. Or, put more bluntly, it lets them escape from having to deal with the corporate IT priesthood (i.e. you) anymore.

The market speaks! You are derided as a pointy-headed nerd and swept into the dustbin of history.

Now fast forward ten or fifteen years. People start taking all those PCs they bought and hooking them together into networks... and suddenly all those things you were worried about back in the day come roaring back to bite them. Users discover that their machine stops talking to the network when they click and hold the mouse button, because the OS can't walk and chew gum at the same time. And the complete lack of security makes their machines super easy to compromise.

The PC vendors panic. They scramble to rewrite their old systems into systems that can live comfortably on a network. And when they're done, they roll out systems that look an awful lot like what you were insisting the baseline for a "real computer" was fifteen years ago. The world cheers and lines up to buy back all the sophistication they had happily thrown away before.

In other words, it's not so much that the IBMers were wrong, it's that they were early. When OS/2 arrived, the world didn't understand yet why it needed something like OS/2. And by the time it did, OS/2 didn't exist anymore. But in this business, being early is effectively the same thing as being wrong. The market doesn't give out points for foresight.

npsimons5• 13 years ago

The market doesn't give out points for foresight.

Indeed; in fact I'd argue the market (and society in general) flat out punishes foresight, especially when it's right. What's that old Heinlein quote about Cassandra? And I think this is why so many nerds/engineers are "unsuccessful", at least by market definitions, or why they end up bitter: they'd rather be right than rich. Just look at the deriding RMS gets, and yet "Right to Read" has more or less come to pass.

jacques_chester• 13 years ago

This is the cycle of our industry.

A beautiful thing is created. It is very expensive. It is sold to very few customers at very high margins. The very high margins subsidise the further perfection of the beautiful thing.

An ugly thing is created. It is very cheap. It is sold to very many customers at very low margins. The very large revenues subsidise the further papering-over of the flaws of the ugly thing.

Eventually, the ugly thing utterly supplants the beautiful thing. A few wistful old high priests mutter about the beautiful thing. Meanwhile, billions of dollars and millions of hours are wasted working around the flaws of the ugly thing and reinventing, poorly, the features of the beautiful thing.

yuhong6• 13 years ago

This reminds me of MS's PX00307 that I found and linked in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3441885 with my comments pointing out the flaws in the thinking.

mixmastamyk• 13 years ago

The same thing happened with digital cameras. I remember hearing people scoff at them and thinking "wait and see, folks."

quanticle• 13 years ago

The funny thing is, replace PC with tablet, replace mainframe with PC, replace Windows with Android and your story still holds true.

History doesn't repeat itself. But it sure does rhyme.

wglb7• 13 years ago

Regarding vulnerabilities, which many think (wrongly) are not present in mainframes, because they are networked nearly as much, and have massively fewer programs running on them, don't show up as much. But they are there.

pjmlp11• 13 years ago

Like we native folks (mainframe) keep talking about those trying to stuff applications inside an application created for reading hypertext documents (pc).

masklinn• 13 years ago

But in this business, being early is effectively the same thing as being wrong. The market doesn't give out points for foresight.

Unless you manage to survive and keep at it until the time turns out to be ripe. NeXT kinda-sorta did, 20 years down the road. It's an exception though, graveyards are full of great OS who didn't have the time to wait.

agumonkey2• 13 years ago

It also rings to me as a story about artificial limitations. They were scared another program could do more for less. IBM is doing good today I think, I wonder if they'd fare better going the Apple/Google 'making people's live better' myth/motto, even at the ~sacrifice of their traditional comfort zone / cash cow.

mp99e99• 13 years ago

This was a great article, thanks for posting!

melling2• 13 years ago

If anyone wants an insider's view, here's a Usenet post from one of the early Microsoft employees, Gordon Letwin:

http://gunkies.org/wiki/Gordon_Letwin_OS/2_usenet_post

Somewhere in the Usenet archive is Gordon trolling the OS/2 users for weeks (or months?) on end. I can't remember the exact details, but he had a bet with several people that Windows would have multitasking, or that OS/2 wouldn't have some sort of multitasking before Windows. The bet was to fly the winner to any city of their choice and buy them dinner.

The discussions were quite heated and it was particulary memorable because he was one of the first 12 employees at Microsoft.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Letwin

twoodfin• 13 years ago

Letwin was also the guy for OS/2 on the Microsoft side while the alliance lasted. His Inside OS/2 is a detailed account of trying to squeeze a real multitasking, protected memory OS into a '286:

http://www.amazon.com/Inside-OS-2-Gordon-Letwin/dp/155615117...

