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Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2 (2013)
- ErikAugust 7y agohttps://beta.trimread.com/articles/552 https://beta.trimread.com/articles/552
- xvilka 7y agoThere is Arca Noae[1], but I don't know how successful their business is. [1] https://www.arcanoae.com/ https://www.arcanoae.com/
- acqq 7y agoThanks. Didn't know they existed. From their page: https://www.arcanoae.com/arcaos/ https://www.arcanoae.com/arcaos/ "ArcaOS is more compatible with modern hardware, makes more efficient use of memory and system resources, and installs more easily than any other OS/2 distribution…ever. Really. Do you have a system with 16GB of RAM in it? Want your apps to really fly? Configure ArcaOS to utilize all memory above 4GB as a RAM disk, and at bootup, copy your most frequently used applications there. It’s like running your OS/2, Windows, DOS, REXX, Java, and ported Linux applications on air." And they develop further for the newer hardware: https://www.arcanoae.com/arca-noae-progress-report-usb-arcaos-updater-multimedia/ https://www.arcanoae.com/arca-noae-progress-report-usb-arcao... "When IBM left off USB driver development, OS/2 had a working, 16-bit USB 1.x and 2.0 driver stack. Fast forward to 2019, and this is no longer adequate for the needs of today’s hardware. The Arca Noae USB stack is now fully 32-bit, and USB 3 support development continues to make good progress. Implementing USB 3 support has been tedious because the OS/2 USB architecture didn’t accommodate the peculiarities of USB 3 well." "entry last updated: October 16th, 2019"
- Lammy 7y agoI can speak to their success, but I have an ArcaOS Personal Edition and am a big fan. It definite seems positioned as a maintenance/upgrade path for existing OS/2 users more than anything else.
- magoon 7y agoLittle-known fact: Windows of today is an entirely different OS than early DOS-based Windows because Microsoft took ownership of the 386-based “OS/2 3.0” codebase it jointly developed with IBM, forming the foundation for Windows NT 3 which all modern Windows is based on. This gave them the huge head start in having a modern enterprise-grade operating system that allowed them to dominate the market.
- jacquesm 7y agoThere were some allegations that Cutler did a bit of a Levandowski on DEC. Or maybe it should be that Levandowski did a bit of a Cutler on Google. Anyway, they settled out of court as long as MS promised to port Windows to DEC's Alpha.
- meddlepal 7y agoEh, there's a big difference between the two. Levandowski basically stole files from Google and gave them to Uber. Cutler just transferred his knowledge of building VMS to building Win NT. I suspect that's why it was settled out of court because the case was much much weaker that Cutler had stolen something tangible from DEC.
- jacquesm 7y agoI'm not so sure about that. DEC may have simply decided to settle because fighting MS in open court would take a long time and deplete them of cash they needed very much (we all know how they ended up), Alpha was their hail-mary pass and having NT on Alpha could have strengthened their position.
- mcguire 7y ago"So a rogue group in Boca Raton, Florida—far away from IBM headquarters—was allowed to use a radical strategy to design and produce a machine using largely off-the-shelf parts and a third-party CPU, operating system, and programming languages." At IBM around this time, Boca Raton was known as the place where people who weren't competent but couldn't be convinced to leave were transferred.
- kls 7y agoYep never underestimate the capabilities and ingenuity of people, especially those with curiosity and time on their hands. They where basically sent to Boca to rot, so they really did not care what they did, they gave them a marginal budget and approved almost any project that did not increase headcount or budget. You would have thought IBM would have caught on then or at least after Bell Labs that incubators work and funding incubators is a good bet. The only strange part is incubators never seem to be able to retain their culture and seem to be temporal in nature.
- Asooka 7y ago> The only strange part is incubators never seem to be able to retain their culture and seem to be temporal in nature Because incubators work only as long as they're not administrated and controlled. The moment they produce a successful project that brings in money, you need to control the process and put administration in place.
- kls 7y agoNot if you spin said project into an independent company, take the key players and replace then with energetic and creative individuals. Incubators need product guys that can see beyond the technicool aspect of the project and spin it into a company. The problem now days is there is just too much cargo-cult around incubation. There is a happy middle between Bell Labs and today fake it till you make it incubation. Don't get me wrong it takes some believing in yourself and I think Job's and Musk had and have the right amount. But believing and outright lying and borderline scamming is what we see more of today, with no technical assets and a story. Where in the days of Bell Labs you had the tech but no one to sell it into a product, much less an independent company.
