25 Years of IBM's OS/2 342
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."
When OS meant Computer (Score:5, Interesting)
Brings a tear to my eye (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:When OS meant Computer (Score:5, Interesting)
In a way, it's almost like RIM and Nokia/Symbian's rather tremendous falls from grace, care of Apple and Google; i.e. they never stood a chance.
It was great... once upon a time. (Score:5, Interesting)
I ran OS/2 extensively from '93 to '03. OS/2 was way ahead of it's time in many ways - maybe too much so. It was a great solid system and the GUI was much better than most of what we have today. it's a shame that IBM couldn't market it properly but they were working against the massive marketing force that MS had back then. That, and the fact that OS really ran best with at least 16mb or RAM back in a time when 8mb was considered excessive. Once Win95 came out OS/2 was pretty much on a fast path to it's death. That clearly demonstrated that the PC industry was more about marketing and deals than producing a better product because windows 95 was absolute trash in comparison.
Titans of the industry (Score:5, Interesting)
"More than 250 companies declared their intention to deliver OS/2 apps, including biggies such as Lotus, WordPerfect, Borland and Novell."
OK, that made me smile.
Technically OS/2 was very impressive. (Score:2, Interesting)
Had excellent scripting, good multitasking, was very stable at the time compared to just about anything that you could run on PC hardware. I also remember it as being very fast, unless you ran Windows applications on it.
IBM was just not flexible enough to win. The exact same thing is happening to Microsoft right now with the only difference being that while IBMs desktop efforts died with very solid products at hand, Microsoft falls on their nose with crapware. Dont get me started on the duct taped Windows Phone 7 GUI with dripping glue onto Windows 7 that is called Windows 8. Every single engineer involved in that crap should be ashamed to the bones.
Re:CIBC (Score:5, Interesting)
One.Word (Score:5, Interesting)
CONFIG.SYS
Well, there's a longer story. Anybody interested should look into the blind luck and frustration that led to MS building Windows as "PM lite" and chancing into Dave Cutler's expulsion from DEC. The book "Big Blues" is a decent start.
When IBM pivoted hard toward PS/2 and 16-bit computing, Gates took one of the 3 or 4 intuitive gambles that defined both his success and that of Microsoft.
There's ONE simple use case, that illustrates the technical failing of OS/2, vs Windows NT - particularly in face of the claim IBM made for a "Better Windows than Windows". > > >. OS/2 didn't perform a special trap for that key sequence. Nor could it - without the 32-bit native, 'Virtual 8086" mode of the 386 processor. This simple illustration exposes the huge architectural gulf that OS/2 was unprepared to cross as 16-bit. Bill's certainty that 32-bit architecture was demanded by multi-task/multi-user computing in 1989 paid off. Inheriting the VMS brain-trust allowed him to execute, while leveraging the design and code contributions his team had made to the OS/2 project.
Besides that? CONFIG.SYS. Really! A whole /etc directory reduced to the parsability of one file! In this context, the follies of the Windows registry appear to be, comparatively enlightened.
Re:Runs most ATM (Score:4, Interesting)
Up until recently, the teller terminals at my bank ran OS/2, but it was basically just a platform to run terminal sessions to the mainframe. Then they switched over to a browser-based front end to a UNIX back end.
The company I work for still supports old, legacy, OS/2 systems used for telephone menuing systems. It's funny that when there is a problem, many of the employees we support have no idea where the machine is located. It was literally stuck in an office somewhere and has been running completely unattended for years. It never gets updates. It never has to reboot. It just runs... and runs... and runs.
The problem we have now is finding hardware old enough to support it. We have to use 80GB drives for replacement and set up a 2GB partition for the OS and software. The rest just sits there idle. AT motherboards, ISA graphics and PS/2 keyboards and mice are getting harder and harder to find.
Re:Titans of the industry (Score:3, Interesting)
"More than 250 companies declared their intention to deliver OS/2 apps, including biggies such as Lotus, WordPerfect, Borland and Novell."
