9 ms·

Hrm. As someone who wasn't alive during the OS/2 era, does anyone have or know of an overview of features that made it particularly stand out?

by dom96 9y ago

jacquesm 9y ago
It was a real contender to Windows, an actual OS rather than a bunch of cobbled together APIs pretending to be an OS. It was also super stable. And it got killed in the marketplace.
tyingq 9y ago
It competed with Windows 3.1, but had preemptive multitasking vs Window's cooperative. Often ran Windows programs faster/better than Windows. And pretty good MSDOS compatibility. For other reasons, it failed. It was the OS of choice for a lot of bank ATMs though.
- jacobush 9y ago
  The way it ran Windows apps was by loading Win 3.1 under the hood. IIRC Microsoft hurt IBM with licensing here.
newnewpdro 9y ago
True 32-bit protected mode preemptive multi-tasking was the primary advantage over comtemporary windows at the time. People were using Desqview in MS-DOS to achieve this level of multi-tasking in lieu of OS/2. OS/2 did it better. Windows 3.1 was cooperative multi-tasking, not even protected mode if memory serves. Windows NT would be where MS tech caught up with IBM, OS/2 was out in the wild for quite some time already. But the general public didn't embrace OS/2, Windows 95 effectively killed it.
- kjs3 9y ago
  OS/2 was 16-bit until 2.0 (and technically still had 16-bit chunks under the hook after that). Windows NT was where MS 'forked' OS/2 after the 2.0 days; IBM and MS were partners in developing OS/2.
  - kyberias 9y ago
    Windows NT started from scratch. It was never an OS/2 fork.
    - danboarder 9y ago
      Not from scratch. It started as "OS/2 NT" in partnership with IBM. Microsoft renamed OS/2 NT to Windows NT. See here: http://www.itprotoday.com/management-mobility/windows-nt-and-vms-rest-story http://www.itprotoday.com/management-mobility/windows-nt-and...
      - Zardoz84 9y ago
        Also, HPFS was like NTFS v0.9
      - kyberias 9y ago
        Yes from scratch. Names matter little. From your source: "Microsoft's internal project name for the new OS was OS/2 NT, because Microsoft's intention was for the new OS to succeed OS/2 yet retain the OS/2 API as its primary interface." Note how Russinovich talks about a "new OS". The NT (kernel) never had any OS/2 code in it, it was a totally different project. The first target processor architecture for NT wasn't even x86, it was MIPS. OS/2 in NT was merely a subsystem layer next to DOS and Posix, somewhat like today there is the Linux subsystem layer in Windows 10. A good source is this: https://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Microsoft/dp/0029356717 https://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Mic...
        newnewpdro 9y ago
        > The first target processor architecture for NT wasn't even x86, it was MIPS. I thought it's pretty well established now that the NT in the name was named after the target architecture: Intel i860 "N10", not MIPS.
        kyberias 9y ago
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Windows NT would be where MS tech caught up with IBM OS/2 was originally a Microsoft/IBM joint product, work on NT at Microsoft began during that time as “NT OS/2”; the cooperation broke down in large part over the different directions MS and IBM wanted to take with OS/2.
  - yuhong 9y ago
    That OS/2 2.0 debacle was so bad BTW it is my favorite topic (especially the MS part). I mentioned before out that DR would not be easily be able to clone OS/2 as they did with DR-DOS.
    - Zardoz84 9y ago
      DR-DOS not was a clone of MS-DOS. The truth is that was CP/M-86 that was added stuff to be MS-DOS compatible. I used DR-DOS 5 when I was a children and I remember that it worked better that MS-DOS 6. Sadly, Microsoft used these dirty trick that Windows 3.1 would autofail if detect any OS that isn't MS-DOS.
      - yuhong 9y ago
        Early versions of DR-DOS was (kind of), but eventually I think they redesigned the kernel to use true DOS data structures etc.
        Zardoz84 9y ago
        DR-DOS 5 keep having the old CP/M sauce like BDOS kernel renamed as "IBMDOS.COM". Other thing, would if they removed old CP/M stuff that was not necessary any more to run MS-DOS programs, but the source code keeps being a evolution of the old CP/M.
      - einr 9y ago
        Sadly, Microsoft used these dirty trick that Windows 3.1 would autofail if detect any OS that isn't MS-DOS. That code, while present in the codebase, was deactivated in the release version of Windows 3.1, so it actually ran just fine on DR-DOS.
projektfu 9y ago
