Is OS/2 Coming Back? 432
mstansberry writes "Is IBM considering relaunching OS/2? One source close to IBM says Big Blue plans to repurpose OS/2 services atop a Linux core. IT managers ask, why now?" Hey, back in simpler times OS/2 was super badass. Both of the guys who ran it were hard core.
WPS (Score:5, Interesting)
I would be delighted to switch my window manager back to the Workplace Shell (well, provided that there were keyboard shortcuts). I would not be so delighted to again deal with the SIQ lockups (but I imagine a port of WPS to X11 wouldn't have that problem, except to the extent that its own components might themselves use their own queue). I also would worry about EA corruption, which was always a concern with OS/2 as the collection of cruft in EAs kept growing and often a little mistake led one to need to repair them (or reinstall the system).
Anyhow, point is if I could just have the interface back, with some light Unix sensibilities injected, I'd be happy to switch from WindowMaker back to WPS. (Actually, having Stardock's Object Desktop as part of that would be a huge plus).
EA corruption (Score:5, Funny)
I also would worry about EA corruption
Did EA even make any games for OS/2?
Re:EA corruption (Score:5, Informative)
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Object Desktop was quite popular - their launchpad replacement was much prettier and more capable than the original. I have no idea how well-recieved the Windows port was, but many of the people on the old IRC channel used OD (and you see it in screenshots just about as much as you'll see the vanilla desktop).
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The only reason they are bloatware on windoze, is they had to write a lot of code to get some WPS functionality. Their original product, for OS/2, just added a layer on top of WPS.
Re:WPS (Score:5, Insightful)
Although I agree a new flavor of Linux is never a bad thing, the strengths that made OS/2 a contender back in the day don't exist now. There were very few viable desktop operating systems back then to choose from. Today is a vastly different landscape. From a technical standpoint this is interesting stuff, but certainly not something to write home about. I just don't see something like this making much of an impact to the current landscape.
Re:WPS (Score:5, Insightful)
You think there are more "viable" desktop operating systems available today than back when OS/2 was released?
Are you sure?
Re:WPS (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you need to brush up on your history, and maybe use a less "book" definition of OS - there were several competitors even in the PC market. Also, there's a bit of apples-to-oranges comparison with the "per platform" qualifier, as there was more platform diversity back then.
Re:WPS (Score:5, Insightful)
Os2 was still used heavily up until a few years ago. Many ATM machines ran it because it was 8000% more stable than any of microsoft's Operating systems.
Honestly OS2 can certainly thrive it has big blue's name behind it, If they make a Linux distro with it that is really hardened and stable, they can own several markets quite quickly.
Look at the government. They dont have a stable OS to use for any military operations.
I know a lot of people that wish that microsoft would make a real industrial OS instead of a Consumer grade OS with some security slapped on it for servers. They could do it, they choose not to because it's cheaper to maintain a single codebase and simply enable or disable features.
Re:WPS (Score:5, Interesting)
Look at the government. They dont have a stable OS to use for any military operations.
Yeah: vessels going to sea today that were designed 10+ years ago are all running Windows NT (if they went with an MS OS). There's a scary thought: the most advanced weapons every devised run on Windows NT.
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Yeah: vessels going to sea today ...
Nuclear wessels, even.
Re:WPS (Score:5, Interesting)
I spent years working as a test technician and test engineer installing operating systems and testing hardware. I have experience with AIX, SunOS, Solaris, Novell NetWare 2.1, 2.2, 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, 4.0, 5.0, etc., IBM OS/2 1.31, 2.0, Microsoft OS/2 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.31, MS DOS 2.0, 2.1...6.1.?, Microsoft Windows NT 3.51, 4.0,..., HP-UX 9.?, 10.*, 11.*, SCO Unix, Linux Slackware, SCO Unix and others. I also have exposure to MS Xenix, HP 3000, HP 1000, and others.
Of the lot, I liked IBM OS/2 2.0 the best. Most stable, easiest to use, powerful. You would have had to be there at the time to understand why IBM OS/2 2.0 didn't do better; Microsoft waged a marketing war to prevent OS/2 2.0's success. The irony is that Microsoft had rights to the IBM source code and used much of the OS/2 2.0 source code to improve its products. You could find copyright and version strings with IBM's copyright in areas such as file system code.
Microsoft isn't the biggest because it writes the best code. Only a Microsoft bigot would believe that.