The cover photo is also classic.

jonah3• 13 years ago

"Foreword by Bill Gates"

adamnemecek• 13 years ago

The photo should be in a National Geographic captioned "A Unix beard in his natural habitat".

yuhong6• 13 years ago

As I mentioned in a comment on a os2museum blog post, keep in mind Letwin left in 1993, before MS did many of the unethical attacks against OS/2 that is not mentioned in this article.

wglb7• 13 years ago

However, I got the impression he was asked to leave as a result of his confrontational behavior.

npsimons5• 13 years ago

So, did Letwin ever pay up?

melling2• 13 years ago

I think Letwin turned out to be right. I can't find the Usenet thread. It was from the early 1990's.

jjguy• 13 years ago

If you liked this article, you should read Show Stopper. It's out of print, but there are ample used copies via Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0029356717/

voltagex_• 13 years ago

Seems to be everywhere as an eBook.

http://ereads.com/ecms/book_title/Showstopper (warning, will set affiliate codes on Amazon links)

tokenrove2• 13 years ago

It's not quite at the level of Soul of a New Machine, but I still think every programmer should read this book. A great story from the trenches. It gave me so much respect for Dave Cutler, and confirmed so many things I suspected about Microsoft at the time.

_sh• 13 years ago

Yeah? My reading of that book was that there was such an inhuman marriage/life destroying crunch getting NT out the door that nobody covered themselves in glory, much less showed themselves worthy of respect.

And it explained to me, in clear terms, why Windows was such a buggy pile of shit. It was created of its culture.

mschaef3• 13 years ago

"FoxTales" by Kerry Nietz is also a good read. Kerry talks about his experiences joining FoxPro development as a freshout college grad. I never cared all that much for FoxPro/xbase, but the book is a good read.

http://www.amazon.com/FoxTales-Behind-Scenes-Fox-Software/dp...

mathattack• 13 years ago

I remember an internal training class at a large consulting firm in the mid 90s that was using OS/2. I thought, "This is an awful sign. Are we doing this just to get some business with IBM?" They were a big user of Lotus Notes 2. You never know...

Stratoscope5• 13 years ago

Long before operating systems got exciting names based on giant cats and towns in California named after dogs, most of their names were pretty boring.

Ah, yes. Mavericks, California. It's a great little offshore town, just off Pillar Point. I love that town.

Kidding aside, this is a great article.

Related to this story, the Windows 3.0 visual shell was originally not supposed to be Program Manager and File Manager. It was going to be a program called Ruby that I worked on with Alan Cooper and our team.

Ruby was a shell construction kit with a visual editor to lay out forms and components, which we called gizmos. You would drag arrows between gizmos to connect events fired by one gizmo to actions taken on another.

The shell was extensible, with an API for creating gizmos. A really weak area was the command language for the actions to be taken on an event. It was about on the level of batch files if that. But we hoped the API would allow for better command languages to be added along with more gizmos.

BTW, this project was where the phrase "fire an event" came from. I was looking for a name for process of one gizmo sending a message to another. I knew that SQL had triggers, but for some reason I didn't like that name. I got frustrated one night and started firing rubber bands at my screen to help me think. It was a habit I had back then, probably more practical on a tough glass CRT than it is today.

After firing a few rubber bands, I knew what to call it.

(As one might guess, I've always been curious to know if the phrase "fire an event" was used before that. I wasn't aware of it, but who knows.)

Anyway, Ruby didn't become the Windows 3.0 shell after all. The went with ProgMan and FileMan instead. To give Ruby a better command language, they adapted Basic and the result was Visual Basic. Gizmos were renamed "controls" (sigh), and my Gizmo API became the notorious VBX interface (sorry about that).

And we still don't have a programmable visual shell in Windows.

wglb7• 13 years ago

I don't think we used that exact terminology, but back in the '70s in the real-time interrupt-driven world, the concept was there. In fact, if you had used that phrase at that time, everyone would have grasped the meaning.

Stratoscope5• 13 years ago

Indeed, when I was firing those rubber bands, I didn't think I'd coined some truly novel piece of terminology. It seemed like a fairly obvious word, especially given the use of "trigger" in the SQL world.

Ah, it starts to come back! In SQL, "trigger" is a noun, not a verb. It refers to a stored procedure that's executed in response to some event.

I knew "trigger" could also be used as a verb, of course, but it seemed that it might be confusing to use it that way given its meaning in SQL. So that's when I started searching for words and firing rubber bands.

I might have fired up something else too, but that's a story for another day...

InclinedPlane4• 13 years ago

And we still don't have a programmable visual shell in Windows.

Very true, there isn't one. But there are several. None of them all that good though. Windows Workflow, System Center Runbooks, Biztalk, they've all made their mark. I've seen serious systems built using all of them, ultimately I have to wonder whether visual programming on that scale is even a good idea.

mariusmg• 13 years ago

No, it's not. Visual is basically bad for anything but toys.

bergie• 13 years ago

Not exactly desktop-focused, but I'm working on something in this space: http://noflojs.org/

w0rd-driven• 13 years ago

Inadvertently, you could say I owe my entire programming career to you specifically. Yes I can expound upon VisualBasic's retarded conceptions but playing around and making "Forms" was how I got really interested in programming as a career choice. One could say DOS batch scripting had a hand before that but it wasn't until VB3 that I really pursued it in earnest. It wasn't until a CS 101 course teaching Pascal where every thing really gelled into a cohesive unit in my brain. I still can't deny the VB underpinning even if I laugh when I admit it. Had Ruby been around with my batch scripting background, things likely would've taken the same turn either way. Regardless of how you see it now, there's likely a lot more people like myself with a similar story.