I wanted OS/2 to succeed because it was reasonably fast and stable, and included a very good filesystem (HPFS) compared to FAT. But "users" don't find those features compelling. 32-bit OS/2 was also limited to 512MB, but at the time that was an unattainable ideal for a PC. I think it would have had a chance if it were easily config'd like the Mac, which was all graphical and simplified. But OS/2 was like DOS, requiring power users to edit config.sys and the like. Windows 95 provided more graphical config options, although in the end if you wanted to run games and the like, you were dealing with the crazy.
YZF 9y ago
It had Rexx as a system scripting language and also a full TCP/IP stack vs. the kludges that were part of Windows at the time...
- tyingq 9y ago
  Hmm. I remember KA9Q, Crynwr packet drivers, Trumpet Winsock, etc. I don't think the creators of any of these got enough credit or compensation. Probably other similar solutions as well. I think there was an open source ne2000 driver with similar popularity.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    Peter Tattam at least got some belated credit. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875
- kitd 9y ago
  Interesting fact: when you ran a Rexx program, the OS precompiled it to IR and prepended it to the script. As a result, Rexx programs could run pretty quick (for the time). Source: wrote whole systems in OS/2 Rexx!
geocar 9y ago
• Ability to run multiple applications at the same time • Filesystem with long file names • Buggy DOS programs couldn't crash the entire system These sound silly and lame by today's standards, but you'd have to look at OS/2 through the lens of the late 1980's: The Apple Macintosh couldn't multitask anything and crashed all the time! DOS was a world where important files were stored in a directory called USPLDNGS or NODELETE. In the 1990s when Microsoft tried their hand at long filenames, we got gems like PROGRA~1 Microsoft and Apple didn't really solve any of these problems for consumers until 2001 (Windows XP and OSX) but it was already too late for OS/2 at that point.
- Grazester 9y ago
  Windows XP? What happened to windows 2000?
  - detaro 9y ago
    I guess the key word is "for consumers", which NT and 2000 weren't aimed at (and anecdotally, the vast majority of consumers did not use).
myrandomcomment 9y ago
Ran OS/2 on a 486DX/66 with a VLbus Cirrus Logic card. 8MB of RAM. I could run X-wing in DOS and have a download going in the background from an BBS and have my FidoNET client running...etc. I could run Word in a Windows session and have another Windows session running another application and when that application crashed windows it did not crash my others Windows session. I could name things "This is my paper on some dumb stuff the prof wanted me to write about.txt" and save it to the file system. OS/2 was pretty cool. It pretty much also ran every ATM and PBX you interacted with up until the early 2000s. It was better then Windows in every way except the fact that it as being sold and marketed by IBM. MS wrote the early code for it and it was going to be the next thing after Windows 3 but then they did NT.
- Zardoz84 9y ago
  There is yet ATMs running OS/2
nickpsecurity 9y ago
Here's a nice article about it: http://techland.time.com/2012/04/02/25-years-of-ibms-os2-the-birth-death-and-afterlife-of-a-legendary-operating-system/ http://techland.time.com/2012/04/02/25-years-of-ibms-os2-the... The lasting benefit it seems to have as jaquesm said is reliability. Claim in article I doubt but shows they rarely crash: "Oh, and another thing: OS/2, Waldhauer, says, doesn’t crash. It’ll run for a decade without requiring rebooting." It's simple. It doesn't change a lot. It rarely crashes if that's to be believed. It's integrated into important systems for legacy effect. It also has at least one company at any given time updating it to work on modern stuff. So, that sounds like benefits a lot of big companies would be interested in. I think the drawbacks are too significant, though, especially it being a closed, barely-living tech without much of an ecosystem plus who knows what security or high-availability attributes.
pjmlp 9y ago
The component system was more OO than COM, called SOM and even allowed for metaclasses. IBM was the only company, after Lucid, that played with using a Smalltalk like development environment for C++ on OS/2, but it required too much resources.
sedatk 9y ago
DOS was becoming outdated and insufficient in the 90’s. No multitasking, no crash-protection, no unified UI, unreliable file system. Yet it ran on millions of computers. OS/2 was one of the spiritual successors to DOS. It was DOS and Windows compatible, could run DOS apps in parallel and apps wouldn’t crash the whole system. It came with a reliable file system called HPFS as well. Its direct competitor was Windows 95. It bet on better compatibility and better hardware support so eventually persevered. After switching to Windows NT kernel with Windows 2000, Windows had no technical shortcomings left compared to OS/2.