And people who believe that Microsoft will continue to dominate clearly don't remember how it used to be that IBM dominated the market. IBM is still important, but it's turn as being number one is over. Microsoft, too, will fade. Its importance as a operating system is waning as the use of computers becomes network focused. Even with all its experience with writing operating systems, and its dominance of the operating system market, Microsoft couldn't make inroads into new markets such as cell phones and mobile devices.
Microsoft is a one-trick pony and that trick is being upstaged by actors who are far better.
Not everyone likes POSIX (Score:2, Insightful)
Although there are a lot of virtues in UNIX programming, some people just don't like it. They prefer richer APIs that Windows and OS/2 provide.
So with OS/2 aging, it makes sense for IBM to put the APIs onto a modern OS. App migration becomes a cinch, and the future of the system is guaranteed.
Does OS/2 have enough customers to make this porting effort worthwhile? I don't know.
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Although there are a lot of virtues in UNIX programming, some people just don't like it. They prefer richer APIs that Windows and OS/2 provide.
That's why there are richer toolkits that sit on top of POSIX and X11, such as Glib/GDK/GTK, Qt, wxWidgets, and Winelib.
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> API on top of POSIX != Rich API
You say that like it's not possible to build a "richer" interface on top of a more primitive one.
Of course this is an idea that's completely assinine and absurd.
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Re:Not everyone likes POSIX (Score:5, Insightful)
Although there are a lot of virtues in UNIX programming, some people just don't like it. They prefer richer APIs that Windows and OS/2 provide.
I have a revolutionary idea: Let's put only the necessary primitives into syscalls and let rest of the rich APIs be served by user-space libraries. Chances are the applications won't give a damn.
Re:Not everyone likes POSIX (Score:4, Insightful)
This would not be for your auntie or some drooling drone making sales calls. It would be for real work like launching missiles, aligning satellites, Controlling a 900 ton press making metal clips, ATM machines, roaming death bots for the new death panels, I.E. real work.
Most of those people don't want a richer API. they want a minimal API that is rock solid stable.
IBM could care less about someone that wants fluf and talking paperclips.
Typical (Score:5, Funny)
This is just typical of IBM Services missing a delivery target.
The article is really an April 1st joke, but the 12th was the closest they could come. Probably need a few more contractor billable hours next time.
Re:Typical (Score:5, Funny)
I believe I speak for most geeks when I say, simply:
*facepalm*
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Be careful not to run out of your supply of /facepalm oil. A chafing /facepalm is no laughing matter.
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Oh noes, you've set her off again ... she's going to be reminding everyone how "unique" she is all bloody day now :-(
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Are you a girl?
No, I'm a lesbian.
Ah, so you are a girl, but with good taste.
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A little fishy, if you ask me.
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A little fishy, if you ask me.
My partner cleans her girl parts. There's nothing fishy about it. :P~
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Ahah - so I wasn't just imagining that blog! Being a guy who likes chicks and then having an operation to make yourself into a pseudo-chick is an amazing way to isolate yourself from 99.99999999999% of available sexual partners :s
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Great, another deskop environment (Score:4, Interesting)
People moan and whine because there's Gnome and KDE (although there's increasingly a bit of a norm unifying the whole thing thanks to opendesktop) and now they pull, out of all things, OS/2 services ?
Granted, why not ? But the few who actually worked on OS/2 programming let it go a long time ago. And why OS/2 and not [insert whatever other dead system here] ?
Everybody nowadays either uses Unix or Windows. Come up with something new or work with the crowd. Out with the IT necromancy I say. Bring out the torches and pitchforks !
Re:Great, another deskop environment (Score:4, Insightful)
From TFA, it doesn't sound so much like a desktop environment as it does server protocols. Kinda like Samba, LikewiseOpen, netatalk, etc, provide services and/or connectivity to other OS's protocols, but they don't actually change anything about the Windows environment.
From that standpoint - it's neat, I guess, but I don't think any regular users will care. This is something to throw to those places running systems on legacy installs of OS/2 so that they can move up to modern hardware and a modern OS without having to redo their core applications.
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Re:Great, another deskop environment (Score:4, Funny)
The more options there are, the more decisions there are.
The more decisions there are, the more people there will be who need to pay someone to help them make those decisions, or implement them.
Making things simple from the very beginning isn't as profitable as making things more complicated and then "helping" people "simplify" stuff
Maybe I'm too cynical?