Having said all that, what you describe would still be interesting today. I just don't know how feasible it would be to implement. I had a file manager/shell idea in the form of a game construct. Something like crates to open or destroy as a delete mechanism. It was never more than a fleeting concept but I find it interesting that I'm not the only one lamenting about what is now Explorer.exe.

Stratoscope5• 13 years ago

Wow, thank you, it's great to hear your story.

Actually, the apology at the end of my post wasn't about Visual Basic as a whole, but the VBX interface specifically. People did use it to build a lot of nifty controls and extensions, but the interface itself wasn't the best-designed thing in the world, and Microsoft eventually replaced it with COM/OCX.

Hmm... Not sure if that was an improvement!

agumonkey2• 13 years ago

I knew about Alan Cooper legacy in VB, but not the Ruby project. Is VB the only program that used this idea at Microsoft ? even another internal project ?

Were you from tripod too ?

Stratoscope5• 13 years ago

I wasn't working with Alan when he wrote the original Tripod prototype. He hired me and Gary Kratkin, Mark Merker, and Frank Raab to rewrite the whole thing in a more maintainable and extensible way.

Alan was a good coder before he decided to concentrate on UX design, but like many prototypes where a number of different ideas have been explored, the code got a bit messy and he felt a fresh start was called for.

There's more of the story here:

http://www.cooper.com/alan/father_of_vb.html

I don't know of any other Microsoft projects that used the Ruby code or ideas, just Visual Basic.

dalke2• 13 years ago

A books.google.com search found "fire an event" in the 1979 "La Conception des systèmes répartis" (p.115) at http://books.google.com/books?id=1VogAQAAIAAJ&q=%22fire+an+e... . The quote snippet is:

"Control refers to any set of rules describing conditions under which processes may fire an event or switch to a new state."

Other sources confirm that there is a 1979 book with that title. (Google Books sometimes has a dramatically wrong year.) However, I don't have access to the book to verify it for myself.

There's also a interesting reference from particle physics; "Figure 6 shows the number of tubes that fire an event vs. the number of photo- electrons.", Proceedings of Workshop on "Weak Interactions and Related Topics", December 13-15, 1979. While not the same, it feels like a similar construction.

Otherwise, the only relevant hits for that phrase are post-1990.

Stratoscope5• 13 years ago

Cool! That is very interesting, thank you for that research.

I guess I can't really claim to be the true originator of that term then. But it still makes a good story...

sehugg• 13 years ago

OS/2 had many flaws but its multitasking was unseen on a PC at the time. I remember formatting a floppy while running two 16-bit Windows sessions (which were communicating with each other) and multiple DOS windows, thinking I was in the future.

Even Windows 95 was limited by many system calls being funneled through single threaded BIOS or DOS 16-bit land.

waterlesscloud• 13 years ago

I remember installing it from the 15 billion floppies it came on and thinking much the same thing.

It seems like it was on 5-1/4" disks. Can that be right?

And REXX! Ha. REXX.

tomfakes• 13 years ago

3 1/2"

The IBM PS/2 only came with the smaller disk, so bigger wasn't necessary

kenjackson• 13 years ago

Couldn't the Amiga already do all that multitasking on a 256KB machine, years before?

sliverstorm2• 13 years ago

He said for a PC, i.e. an IBM PC clone.

megablast• 13 years ago

I don't think the Amiga had real multi-tasking, from what I understand. I may be wrong.

pjmlp11• 13 years ago

Yes, but it was 512 MB, not 256KB.

Plus it had a heterogeneous architecture, with dedicated chips for sound and graphics.

Just set the required data structures and let the chip do its work alone. Sounds familiar?

huxley3• 13 years ago

Sinclair QDOS which ran on the Sinclair QL did preemptive multitasking on a 128KB machine (buggy as heck when it came out but it did precede the Amiga by almost a year and half).

yuhong6• 13 years ago

For me, the worst thing is that Caldera was able to continue suing MS due to this Win9x dependency on DOS.

yardie2• 13 years ago

you mean MS-DOS. Caldera and others had their own version of DOS and MS went out of their way to make sure no one used it.

wglb7• 13 years ago

No there were some unix-like systems running at that time, three or four years before OS/2.

ojbyrne• 13 years ago

"Some" is an understatement and "unix-like" is kind of funny. There were several strains of unix available when OS/2 was released in 1985.

System V: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_5

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

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix (which was created by the eventually infamous Santa Cruz Operation - SCO - and licensed by Microsoft)

Also VMS qualifies as a fully memory-protected, preemptive OS: The real innovation that Windows and OS/2 did was to take fully preemptive OSes and put them in marginal hardware (at the time) like PCs.

SloopJon• 13 years ago

It almost seems too early to reminisce about this stuff. My first computers were a TRS-80 clone and a Commodore 64, but this is the era in which I really started to get into computers: the Solaris and NeXT ads in Byte and PC Magazine, with impressive looking screenshots of a busy computer; the Mac IIfx briefly taking the clock speed crown at a whopping 40 MHz; wondering if I'd take an Amiga or a Mac to college, then settling on a 486SX from Gateway.

