25 Years of IBM's OS/2 342
Posted
by
samzenpus
from the back-in-the-day dept.
from the back-in-the-day dept.
harrymcc writes "On April 2nd, 1987 — 25 years ago today — IBM announced OS/2. It was supposed to be the next-generation operating system that would replace DOS. It never did. But for a famous failure, it's doing okay — it still runs the computers that manage the New York Subway's Metrocard fare cards, for instance. Over at TIME.com, I've taken a look at its occasional triumphs, frequent tribulations and enduring legacy."
Don't Push Us! (Score:2, Informative)
OH the memories (Score:5, Informative)
Re:os/2 was not able to windows 32 bit apps just 3 (Score:0, Informative)
you might have a valid point in there somewhere - but, sadly, your grammar and punctuation are so poor that it is lost
congratulations, your written english is even less readable than perl!
Re:okay ? (Score:5, Informative)
... would consider this a failure of New York Subway's and not an indication how good OS/2 really is.
Why is that a failure of the subway system? I live in New York and I take the subway every day. The computer system always works fine for me, there's hardly any time that I swipe my card and it erroneously doesn't open the turnstile for me. From a customer perspective, whatever software they're using, it's very reliable.
Re:Runs most ATM (Score:5, Informative)
There's tons of old OS/2 boxes chugging along in a corner somewhere until the hardware finally breaks. OS/2 sales in the form of eComStation has been tripling each year lately due to places like your work needing to install OS/2 on modern hardware. http://ecomstation.com/ [ecomstation.com]
And it will still install and run on modern hardware though you have to choose carefully. No accelerated video and only ATI supported. Barely any wireless support and only a few network cards supported. Sound based on Alsa so most sound cards including built in supported. 512 GB partitions if you want them compatible with other operating systems, otherwise the ancient architecture is limited to 2 TB. Best to stick to Intel hardware, especially if you want to take advantage of all cores. OS/2 is licensed per CPU, not core so it does do SMP. Only 64 cores supported though.
Re:When OS meant Computer (Score:5, Informative)
Same reason why it took Linux so long to gain some speed. Let's be honest here, it's a great system. But run it on the 486DX available in 1990 or the early Pentiums and you're in for a very, very slow and sorry ride. Compare to DOS, which is MUCH more lightweight, it had no chance.
Sure, Linux was even back then a full blown multitasking, multiuser system, nothing DOS could have held a candle to in any sense (actually, Linux farting would have blown out that candle without even aiming in the right direction), but the problem was simple: Nobody cared. Multiuser, multitasking system on a box that can barely run ONE task without overextending its CPU power? What for?
OS/2 suffered the same problem, it was a great system, it had great features but the hardware it was supposed to run on was not up to it. And the features went unused, both by software and the user, which in turn makes the DOS/Windows combo the "better" system in the eyes of the user. Simply because it was faster. Yes, from a technology point of view it was inferior to OS/2 (hell, even NT4.0 was), no doubt about that. But the superiority of OS/2 didn't "arrive" at the user.
Re:One.Word (Score:5, Informative)
Interesting, and wrong.
OS/2 1.0 offered a single "DOS box". No claim was made to be a better "Windows than Windows".
With OS/2 2.x, 32 bit mode was exploited, and Virtual 8086 mode as well for multiple DOS boxes. Windows 3 was modified to run in a "virtual friendly" fashion. Remember that IBM had a source license and was allowed to modify Windows 3.
THIS version was a "better Windows than Windows" -- at least 16 bit Windows. Better performance, less crashing.
However, the para-virtualized Windows relied on a certain addressing layout. Microsoft made sure to break that with Windows 95, removing the option of modifying and running under OS/2.
Yes, a monolithic CONFIG.SYS was a bottleneck -- some ran into 100 or more lines. But, practically, not as big a concern. OS/2 was smaller, did not support multi-user, and few file systems. CONFIG.SYS was arguably the right choice. For OS/3... not so much, but then, that became Win NT.
Re:When OS meant Computer (Score:5, Informative)
Yea, mine was I could write code for Windows (and DOS) without paying fees but the OS/2 API was $2,000 (or something silly like that; it's been a few years).
[John]
Re:One.Word (Score:2, Informative)
Are you kidding me? Windows did not take full advantage of the 32-bit architecture until Windows XP. Everything before that was 32-bit bolt-ons to 16-bit underpinnings. That's a full 16 years where the hardware in most of the business and home computers in the world were hobbled by inferior software.
We saw a somewhat smaller version of that with the 64-bit transition where the 64-bit processors were common years before anybody in their right mind would run a 64-bit copy of Windows. Thankfully, that has changed now that Windows 7 is much more common than XP and (shudder) Vista.
Re:os/2 was not able to windows 32 bit apps just 3 (Score:4, Informative)
With Warp server. OS/2 did start to support high memory, first 2 GBs then 3+GBs and with FixPak #13 for V4 they combined the desktop and server kernels and updated V4 to V4.5 which gave high memory support on the desktop.
While they never finished porting the API to be high memory friendly they did a good enough job that things like Firefox, that ran like shit with a 512 MB address space, more like 350 MBs after loading shared DLLs, run quite well. And OS/2 has Odin, sorta Wine for OS/2, which allows some Win32 programs to run and is now being used to compile some Windows programs against. This is how Java 6 and Flash 11 work under OS/2 now. (actually we use the native Flash binary with a wrapper)