Re:Great, another deskop environment (Score:4, Informative)
Because more people used OS/2 than any other dead GUI OS I can think of at the moment. The other (and more important reason) is that many companies are still using OS/2 for critical applications. If they were able to build WPS (which by the way is not what this story is really about) on Linux, your concern about 3 major desktop environments would go away within 18 months anyway. WPS was a better desktop environment 10 years ago than Gnome or KDE are today. If they spent some time actually updating it, the other two would fade into obscurity. Linux has come a long way, but it is no where near being a serious threat in the desktop market. Would OS/2 services and GUI change this, no probablly not.
Why? Because in order to support a desktop OS today, you either have to control the hardware platform or have a significant enough install base to compel every hardware manufacturer to release updated and supported drivers in a timely manner. This is why you have Windows (big install base) and OSX closed platform. Linux works on most every platform, but there are nearly always tradeoffs and limitations, no one devotes the same level of engineering to their Linux drivers as they do their Windows drivers for desktop hardware. In the server space there has been considerable progress made in driver development, in many cases Linux driver support far exceeds Windows on enterprise server hardware.
Desktops remain a difficult nut to crack. Revere engineered drivers are not a viable solution for a consumer operating system, drivers must be engineered and supported for consumer hardware , just like they are for server systems , before you will ever see Linux make any meaningful inroads into the desktop market. Since IBM does not make desktop hardware anymore, it is unlikely they will be the ones to bring a closed platform Linux solution forward (essentially like Apple did with BSD), but an OS/2 Linux hybrid could be interesting if they could partner with Lenovo (for example) and provided a fully integrated and supported solution.
Great! Another deskop environment to mix things up (Score:2)
There's also GNUStep and XFCE and the ROX desktop and probably many more.
KDE and GNOME are slightly warmed over versions of Windows, perhaps with a few hints of OSX. Those are not the last word in UIs by such a long way...
The WPS was object oriented. Right now GNOME-devs are talking about making gnome more "applicaton oriented" which is really "back to the age of pitchforks". I'd like to see a desktop like the WPS on Linux so that GNOME and KDE devs have something better to copy their ideas from.
As said
Those Two Guys (Score:5, Informative)
You seem to miss the thousands of banks and financial institutions that were using it as well. OS/2 was far more prevalent in large businesses than it ever was with home users.
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OS/2 Really fill the void (with novel) before NT came out and got popular. It offered good multi-tasking and made a good small scale server. OS/2 Warp there was a lot of speculation that it Might be the next Big thing and kill windows... However IBM was Stupid with the advertising while Microsoft was smart. And Windows 95 really got the mind share, once it got the mind share when NT 4 with a Windows 95 interface came out it caused a migration away from OS/2 Warp and Netware... At that Time linux came in a
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OS/2 never went away (Score:5, Informative)
OS/2 is still running ATMs, train systems, all kinds of important things. It never went away.
Re:OS/2 never went away (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually I have to wonder if OS/2 might not make a great embedded OS these days. It is super reliable and by today's standards petty light weight.
OS/2 Mobile on your next phone?
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I remember OS/2 being the opposite of reliable. I used versions 2.1 and 3.0. Did they make a quantum leap in 4.0, or are you just speaking nonsense?
OS/2 Mobile on your next phone?
Even AmigaOS would make more sense; sure, there's no memory protection (or is there, now?) but it at least reboots quickly. Put all the stuff for handling voice calls into a whole separate subsystem and let the smartphone part crash and reboot itself in under a second if it has to :p Classic AmigaDOS could be coaxed into doing that, including the GUI, if you stu
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Did they make a quantum leap in 4.0,
No they made a big change, not an incredibly small one.
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Not sure that's a good analogy as OS/2 was heavily OO and had an arguably larger feature set than its mainstream rivals. A case could maybe be made for OS/2 1.0, tho.
If DOS is BASIC and Windows is C#, OS/2 was more like a C++ environment which also had some sort of virtual BASIC tossed in as well as some fancy object libraries which were very useful but which took a certain mindset to use effectively.
The document-centric paradigm the WPS presented was not the traditional "launch program first, then open do
Workgroup Folders (Score:3, Informative)
For those who don't know, a Workgroup Folder allowed one to put a group of programs and/or documents in a single folder and then open/close those elements as a single logical unit. Open the folder, and all of your programs and associated documents popped open. Close the folder, and everything closed as a unit. It was very slick...
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Is it still on ATMs? I know the ATM I use is on Windows. I know because I saw it during a bluescreen.