In college I really wanted to like OS/2 2.0 (and later 2.1), but driver problems with the Diamond video card were a constant problem. (If only we'd sprung for the ATI Graphics Ultra Pro!) I had a copy of DeScribe; later sold it to someone through the ISCA BBS.

My impression at the time was that Microsoft executed so much better than its competitors, offsetting its weaker Office products with a better UI, which in turn gave you a reason to run Windows. I later attributed its success much more to its ruthless business practices.

This article brings the focus on the strategic vision: betting big on clones; belatedly embracing the Internet; hammering away at PDAs and tablets, yet losing big to the iPod, iPhone, et al. Sometimes we predict the future, and sometimes we make it.

meerita• 13 years ago

Oh, you made me remember again. I forgot that little detail of formatting. In those days formatting was a common practice, right now unless you want to do a wipeout clean install or prepare a new USB for other file system you don't need to format :).

jzzskijj2• 13 years ago

Many of the people I knew in the beginning of 1990's ended up running either DESQview or OS/2. And that was because they were running either one node bulletin board system on their only desktop computer or they had a multi node BBS on their dedicated BBS computer.

Around that time I had updated from 1200 bps to 2400 bps to 14400 bps modem. Mostly the multitasking was running smooth enough to provide reasonably speedy BBS experience even for the 14k4 caller. The multitasking mostly was visible when the system was building and compressing the QWK archive for offine message reading (Blue Wave FTW).

brk• 13 years ago

I remember running DESQView '386 for exactly that purpose. A TAG BBS on one session, and then whatever else in another session.

It was reasonably amazing at the time to be able to run more than one thing concurrently on your PC.

gmuslera• 13 years ago

In the very beginning of the 90's programmed a BBS and had it running under Desqview. In 1994 had to build a data bank accessible by modem, and based on my bbs to build it, but used OS/2 as multitasker, which made a big difference in stability.

In 1996 had to put access to that data via internet, and used the same OS/2 box for both modem access and an internet server with most of the usual services (mail/web/dns/proxy).

It was very reliable (really don't remember reboots, maybe it was mostly for upgrades), impressed me when i realized that i created a 16mb vector in that 16mb server with everything running normally, and loved WPS (not sure which today's desktop had so good integration with fs) and rexx (parsing without regexes was good, but later learnt how limited i was).

bowlofpetunias• 13 years ago

That's basically why we tried OS/2 at my workplace at the time: to compile and continue working at the same time.

However, we very soon switched to simply having two PC's on our desktops.

chiph2• 13 years ago

One of the cool things about OS/2 is that it changed the sound the floppy drive made as it track-seeked. Rather than a chunk-chunk sound, it was more of a buzzing noise.

The small things one remembers...

petejansson• 13 years ago

About 1985 IBM had a product called TopView that ran a multitasking supervisor on top of DOS and could do real multitasking with the right disk drivers. No protected memory though. TopView was really memory heavy, though -- you gave up at least 160KB just with TopView. Two guys created a TopView clone called Mondrian that ran in just 40K, and ran much faster. Those two guys were Nathan and Cameron Myhrvold. Mondrian was sold to Microsoft and those two guys went with it. Mondrian was a really clever engineering feat.

outworlder2• 13 years ago

That's my reason for switching to Linux, back in the Slackware days.

Back when CD burners were still uncommon, I got as a gift a japanese, SCSI-based one. With my hardware, I'd lose a CD if I forgot to disable the screensaver - the amount of disk seeks required to load the screen saver executable was enough to starve the buffer, and I'd get a buffer underrun every single time.

So, one time I was trying a linux system, and had to do a last-minute presentation, which required files on a floppy drive. For some reason, I had no usable floppies and had to format one, and I couldn't wait for the burn to finish.

So I inserted the drive and, fully expecting to lose the CD, called fdformat. cdrecord didn't even flinch, the buffer was still full when the format finished.

I only ever booted Windows from then on to play games.

erichocean• 13 years ago

I seem to recall UPS widely deploying OS/2 internally back in the 90s, with custom (internal) apps written for it.

Probably all Windows by now...

kickingvegas2• 13 years ago

A previous HN thread on OS/2.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3785819

yuhong6• 13 years ago

Also see these threads with my comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3785819

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3441885

dangoldin• 13 years ago

I remember my dad getting a promotional shirt for OS/2 with the caption "Flight 4.0 to Chicago has been delayed, I'm taking off with OS/2"

The idea being that Windows 95 was internally called Windows 4.0 with the codename Chicago.

I keep on searching for it but can't find it anywhere.

And Bill Gates on OS/2 in 1987: "I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time."

InclinedPlane4• 13 years ago

I remember seeing this article in popsci way back when: http://www.popsci.com/archive-viewer?id=vypUfjzMwlAC&pg=52

It talks about Windows 4.0 and other contemporary "next gen" operating systems.

huxley3• 13 years ago

You can find many of Microsoft's codenames here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_codenames#Win...