Hrm. As someone who wasn't alive during the OS/2 era, does anyone have or know of an overview of features that made it particularly stand out?

by dom96 9y ago

Hrm. As someone who wasn't alive during the OS/2 era, does anyone have or know of an overview of features that made it particularly stand out?

jacquesm 9y ago

It was a real contender to Windows, an actual OS rather than a bunch of cobbled together APIs pretending to be an OS. It was also super stable. And it got killed in the marketplace.

tyingq 9y ago

It competed with Windows 3.1, but had preemptive multitasking vs Window's cooperative. Often ran Windows programs faster/better than Windows. And pretty good MSDOS compatibility. For other reasons, it failed. It was the OS of choice for a lot of bank ATMs though.

jacobush 9y ago
The way it ran Windows apps was by loading Win 3.1 under the hood. IIRC Microsoft hurt IBM with licensing here.

newnewpdro 9y ago

True 32-bit protected mode preemptive multi-tasking was the primary advantage over comtemporary windows at the time. People were using Desqview in MS-DOS to achieve this level of multi-tasking in lieu of OS/2. OS/2 did it better. Windows 3.1 was cooperative multi-tasking, not even protected mode if memory serves. Windows NT would be where MS tech caught up with IBM, OS/2 was out in the wild for quite some time already. But the general public didn't embrace OS/2, Windows 95 effectively killed it.

kjs3 9y ago
OS/2 was 16-bit until 2.0 (and technically still had 16-bit chunks under the hook after that). Windows NT was where MS 'forked' OS/2 after the 2.0 days; IBM and MS were partners in developing OS/2.
- kyberias 9y ago
  Windows NT started from scratch. It was never an OS/2 fork.
  - danboarder 9y ago
    Not from scratch. It started as "OS/2 NT" in partnership with IBM. Microsoft renamed OS/2 NT to Windows NT. See here: http://www.itprotoday.com/management-mobility/windows-nt-and-vms-rest-story http://www.itprotoday.com/management-mobility/windows-nt-and...
    - Zardoz84 9y ago
      Also, HPFS was like NTFS v0.9
    - kyberias 9y ago
      Yes from scratch. Names matter little. From your source: "Microsoft's internal project name for the new OS was OS/2 NT, because Microsoft's intention was for the new OS to succeed OS/2 yet retain the OS/2 API as its primary interface." Note how Russinovich talks about a "new OS". The NT (kernel) never had any OS/2 code in it, it was a totally different project. The first target processor architecture for NT wasn't even x86, it was MIPS. OS/2 in NT was merely a subsystem layer next to DOS and Posix, somewhat like today there is the Linux subsystem layer in Windows 10. A good source is this: https://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Microsoft/dp/0029356717 https://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Mic...
      - newnewpdro 9y ago
        > The first target processor architecture for NT wasn't even x86, it was MIPS. I thought it's pretty well established now that the NT in the name was named after the target architecture: Intel i860 "N10", not MIPS.
        kyberias 9y ago
dragonwriter 9y ago
> Windows NT would be where MS tech caught up with IBM OS/2 was originally a Microsoft/IBM joint product, work on NT at Microsoft began during that time as “NT OS/2”; the cooperation broke down in large part over the different directions MS and IBM wanted to take with OS/2.
- yuhong 9y ago
  That OS/2 2.0 debacle was so bad BTW it is my favorite topic (especially the MS part). I mentioned before out that DR would not be easily be able to clone OS/2 as they did with DR-DOS.
  - Zardoz84 9y ago
    DR-DOS not was a clone of MS-DOS. The truth is that was CP/M-86 that was added stuff to be MS-DOS compatible. I used DR-DOS 5 when I was a children and I remember that it worked better that MS-DOS 6. Sadly, Microsoft used these dirty trick that Windows 3.1 would autofail if detect any OS that isn't MS-DOS.
    - yuhong 9y ago
      Early versions of DR-DOS was (kind of), but eventually I think they redesigned the kernel to use true DOS data structures etc.
      - Zardoz84 9y ago
        DR-DOS 5 keep having the old CP/M sauce like BDOS kernel renamed as "IBMDOS.COM". Other thing, would if they removed old CP/M stuff that was not necessary any more to run MS-DOS programs, but the source code keeps being a evolution of the old CP/M.
    - einr 9y ago
      Sadly, Microsoft used these dirty trick that Windows 3.1 would autofail if detect any OS that isn't MS-DOS. That code, while present in the codebase, was deactivated in the release version of Windows 3.1, so it actually ran just fine on DR-DOS.

projektfu 9y ago

I wanted OS/2 to succeed because it was reasonably fast and stable, and included a very good filesystem (HPFS) compared to FAT. But "users" don't find those features compelling. 32-bit OS/2 was also limited to 512MB, but at the time that was an unattainable ideal for a PC. I think it would have had a chance if it were easily config'd like the Mac, which was all graphical and simplified. But OS/2 was like DOS, requiring power users to edit config.sys and the like. Windows 95 provided more graphical config options, although in the end if you wanted to run games and the like, you were dealing with the crazy.