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An updated Workplace Shell would be great (Score:5, Interesting)
Gnome and KDE are fine, but if IBM really wanted to, they could make them both obsolete pretty quickly with an update WPS interface. Plus, let's face it, at this stage in the "Linux on the desktop" battle, Linux *needs* an official, fully-funded commercial desktop environment. The Gnome vs. KDE battle is retarded, and both DEs are starting to get kind of nutty. IBM could restore sanity.
I'm all for it, personally. But I also think it's obvious that this is just a rumor.
Re:An updated Workplace Shell would be great (Score:5, Informative)
I'd be wary of suggesting that we ever will or should have an official desktop. Some competition and cross-pollination helps us share interface ideas that work after having separate communities really find out what doesn't. Those of us who actually used OS/2 generally also find the very idea of "IBM will save us" to be ridiculous. IBM long neglected, ignored, and occasionally kicked the OS/2 community. They're not really the poster child for sanity. We liked the product, but were very wary of big blue itself.
Also, as a general hint to other people, whenever somebody says "let's face it", it's a good clue that they're being a douche. It's an empty, self-congratulatory phrase.
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Yes, because reinventing the something 27 times is such a great idea.
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It can be, sure, as part of continual experimentation and cross-pollination.
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What happens when that standard desktop sucks? What happens when people feel discouraged and skip out on experimentation because the standard already exists?
Have you used CDE? Do you think CDE would've aged gracefully into something as nice as we have now had the companies involved kept at it?
Would need a SOM runtime. (Score:2, Informative)
SOM programming was a pain in the ass: code an IDL, precompile and get C header file from Hell (it was akin to the first C++ precomilers that would implement everything in C), link, and then there was a binding operation - IIRC. For the WPS, you'd create a dll that would extend it - your application was really a dll that was run by the desktop. It did allow multi threading BUT it w
They could port (Score:4, Interesting)
They could port the OS/2 userspace APIs to linux. It would probably work pretty well. They could probably make it load and run OS/2 EXEs and DLLs unchanged. That would be cool.
(Spent some years of my life working on IBMs C++ compiler for OS/2.)
Wine-ing about app compatibility (Score:2)
They could port the OS/2 userspace APIs to linux. It would probably work pretty well. They could probably make it load and run OS/2 EXEs and DLLs unchanged. That would be cool.
But how many people would "Wine" about changes to the APIs during the transition that break specific apps? Or that a piece of hardware that worked on OS/2 Warp doesn't work on OS/2 for Linux because the driver API wasn't also ported?
Interesting.. (Score:5, Insightful)
For a lot of companies, if something works there is no reason to mess with it. As hardware gets old and is difficult to replace with devices supported by OS/2, this may be attractive for some companies. In the past 12 months I have visited clients running critical applications on OS/2 and Xenix, while it is easy for an outsider to say "Just upgrade it to a newer application", replicating all the business logic and surrounding process would be costly and disruptive.
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Interesting idea, it would be worth a shot, at least if you did not need any driver support.
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Why should businesses have to "keep up with technology".
We're talking about the span of only a decade or so. Why should businesses have to be in a constant state of chaos just because the geeks and the conspicuous consumers need something new and shiny constantly?
Sadly many times the "new technology" simply doesn't measure up.
No one should be forced to used crap they don't want to.
This is not the Soviet Union.
YES!!! (Score:4, Funny)
What? What do you mean TFA wasn't talking about the port?
New Tag... (Score:3, Insightful)
Can we have a new tag: "Rhetorical questions to which the answer is 'No'"
My OS/2 story (Score:5, Informative)
When I worked for the state there was a company contracted to develop a whole suite of Windows applications to move us off the old VAX green-screen interfaces into the modern world. Most of the department ran on Windows NT 4.
So naturally, the contractor developed all of their applications on a Windows NT 3.51 emulator running under OS/2.
Aaaaand after millions of dollars spent, the contractor demonstrated their applications (working flawlessly under the emulator in OS/2) got their money and high-tailed it, leaving us IT schlubs to implement the applications. All the apps immediately crashed when we attempted to run them in the real NT 4 environment. We never did get them working, except on the few workstations actually running OS/2 with an NT emulator.
Your tax dollars at work. Remember kids, watch your specifications when hiring a contractor!
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Your post should be entitled "My experience with a mismanaged Windows NT 4 software development project." The only experience you had with OS/2 in your story is that the contractor used it to emulate NT 3.51 during development instead of using actual NT 4.0 machines.