My favourite codename sniping had to do with Windows NT (codename Cairo) and NeXT. When announcing NeXTSTEP 4.0 (codename Mecca), Jobs quipped, "Why stop at Cairo when you can go all the way to Mecca?"

http://www.paullynch.org/NeXTSTEP/Expo.1994.htmld/

steven20122• 13 years ago

I actually bought a copy of OS/2 Warp when it came out because I was interested in its preemptive multi-tasking, and it was a decent operating system for what it's worth. I was definitely more stable than Window 3.11, but its real problem was compatibility. Back in the early 90s, everything was about getting compatibility, and while OS/2 had good compatibility, didn't have perfect compatibility.

As well, I worked at a bank, and as the article correctly stated, the entire bank was run on OS/2, most notably the ATMs, except the ATMs I worked with was using OS/2 2.0.

However, when Windows NT 3.51 came out, that was the game changer. I was the only person I knew who even knew what it was (I read about it in a magazine at the time), and I was able to get a student-priced copy at my college bookstore. I started using it, and it was awesome, everything just worked, except for some games. You couldn't even compare NT 3.51 to OS/2, it wasn't even in the same level. The look and feel of NT was exactly the same as Windows 3.11, and all the programs worked.

jonah3• 13 years ago

My computer had 8mb RAM at the time and NT required 16 to install so I "borrowed" another 8 from one of the school computers, installed NT and then returned the memory. It ran well enough on 8.

steven20122• 13 years ago

I was lucky enough to have a 486DX-50 (not a DX2-66)with 16 MB of RAM, so it ran perfectly for me.

Even with what was bleeding edge hardware at the time, I still remember trying to finish writing my senior project using Corel Draw and Microsoft Word on Windows 3.11, and having my computer crash ever 30-45 mins, and my project partner eventually broke down and started crying because of how frustrating it was.

peteri• 13 years ago

I remember buying a copy of OS/2 Warp from Grey Matter in the UK for £5 as a promotional version (required a version of windows to upgrade from IIRC)

Sadly the big problem was that it swapped like mad in 4MB which Windows 95 didn't. Doesn't sound like a big problem today but the extra memory would have been expensive at the time. In particular 4MB was a popular option on 386/486 machines arranged as 4 x 1MB which often filled all the SIMM slots on the motherboard so upgrading to 8MB meant buying 4 x 2MB SIMMs which doubled the memory cost.

For most of us at the time 4MB was a good usable amount of memory with EMM386 but the upgrade past that didn't give much extra functionality.

msh• 13 years ago

3 years ago I did consulting for a UK bank on a project that involved migrating off os/2.

yuhong6• 13 years ago

The sad thing is that I have never seen an article on the entire MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco that is what I call complete and detailed and many omitting for example the unethical attacks MS did against OS/2 such as "Microsoft Munchkins". I try with my own blog article, but I admit it is not very good either.

michaelwww• 13 years ago

Wikipedia has some interesting things to say about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_OS/2

mbennett• 13 years ago

Finally, and most importantly for the future of the company, Bill Gates hired the architect of the industrial-strength minicomputer operating system VMS and put him in charge of the OS/2 3.0 NT group. Dave Cutler’s first directive was to throw away all the old OS/2 code and start from scratch. The company wanted to build a high-performance, fault-tolerant, platform-independent, and fully networkable operating system. It would be known as Windows NT.

A couple of decades later, Dave Cutler is still around at Microsoft and worked on the hypervisor for the Xbox One at the ripe young age of 71, allowing games to run seamlessly beside apps.

From http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/8/5075216/xbox-one-tv-micros...

Underneath it all lies the magic — a system layer called the hypervisor that manages resources and keeps both platforms running optimally even as users bounce back and forth between games, apps, and TV.
To build the hypervisor, Multerer recruited the heaviest hitter he could find: David Cutler, a legendary 71-year-old Microsoft senior technical fellow who wrote the VMS mainframe operating system in 1975 and then came to Microsoft and served as the chief architect of Windows NT.
It appears his work bridging the two sides of the One has gone swimmingly: jumping between massively complex games like Forza Motorsport 5, TV, and apps like Skype and Internet Explorer was seamless when I got to play with a system in Redmond. Switching in and out of Forza was particularly impressive: the game instantly resumed, with no loading times at all. "It all just works for people," says Henshaw as he walks me through the demo. "They don’t have to think about what operating system is there."

pjmlp11• 13 years ago

Yes, many like to bash Windows, but the NT family is actually a VMS at heart, spoiled by a not so good user land experience.

I once attend a session by him about the Windows kernel design, quite interesting.

gjm11• 13 years ago

VMS + 1 = WNT, in the same way as IBM - 1 = HAL.

(So far as I know, both of these are just amusing coincidences.)

protomyth5• 13 years ago

I would love to see a kickstarted to buy OpenVMS from HP since they are retiring it. It was a quirky but solid OS with some great clustering and security.

gaius2• 13 years ago

One thing VMS was not was quirky, DEC went to considerable effort to make everything consistent. If you didn't know a command you could guess it, and it would take the same switches as any other command. Contrast that with Unix whose commands really are quirky...

wazoox• 13 years ago

A friend of mine (who is a huge VMS fan) wrote this: http://www.freevms.net/

zenbowman2• 13 years ago

Thanks for the tale, heartwarming to hear that he is still at Microsoft. In my view some of the best work in our industry has come from lifers (or at least long-timers).

protomyth5• 13 years ago

I bought OS/2 for work to run on some DEC PC (not the damn Rainbow, the decent 486 DEC sold). The graphic card (S3) wasn't supported out of the box, so I called the IBM and got nowhere other than an acknowledgement it existed.