OK, that made me smile.
Why?
When I was at IBM Boca (when it existed), we had all those apps running and they were available for sale at your local computer store.
I remember the Borland OS/2 compiler rather fondly, although, at IBM we were stuck with Visual Age - a pig - during the Warp days. Before that we had Microsoft's C/C++ compiler and that was pretty good.
Novell, I guess that made you smile. Although, the networking on OS/2 (TCP/IP, Netbeui) was quite combersome and a bitch to get around - that was written by IBM along with the install program. I almost got fired when I asked during the Warp days, "I see that on the top of every source module 'Copyright 1987 Microsoft Corporation'. Is there anything that IBM actually wrote?"
"The install and networking."
"Ah! The features that everyone says is crappy with OS/2."
"Hey! Hey!"
"Uh....nevermind."
Although, the WorkPlace shell was an IBM program and it was rather good - for the user. Programming the fucker with SOM (and its obscenely large headers to make C object oriented) was kind of a bitch.
Re:When OS meant Computer (Score:5, Interesting)
IBM was pushing OS/2 Warp to compete with Windows NT. I was in college at the time and did a co-op with IBM that year. I had to opportunity to go to COMDEX and IBM gave lots of people a t-shirt that said "Nice Try" (with the N and the T really emphasized) on the front and "OS/2 Warp, Up and Running, Not Up and Coming" on the back. We were to wear the shirt in the audience of Bill Gates keynote when he officially announced Windows NT.
I still have that T-Shirt.
Re:When OS meant Computer (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, I tried Warp and the problem for me was RAM. You see, at the time, a 386sx40 with 4MB of RAM and a 170MB HD was an average machine but it wasn't enough to run Warp decently. Warp just didn't run at Warp speeds on that hardware. If Warp would have appeared a few years earlier, the problem would have been worse.
Re:os/2 was not able to windows 32 bit apps just 3 (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft used to update win32s every week it seemed then IBM would fix OS/2 to run them. Finally with Win32s v1.30 Microsoft hardcoded some DLLs to load in high memory and as OS/2 only supported 512 MBs per process, no more Win32s support without a lot of work.
Re:One.Word (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember in at least one version of OS/2 that I used to run (2? Warp?), if you sorted the driver lines in your CONFIG.SYS alphabetically, your boot time would improve dramatically.
I loved OS/2 back in the day.
My old fart rant. Ex-IBM'er contractor. (Score:5, Interesting)
I was in college at the time and did a co-op with IBM that year.
My group used to call you CO-OP guys "NOP"'s - no operation - as in assembly 'NOP'.
You were easy to pick out - shirt and tie for the first week on your NOP job.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we gave you punks a hard time, but it was out of love, man. You were sharp and ambitious and would end up as our boss. We had to take our shots while we could.
I still have that T-Shirt.
Me too.
I was in my local NAPA auto parts store and this old guy (even older than me) saw that shirt and said, "That's a really old T-Shirt."
Long story short, he was one of those guys that took an early retirement.
When I was at Boca, I watched all those "out of date loser" mainframers come down from NY to do shit jobs. I smugly thought, "That's what you get for not staying current!"
How arrogant I am. And I'm ashamed for it.
I escaped to a so-so business back office programming job while others were poached by Microsoft - the smart ones which wasn't me (Peter, peter rice eater - you rock man! I hope you're a MS Millionaire because you deserve it!).
The ironic thing is that the Hartford Insurers (who still train, btw) need some mainframers.
I met the most obscenely talented and genius people at IBM.
Looking back, it was the most humbling experience ever - and I was too arrogant to take that lesson in at that time. Then again, we have to be arrogant to get jobs in this fucked up industry, don't we? Saying, "I don't know." is the kiss of death.
OSFree (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately, I never owned a PC during the time that OS/2 was around, and so never got to experience what it was. But most of the people who ever used it liked it. Just hearing about some of the concepts - dragging a file to a printer icon in order to print - blew me away. An OS that would have been the offspring of OS/2 and NEXTSTEP would have been just purrrfekt!