What happened is not the fault of OS/2, but rather the contractor and the manager overseeing the development.
It would be a very intresting move (Score:4, Interesting)
Since MS has won the desktop OS battle, IBM has been behaving as a small company, but they are not. Sure the company that IS big IT must have more aspirations then just being a service provider?
And of course they are a lot more, but once they were the face of IT to ordinary people. You bought an IBM or at least an IBM compatible.
And now?
So if this story has some truth in it, it could mark an attempt by IBM to get back out there and fight in a crowded market place and not just charge 1000 dollars per hour for its personnel.
Doubt this is the case but I have always had the thought that if anyone can break the current stalemates it is IBM. It could force both hardware and software makers to worry about competition again.
Not that I think it is likely, IBM does quite well as it is. But it would be more intresting if it is true.
IBM Software (Score:5, Funny)
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lol (Score:2)
I find it very telling that many of the people that have commented on this story have low UIDs, lol
Linux on the user desktop success (Score:2)
This is the exact thing that would have a chance to make it as a general user desktop Linux distribution.
Of course, most FLOSS fanboys will scream and cry and hate all over IBM so it probably won't happen, but it would have a much better chance of success than the current offerings.
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MVS is still around too (Score:3, Informative)
OS/2 was a basterd child. I had the first OS/2 developers kit. It cost $3,000, had no GUI (PM came later), and wouldn't compile "Hello World." The day after I got the SDK, I drove from SF to Seattle to attend the first OS/2 developers' conference at the Westin. Balmer was there but Gates was not. I wondered why the head geek did not show up for such a "big event." Now we all know why.
No way (Score:2, Interesting)
Laugh all you want... (Score:2)
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That's the problem. OS/2 was stable, but most of the apps were Win31 apps, and they crashed worse on OS/2 than they did on Windows itself. The only advantage is that I didn't have to reboot.
Unfortunately, the "one source close to IBM" is: (Score:2)
Bob Moffat ( http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-03-29/robert-moffat-pleads-guilty-in-galleon-group-case-update1-.html [businessweek.com] )
This will be great! IF we get MSOffice Pro for OS2 (Score:2)
Slapping Services onto Linux Not a Good Thing... (Score:2)
But... simply throwing new services onto a linux kernel does *not* make for a great new product. Novell tried this when with shoddy Netware services in their Open Enterprise Server, versions 1 and 2. They actually managed to to take two stable platforms and merge them into a bloody mess.
Funny, but the last laugh is on us (Score:2)
Both of the guys who ran it were hard core.
Yeah, them and NCR, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and WaMu. OS/2 was for real [1] [pcworld.com] [2] [allbusiness.com] (see page 2).
I think WaMu was the last to ditch OS/2. I worked B of A. Any WaMu vets know?
This is seriously black humor, disentangling oneself from Big Blue. Let's not forget it.
--
Toro
In other news... (Score:4, Funny)
BeOS, AmigaOS User Groups Say OS/2 Not As Worthy Of Rebirth As Their OS, Scuffle Ensues
General Availability (GA) Release 2.0 Of eComStation Announced For Autumn 2009
Wasn't *that* uncommon in its heydey (Score:5, Interesting)
Everyone has used OS/2. They just don't know it. (Score:5, Informative)
Up until rather recently, a large majority of bank ATM's ran OS/2.
Many call centers ran software that used OS/2.
OS/2's attempt to reach the consumer market were laughable - they sponsored the OS/2 Fiesta Bowl in the 1990's, without explaining to the public what OS/2 even was - but the software was everywhere in the corporate world it seemed. (for those slashdotters who don't know what the Fiesta Bowl is, it's one of the biggest college football ball games.)
Ford car dealerships ran a satelite uplink system that required OS/2.
I used it to ran a multiline BBS. It was good stuff. Even today, many of the guts (and filenames) of Windows stem from MS's long ago partnership with IBM....the more stable portions of Windows.
Not sure what the relevance of it today would be, but it was more widespread than you might think.
Ahhh OS2. (Score:3, Interesting)
OS2 is what pushed me unto the unix for good. My bad ass 486-25 sx (with math coprocessor), 16 meg of ram and WHOPPING 1.2gig full height scsi drive was hungering for some more fun. I had been running a hodge podge of operating systems and had settled on DESQView/X. I had it all, running windows 3.0 apps, command shells, x applications, even X apps from remote! But then a new version of OS2 came out (2.0? 2.1?) that promised me everything DESQView/X was giving me, but running with out DOS! THE FUTURE HAD ARRIVED!