I called DEC and they too believed it existed, so they (while I was still on the line) called their contact at IBM. After being transferred twice, we arrived at the person who could mail me the driver, but I would have to sign an NDA. Myself and the DEC rep explained we didn't want source or a beta driver, just the release one. He insisted every customer had to sign. I said I'd think about it. After hanging up, the DEC rep couldn't stop laughing. He asked if I wanted a free copy of NT compliments of DEC. I took it and it had the correct driver.

I tried, but they had no chance.

baldfat• 13 years ago

not the damn Rainbow

Hey I had a Rainbow! It was pretty amazing IF it had it's full potential it would have been the best computer until the Amiga came out.

Rainbow: CPUs - Z80 (8 Bit) and a Intel 8080 OS - CP/M and MS-DOS Could be upgraded to 286 later.

Would have been perfect BUT they didn't get things setup correctly and I was really stuck in Z80 CP/M land.

protomyth5• 13 years ago

One man's innovation is another man's Frankenstein Monster.

It was actually an 8088 not an 8080.

Anyone who had to deal with people using those damn Rainbow floppy disk drives has my eternal sympathy. I really, really want to know what they were thinking on both the format and how you inserted those disks.

jboggan2• 13 years ago

Up until March of last year a lot of ATMs in the US were still running OS/2 . . . I "upgraded" a lot of them to Windows XP. Yuck.

When I would take the OS/2 system offline and replace it with a Windows cage the payment network would sometimes tell me the uptime on the deprecated machines . . . one network operator claimed 8 years of uptime at one particular machine. I have no way of confirming that, but I definitely felt the OS/2 machines were rock solid, especially compared to the vulnerable Windows machines. Most small banks with NCR machines are running two software packages (APTRA Edge or Advance) with default admin passwords and are really behind on the monthly bug patches. Eek.

The OS/2 machines required you to input config info in hex though, so I was glad I didn't have to work on them in the field too much.

gnaffle• 13 years ago

When you think of it, 8 years of uptime isn't special for a machine running on a UPS and not needing a reboot for software updates. There simply isn't a reason for a well-built operating system running on solid hardware to crash.

marshray• 13 years ago

Cosmic rays, but yeah, that's solid.

LinaLauneBaer• 13 years ago

ATMs usually do not have a UPS.

jboggan2• 13 years ago

No UPS for a lot of machines. I can't imagine the OS/2 getting an update simply because core ATM features haven't changed since the 80's. But it was still impressive uptime because ATMs are generally cantankerous creatures.

A software upgrade on the XP machines was ridiculous. It usually involved 3-4 hours of loading and booting and restarting with several different CDs. The other techs and I were convinced that NCR padded the installs/updates to take longer since their certified field techs billed out at around $300/hour.

kabdib3• 13 years ago

When OS/2 Warp came out, I remember it being insanely cheap ($20?), so in a what-the-hell mood I bought it. Took it home and tried to install it. It was a hopeless mess of disks, both optical and floppy, and I never got it to run.

One of my cow-orkers at Apple had worked on the OS/2 Presentation Manager at IBM. I tried talking with her about it, but she said the experience had been "absolutely awful" and she didn't want to say much else.

IBM never had a chance.

baruch2• 13 years ago

I have OS/2 Warp 3 and 4, both boxes at home. They both worked on my computer at the time and run my tiny BBS and allowed me to work on the computer flawlessly. This was much better than my peers who had to dedicate a computer to this. But then I had a loaner modem and a shared voice/BBS line and they had a private line for the BBS too.

It worked nicely and the install wasn't bad, it was quite a few disks but than Windows didn't fare much better in that regard. It was also a mess of many floppy disks to perform an install.

I remember fondly the Team OS/2 meetings where we could geek out our love for OS/2 and mourn the inefficiency of IBM marketing to push it.

And then I found Linux.

zura• 13 years ago

Hah, I was thinking to Ask HN these days about the availability of exotic jobs, including OS/2 (or eComStation) programming jobs. I also wouldn't mind to take Motif jobs. Feel free to contact me if you have any ;)

yuhong6• 13 years ago

Motif was recently GPLed, as it happened.

nikbackm• 13 years ago

Interesting read. This part really brought the current Windows 8 push by Microsoft to mind.

"These machines were meant to wrestle control of the PC industry away from the clone makers, but they were also meant to subtly push people back toward a world where PCs were the servants and mainframes were the masters. They were never allowed to be too fast or run a proper operating system that would take advantage of the 32-bit computing power available with the 386 chip. In trying to do two contradictory things at once, they failed at both."