In college, I learnt about microprocessor design on a PPC 601 - the first PPC to come out after IBM did a derivative design of it along w/ Motorola (now Freescale). Knowing that OS/2 was going to have an uphill battle outside IBM (heck, even Amber didn't offer the OS), I was rooting for OS/2-PPC, which was known as Workplace OS. Unfortunately, as it turned out, Mach 3 turned out to be a horrible choice for a kernel (and Hurd pretty much made the same mistake in going w/ it) and finally, IBM canned it. That was the real death knell of OS/2, and w/ it died any real hopes of the PPC getting popular outside Apple (as far as computers go - I'm not thinking about consoles or other boxes)
Incidentally, today, there is a project called OSFree [osfree.org], which is similar in concept to Workplace OS, except that it uses the more recent L4 micro-kernel as its underpinning. The concept here is good - on top of the micro-kernel, they plan to use different 'personalities', such as Presentation Manager, Win32, DOS and even Linux (there already exists an L4Linux, so they may not do much more on that one), as well as a Neutral personality, which would provide the services that the other personalities require. The advantage here is that the portability of the L4 has already been demonstrated, since after an initial design w/ some assembly code, it was found that replacing assembly code w/ C didn't have any performance impact.
I know that at this point in the game, computers based on anything other than x64 or ARM are pretty much non-starters, but it would be fantastic if such a project actually came to fruition. That would be a good step towards portable computing, while giving just about any architecture the ability to have an environment like OS/2. Hopefully, all the major FOSS software will be ported there, and that platform would then have a chance of being viable. I think that b/w OSFree and ReactOS, there should be enough opportunity for OSs that decide to take advantage of the end of support for XP. Maybe a laptop based on a MIPS or PPC can have a go at it
Re:When OS meant Computer (Score:5, Interesting)
I actually considered abandoning Windows myself for it, after a friend showed me what OS/2 Warp could do (its multitasking blew away Windows 3.1, and unlike Mac's, it could run DOS games/software). It may have succeeded if it Warp had come out just a couple of years earlier. As it was, it only beat Win 95 to market by a year or so, and so most people just held out for another year and stuck with Windows.
I don't think it was the timing of Warp's release - after all, even OS/2 2.1 was superior to Windows 3.1. Problem was that OS/2 had double the memory requirements, which was a major showstopper at the time. Although it supported all DOS device drivers, there was always the problem of which systems wouldn't run it.
Also, for PC makers, IBM was a competitor, while Microsoft was not. That too was a part of the decision. Also, IBM took way too long and ultimately aborted Workplace OS, which was to have succeeded OS/2. That turned out to be the death knell for the OS.
After Microsoft merged Windows 9x and NT in Windows 2000, the rationale for OS/2 was pretty much gone. Which, alongside the demise of Amiga, NEXTSTEP, NT-RISC, was some of the tragic reasons for which all we have today is Windows and Unix (I'm considering Linux, BSD, Solaris and all their derivatives as Unix).
Re:When OS meant Computer (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, more accurate estimates place Linux at around 5% +- 1%. The reason people continue to use 2% is because even though they know that number is a wild guess (literally - no hyperbole), they simply don't like the idea of Linux having a larger percentage (yes, seriously). And that's no exaguration. Regardless of what anyone here personally likes, what we know is that 2% is the LOWER BOUND. So factually speaking, we know for sure Linux has between 2%-6% of the desktop market, with very reasonable numbers indicating its far more likely closer to 5% than 2%.
Yes, I know trolls will want to censor and negatively moderate, but its not like these numbers are new. New numbers have been pushed for a long, long time (years) and for whever reason, people just pretend they don't exist.
The technology created of OS/2 lives on in Windows (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember it well, I was tasked with a number of OS/2 projects. Recoding MS's writelog function, making it asynchronous (non-blocking), creating the (AT) VGA driver, creating (AT) ST506 driver, and the biggest challenge ever, I was tasked with creating the final quality control steps/code/testing methodology.