YZF 9y ago

It had Rexx as a system scripting language and also a full TCP/IP stack vs. the kludges that were part of Windows at the time...

tyingq 9y ago
Hmm. I remember KA9Q, Crynwr packet drivers, Trumpet Winsock, etc. I don't think the creators of any of these got enough credit or compensation. Probably other similar solutions as well. I think there was an open source ne2000 driver with similar popularity.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  Peter Tattam at least got some belated credit. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875
kitd 9y ago
Interesting fact: when you ran a Rexx program, the OS precompiled it to IR and prepended it to the script. As a result, Rexx programs could run pretty quick (for the time). Source: wrote whole systems in OS/2 Rexx!

geocar 9y ago

• Ability to run multiple applications at the same time • Filesystem with long file names • Buggy DOS programs couldn't crash the entire system These sound silly and lame by today's standards, but you'd have to look at OS/2 through the lens of the late 1980's: The Apple Macintosh couldn't multitask anything and crashed all the time! DOS was a world where important files were stored in a directory called USPLDNGS or NODELETE. In the 1990s when Microsoft tried their hand at long filenames, we got gems like PROGRA~1 Microsoft and Apple didn't really solve any of these problems for consumers until 2001 (Windows XP and OSX) but it was already too late for OS/2 at that point.

Grazester 9y ago
Windows XP? What happened to windows 2000?
- detaro 9y ago
  I guess the key word is "for consumers", which NT and 2000 weren't aimed at (and anecdotally, the vast majority of consumers did not use).

myrandomcomment 9y ago

Ran OS/2 on a 486DX/66 with a VLbus Cirrus Logic card. 8MB of RAM. I could run X-wing in DOS and have a download going in the background from an BBS and have my FidoNET client running...etc. I could run Word in a Windows session and have another Windows session running another application and when that application crashed windows it did not crash my others Windows session. I could name things "This is my paper on some dumb stuff the prof wanted me to write about.txt" and save it to the file system. OS/2 was pretty cool. It pretty much also ran every ATM and PBX you interacted with up until the early 2000s. It was better then Windows in every way except the fact that it as being sold and marketed by IBM. MS wrote the early code for it and it was going to be the next thing after Windows 3 but then they did NT.

Zardoz84 9y ago
There is yet ATMs running OS/2

nickpsecurity 9y ago

Here's a nice article about it: http://techland.time.com/2012/04/02/25-years-of-ibms-os2-the-birth-death-and-afterlife-of-a-legendary-operating-system/ http://techland.time.com/2012/04/02/25-years-of-ibms-os2-the... The lasting benefit it seems to have as jaquesm said is reliability. Claim in article I doubt but shows they rarely crash: "Oh, and another thing: OS/2, Waldhauer, says, doesn’t crash. It’ll run for a decade without requiring rebooting." It's simple. It doesn't change a lot. It rarely crashes if that's to be believed. It's integrated into important systems for legacy effect. It also has at least one company at any given time updating it to work on modern stuff. So, that sounds like benefits a lot of big companies would be interested in. I think the drawbacks are too significant, though, especially it being a closed, barely-living tech without much of an ecosystem plus who knows what security or high-availability attributes.

pjmlp 9y ago

The component system was more OO than COM, called SOM and even allowed for metaclasses. IBM was the only company, after Lucid, that played with using a Smalltalk like development environment for C++ on OS/2, but it required too much resources.

sedatk 9y ago

DOS was becoming outdated and insufficient in the 90’s. No multitasking, no crash-protection, no unified UI, unreliable file system. Yet it ran on millions of computers. OS/2 was one of the spiritual successors to DOS. It was DOS and Windows compatible, could run DOS apps in parallel and apps wouldn’t crash the whole system. It came with a reliable file system called HPFS as well. Its direct competitor was Windows 95. It bet on better compatibility and better hardware support so eventually persevered. After switching to Windows NT kernel with Windows 2000, Windows had no technical shortcomings left compared to OS/2.