Not quite the same situation, but they have many similarities.

forgottenpaswrd• 13 years ago

"Version 3.0 was going to up the graphical ante with an exciting new 3D beveled design (which had first appeared with OS/2 1.2)"

I think it was Next computers who got first on this.

justincormack• 13 years ago

As this article admits, it is just a rewrite of "Triumph of the Nerds".

jfb• 13 years ago

Yeah, it's typical of Ars these days. Not particularly artful rehashing of existing info.

jlebrech• 13 years ago

don't outsource for the sake of a few months, if things take time, then they take time.

mnw21cam3• 13 years ago

The article says that the Mac OS was the only OS to ship that ran on PowerPC CPUs. This is not true - later versions of the Amiga OS ran on PowerPC.

mschaef3• 13 years ago

I have fond memories of OS/2 from the summer of 1995. At the time, I was a undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin, and IBM needed summer intern testers for a product they were calling "OS/2 Lan Server Enterprise". OS/2 LSE was IBM's effort to re-platform OS/2 LAN Server on top of OS/2 DCE (in development on the lab next door to LSE). The general idea was to provide a way to scale up OS/2 so that it would interoperate with other DCE-based systems (mainly RS/6000 AIX, IIRC).

Anyway, the machine IBM gave me to use was a PS/2 Model 80. This was a 1988-era machine that had been brought to the semi-modern era with 20MB of RAM memory installed via several MCA expansion cards. Against my best expectations, the machine ran well, despite the fact that its CPU was at least 10% the speed of the then-state of the art.

From what I remember, the OS/2 LSE product itself was fairly solid. However, the biggest memory I have from that summer was the afternoon we spent playing around with the Microsoft Windows 95 beta disk we received for compatability testing. Towards the end of the afternoon, we tried to DriveSpace (compress) the disk. We got bored during the wait for the compress, so we pulled the power on the machine thinking that would be the end of it. However, once we powered the machine back up to install OS/2, Windows 95 just resumed compressing away like nothing happened. A few weeks later, a friend and I went to CompUSA for the Windows95 launch. Even at midnight, there was a line out the door, winding past the Windows 95 boxes, then the Plus Pack, then Office 95, and then memory upgrades... Didn't hear much about OS/2 after that...

swampboy• 13 years ago

I enjoyed the article. It was a nice trip down memory lane. Regarding development tools, there were 2 commercial IDEs based on REXX: Watcom VX-REXX and VisPro REXX. I used Watcom's VX-REXX and it was a joy to use and allowed for incredibly fast and powerful application development. I heard the same about VisPro REXX. IBM's early set of tools C/2 and C Set++ were a bit painful to use. VisualAge C++ 3.0 was a decent toolset once you got over the weirdness of it. For a while, if you wanted to write C or C++ code using sockets you had to purchase IBM's TCP/IP SDK for $100.

The SIQ was a "synchronous" input queue and the problem has been understated in the article and comments. It was really bad. The base OS was incredibly stable, but the GUI shell, not so much due to the SIQ problem.

There were a number of Unix and Unix-like systems in addition to the ones already listed: Coherent, Interactive, and SCO are some that come to mind. They were pretty expensive IIRC, around $1000 to license.

mdip• 13 years ago

I worked at a large computer chain (R.I.P. Softwarehouse / CompUSA) from 1993 - 1996 and had been building clone computers for businesses from 1990-1993. I remember how this played out very well.

At the time, IBM had sent in scores of company reps to train up our floor staff on the advantages of OS/2 over the always-soon-to-be-released Chicago. They did a good job getting all of us to "drink the Kool Aid". I received a free (not pirated, promotional) copy of blue OS/2 Warp 3.0. It was a fantastic operating system for running a DOS based multi-node Telegard BBS and it did well with Win16 applications.

The impact of Windows 95 coming on the scene, though, is difficult to fully appreciate unless you were there. We had been selling pre-orders for months and there were a myriad of promos. I remember some of those preorders were sold under the threat that there wouldn't be enough copies to go around on release day. I had been playing with pirated copies of the betas of Windows 95 for the prior two months. Even in its beta form, it ran circles around Windows 3.0/3.1 in terms of reliability. I even remember reloading my PC with the most recent beta after release because a DOS application I used ran more reliably in it than in the RTM code.

Then launch day came. It was unlike anything I had ever seen in terms of a software release. We closed up at 9:00 PM and re-opened at 12:00 midnight to a line of customers that went around the building --- A line of customers ... for an operating system. We joked at the time that "Windows really was that bad". There were tons of additional promotions to ensure people came and lined up--Some RAM / hard disks selling under "cost" and others. And the atmosphere of the store felt like a party. We had theme music playing (start me up?) and some Microsoft video playing on our higher-end multi-media PCs. It was obvious to us, on the floor, trained by IBMs marketing machine, that Warp died that day.

As an anecdote to the stories about IBMs marketing being a little off: I remember around the release of Warp 4.0 I saw an advertisement at a subway station something along the lines of "Warp Obliterated my PC!"-- that tagline, evidently, meant to be some hip new use of the word obliterated.

techsupporter• 13 years ago

We closed up at 9:00 PM and re-opened at 12:00 midnight to a line of customers that went around the building --- A line of customers ... for an operating system.