OS/2 promptly ate my partition table and destroyed all my DVX, windows and dos partitions.
I was so effing pissed that it did this without really asking me anything that I swore it off. Fortunately something sorta BIG had just happened there on them ol' USENETs: The new 11 Floppy version of Slackware dropped. I installed it... and never looked back.
Open-sourcing it? (Score:3, Insightful)
OS/2 was as popular as the Mac once... (Score:3, Interesting)
According to IDC, IBM shipped a total of 4.5 million units of desktop OS/2 (with another 275,000 as servers) in 1995.
To put that in perspective, note that Apple shipped 4.8 million Macintoshes in 1995, all running System 7.5, plus another 800,000-900,000 System 7.5 upgrades.
It was almost as popular as the Mac in 1995, and the Mac was #2 to Windows at that time.
Re:Those two guys (Score:4, Informative)
I am one of them :D
Ran it, wrote code for it, supported it for 10,000 users from version 2 to version 4.
Unfortunately, they kind of pulled the wind out of the sails around the time Win 95/98 came out, so it didn't really make sense to stay with it.
I still miss little things like being able to reset the video to the default driver with a key combo, SNA/3270 support (which matters if you're not addicted to using a VB front-end for your mainframe), the first graphical remote desktop support, and a really great CDE style dock.
Oh, and REXX. I loved REXX... that was a great language.
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That was a move I just couldn't understand - IBM dropping OS/2 just as Windows 95 came out.
Here's the situation - Microsoft is forcing it's user base to migrate off of DOS and Windows 3.x. Both Windows 95 and OS/2 are backward compatible with DOS/Windows 3.x, and at the time, there were more native applications available for OS/2 than applications that used Windows 95's exclusive features, and OS/2 was far and away acknowledged to be the technically superior OS. Since Microsoft was forcing a migration to an
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When a computer cost $1500-$2000 for just the low-end, a $250 OS price difference on top of that was a non-starter. If Windows95 has to stand on it's own on the shelf at Computer City or Comp
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OS/2 worked quite well on "business-class" hardware ... 3Com and Intel NICs were almost always support, Matrox was well known for its quality OS/2 drivers, Creative Labs soundcards were well-supported through the AWE64 until they completely changed the chipset and stopped writing drivers for OS/2, etc.
With a little research, it wasn't difficult at all to get a PC to run with OS/2, but sometimes that meant replacing a component. OS/2 had the same issue that Linux did at the time ... most hardware manufactur
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> ...the first graphical remote desktop support...
The X Window System was first.
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Graphical remote desktop support? Wasn't X11 doing that long before?
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I used to work for one. Two years ago, and their systems were still running OS/2.
Heck, they probably are still running them. I just don't work there anymore.
He'd probably like being able to run it on Linux: It'd ease his migration path.
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You're aware of AROS, and AmigaOS4? And (E-)UAE? And Fellow? And AmigaForever?
Part of me wants to add... "and BeOS and DragonFly BSD and GNOME and KDE" as I'm pretty sure AmigaOS influenced each of these in some small ways (spatial desktop on GNOME, for instance).
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Actually, there was some exchange of technologies going on between Amiga and OS/2. IBM gave Amiga REXX in exchange for some general desktop enviroment tech; something like that.
Re:Why not bring back Amiga OS? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Amiga had proper co-operative multitasking around a decade(!) before Windows
Amiga multitasking was pre-emptive, not cooperative. Much better. Windows multi-tasking was cooperative (if that) until Windows NT/95. Pre-emptive multitasking was where Amiga OS had a ten year advantage over common versions of Windows. The Mac didn't get co-operative multitasking until System 7, and pre-emptive multitasking on the Mac didn't come until Mac OS X.
The main problem with AmigaOS was that there was no security or process isolation to speak of. That made it _extremely_ fast, but also rather vulnerable to a variety of problems.
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How about because the X Window System actually sucks?
How about because there is a better way of doing things?
How about because a standardized UI is better than the crap out there now?
Is that reason enough for you?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Still, is amazing the kind of things that one was able to do on it with 8-16Mb of RAM, some of its design (wps,and its integration with hpfs, i.e.) could be something interesting to add to the "gene pool" of open source systems, at least if its released under the right lic