I knew the final QC phase would be huge, an almost impossible challenge, since the Microsoft's core staff was mostly Recent College Grads who would take many of inappropriate shortcuts. Thus it would take something extraordinary to beat their code into something useful.
If I had failed, I suspect the micro computer industry would have been stuck in a dark age for at least a decade, maybe more.
The biggest hurtle was there would be no way to fully test all combinations of system functions, our SUN would burn out first(billions of years). Instead of attempting the impossible, I did the next best thing.
I created a series of revolutionary stress tests for that project. The component programs were a series if self checking programs which used out of phase pseudo random number generators. The resulting (re-creatable) data patterns were used for both the function parameters and content, and the longer they executed, the greater the testing coverage.
Long story short.. The first release of OS/2 (86) never saw the light of day.. It couldn't even pass the individual component stress tests, let alone dozens of them in combination, all controlled by my screen manager. Sloppy coding techniques and shortcuts had forced MS coders to go back to drawing board and start over from scratch.
Net result, those stress tests uncovered many flaws, including hardware problems, and major software issues, some of which were carry overs from PC/MS/DOS. They were discovered and fixed, some of them were folded back into next release PC/MS/DOS, 4.0. Thus making DOS based PC's useful for large databases for the very first time.
In the end, the code, the methodology I created, was so far ahead of everything else they quickly took over all other forms of OS testing at both IBM and MS. And it lives on to this day, Microsoft has ten's of thousands people creating/running modern permutations of those 24hr stress tests I pioneered for the birth of OS2, using it to find and fix bugs in all versions of windows.
Re:One.Word (Score:5, Interesting)
Usability killed it (Score:4, Interesting)
Despite all that if you knew what you were doing it was far more superior to anything Microsoft had at the time. I'm sure Microsoft engaged in all kinds of sharp practice but it really needn't have bothered. IBM was its own worst enemy. By the time NT4.0 / W2K were appearing there was no reason at all to use OS/2.
Re:os/2 was not able to windows 32 bit apps just 3 (Score:5, Interesting)
There were stories of IBM even solving that problem but deciding that if Microsoft was willing to convolute their OS design to prevent OS/2 from running it once, they'd just keep doing it and so IBM ended the cat/mouse game at Win32S capabilities along with OS/2's already advanced design.
LoB
Re:When OS meant Computer (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm pretty skeptical of conspiracy theories so didn't really believe at first that the press was being bought by Microsoft to favor Windows. But what convinced me was an issue of Infoweek I think. One article was headlined that IBM was delaying OS/2 2.0's release by a few months. Buried in the article text it mentioned that several new features were going to be added. Next page an article was headlined the Microsoft was adding new features to Windows 95. Buried in the text was that Windows 95 was going to be delayed by a few months.
Re:When OS meant Computer (Score:4, Interesting)
Looking back now, I might have been able to tweak it and get it usable if I had been willing to invest the time in it, but I instead focused my energy on FreeBSD (2.1!) and that turned out to be the better choice anyway.
The one thing I did like about that machine: PC-DOS was better than MS-DOS. Not a lot better, but its memory management was just slightly superior so that the constant headaches my friends had with trying to get stuff to run on their MS-DOS machines (damn, 1MB short of base memory!) was not a problem on mine. I never had to make boot floppies to get Doom to run because PC-DOS was slightly better about getting stuff up into High Memory).
Re:One.Word (Score:5, Interesting)
I find it hard to believe the CTL-ALT-DEL would be enough reason for users to quit OS/2 and pick Windows instead.
Of course both of these 80s and early-90s OSes sucked compared to the simplicity of the Mac System 6, or Atari ST-TOS, or the preemptive tasking of the multimedia-capable Amiga OS (since 1985) which was used to create graphics for seaQuest, Babylon 5, and Voyager (one season).
People who wanted power, like for gaming, were not buying either OS/2 or Windows 2/3 on PCs. They were choosing the Atari STs or Commodore Amigas.