I grew up in Dallas, SoftWarehouse (somebody else remembers that name, awesome)/CompUSA's original stomping grounds and this story kept coming back to me throughout the whole article. Windows 95 was considered revolutionary at the time, even to those of us lined up at the Lewisville, Texas store at 10:30PM to buy an operating system. (Incidentally, the first time I ever talked my dad into taking me to an overnight release of anything.) Windows 95 was the first operating system I ever saw non-technical people set out intentionally to buy and I spent months installing it for friends and family.

We had theme music playing (start me up?) and some Microsoft video playing on our higher-end multi-media PCs.

Yep, it was "Start Me Up" by the Rolling Stones. If I remember correctly, the video was a demo reel of everything new in Windows 95 and was highlighted by the huge Start button popping in at the end of the video, then fading to black. It even had a snippet of the waving Windows 3.1 flag and the bear from the "Help / About" Easter Egg hidden in 3.1.

jdcarter• 13 years ago

I bought my first PC from that Softwarehouse in the late 80's. Man, I so loved that store.

zenbowman2• 13 years ago

Thank you for sharing, a great article indeed.

I'm glad it ended up the way it did, Microsoft at the time was betting on openness being a feature, and I think they helped move the computer and software industries they have gone in since, towards greater openness (and thereby professionalism).

People associate Microsoft with closed source, but it is of course relative, they were in their day the vendor who was banking on openness and courting developers harder than the others.

picomancer• 13 years ago

Here's a perspective from the founder of a successful bootstrapped software startup that began by developing native OS/2 applications:

http://www.stardock.com/stardock/articles/article_sdos2.html

I own a copy of the OS/2 Galactic Civilizations 2.

outworlder2• 13 years ago

And not a single mention of Babylon 5.

The special effects were created on Amigas: http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/making/effects.html

Also, while looking at Video Toaster's entry on Wikipedia, I found this gem:

"An updated version called Video Toaster 4000 was later released, using the Amiga 4000's video slot. The 4000 was co-developed by actor Wil Wheaton, who worked on product testing and quality control.[6][7] He later used his public profile to serve as a technology evangelist for the product.[8] The Amiga Video Toaster 4000 source code was released in 2004 by NewTek & DiscreetFX."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster

nnq• 13 years ago

Why aren't the unix-family OSs of the era part of the story? Why didn't IBM even consider porting a unix-family OS to the PCs instead of paying an unproven company like Microsoft to write an OS?

(...all the events from this stretch of computing history seem so weird to me, like from a steampunk-like alternate reality movie. There's surely lots of context missing and stories that nobody will ever tell, since most of the decisions taken by all the key players seem so anti-business. Computers may have changed a lot from back then, but business is still business and all the decisions made seem either "irrational" or based on "hidden information" that is not part of the story.)

vesinisa• 13 years ago

I guess because, as the article describes, IBM was all for protecting its workstation business as well as the lucrative mainframe business.

A workstation back then was defined as an expensive high-end computer that was designed to be used by only one user at a time (i.e. not a multi-user mainframe), yet was suitable for high-performance applications. They were intended mostly for corporations and academia where extra juice was needed and that could afford to buy workstations (think scientific computing, CAD and graphic design in the 1980s). IBM did at this time already manufacture workstations with UNIX as the operating system (see e.g. http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=867&st=1 ) But they were way too expensive for the home user. PC (personal computer) was the low-end product that you could afford with a normal salary.

I understand UNIX back then was a mainframe and workstation operating system. Licensing was expensive and the hardware requirements beyond that of a PC. Few people had access to UNIX, mostly at universities and at big corporations. These were the very reasons why GNU and Linux were born - to provide a mostly-compatible UNIX clone for the home users with an affordable IBM PC compatible.

So my theory is that IBM was protecting its mainframe business - it did not want to put the powerful UNIX to the PC because it wanted to sell more expensive special hardware to those who wanted UNIX. So it hired a maverick company (Microsoft) to write a low-end, feature-poor operating system for PC (DOS). It was (and continues to be) a business strategy to bundle better software with better hardware so that you can ask customers that want only the superior software for a higher price (still essentially the business model of a certain Cupertino, California based manufacturer)

derleth2• 13 years ago

So the new System/360 mainframe line would run the also brand-new OS/360.

Bad example. Really bad example: Not even IBM could standardize on a single OS for the System/360.

The System/360 went through a few OS iterations before OS/360 came along: OS/360 was late, as recounted in The Mythical Man-Month, so DOS/360 came along, then BOS/360, then TOS/360, and even PCP, which didn't support multiprogramming. Other OSes were CP-67, which became VM, MFT, MVT, and still more OSes on top of that.

To this day, there are multiple OSes for the architecture descended from the System/360, including Linux.

jgeorge• 13 years ago

One of my fondest memories of OS/2 (there weren't many, sorry) was finding a media file on one of the diskettes called IBMRALLY.MID which was a little piano rendition of "Ever Onward, IBM" from way back when in the Way Back When Days of IBM.

Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2

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