- pjmlp 7y agoSOM was much more advanced than COM and nowadays it is almost impossible to find any documentation online. WinRT is closer to it, but still lacks the metaclasses capabilities that SOM had.
- pjmlp 7y agoSo I went hunting and there is information available about SOM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_Object_Model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_Object_Model https://ecsoft2.org/ibm-somobjects-developers-toolkit-os2 https://ecsoft2.org/ibm-somobjects-developers-toolkit-os2 http://www.os2museum.com/wp/os2-history/os2-library/os2-2-0-technical-library/ http://www.os2museum.com/wp/os2-history/os2-library/os2-2-0-...
- chiph 7y agoSOM was pretty cool, for sure. But using SOM objects (more than a couple) and it would bring my 486 to it's knees.
- pjmlp 7y agoInteresting, I never got to use it, only wonder in awe reading articles and OOPLSA papers about it. My OS/2 experience is based on playing around with it at trade shows. When I finally got a PC, I went with a 386SX, which was unable to run OS/2, as the only shop in town selling PCs with OS/2 was selling it with alongside PS/2 systems, about 1000 € more expensive (in today's money) than compatibles running the DOS + Win 3.x combo.
- eaguyhn 7y agoI almost got to use OS/2 for a commercial project.. we had fetch information from a PC desktop and feed it to an IBM mainframe while servicing up to two simultaneous users. OS/2 1.1 EE had EHLLAPI support but was still a few months from release and I couldn't wait for it. I was really disappointed I didn't get to explore it fully because first look was really impressive. I ended up using DOS + DESQview, and it worked out fine.
- xenospn 7y agoDESQview. Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in 20 years.
- pdonis 7y ago> I ended up using DOS + DESQview, and it worked out fine. This was my standard setup for almost a decade, from my first 486 machine (my previous computer had been an 8088 PC clone, with only two 360K floppy drives and no hard disk) until I replaced it with a Windows 98 machine. I even ran Windows 3.1 occasionally in a DESQview window.
- shrubble 7y agoA couple things to add: 1. Microsoft got paid about $400 million for their work on OS/2, supposedly, through to v1.3 . Development of Windows through to v3.0 was much much less. It is safe to say that Microsoft made money from the partnership with IBM. 2. OS/2 installation had a fatal flaw: if your PC had cache memory you had to disable it while the installer copied the files from floppy. It didn't hurt install speed since floppies were the bottleneck but it was very confusing to the newbies to OS/2 that IBM was trying to attract. 3. The Ziff-Davis magazines were pay-to-play in editorial content and they plugged Microsoft as being the better choice all the time. And pre-Internet they were a big source of information.
- blantonl 7y agoThe other OS/2 installation fatal flaw was there were 20+ installation diskettes, so your chance of coming across a bad disk halfway through a 2+ hour installation was pretty good. If you were an OS/2 administrator back in the day, hearing the disk drive start trying to re-read sectors on Disk 18 was a terrifying prospect.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pjmlp 7y agoAdd Turbo Pascal, Borland C++ and Windows 3.x to that floppy salad. The afternoons spent installing software and now they complain an app takes too long. The first thing I did when I bought software back then was to create backup floppies and always install from the copies. Naturally it did not work with some copy protection schemes.
- Narishma 7y agoFor Windows you can just copy all the disks to a directory on the HDD and install from there. It goes much faster that way.
- deleted 7y ago
- majewsky 7y ago(2013) > This story first ran in November 2013, and it appears unchanged below.
- JeremyReimer 7y agoI was pleasantly surprised that Ars re-ran this story. It was one of my favorites to write. Also probably the most popular single article I ever did.
- rado 7y agoI was a fan, but looking at the UI now, it's too messy. Has any designer mocked up something like the OS/2 UI, but good?
- bdamm 7y agoNever mind the UI. I wanted OS/2 Warp, but it wouldn’t boot on my machine because the RAM’s parity method was not the IBM way. Or at least that was roughly the error code.
- jacquesm 7y agoThere was something called Tabworks at some point in time, a reworking of the Windows GUI that I always really liked. Very intuitive and worked well on smaller screens.
- pjmlp 7y agoDon't you mean Geoworks, that was bundled with Phillips PCs?
- timbit42 7y agoThe OS/2 team wrote a replacement for Window's Program Manager called WorkPlace Shell for Windows. It gave Windows 3.x the OS/2 desktop. It was vastly better than Program Manager. WPS4WIN was eventually open sourced.
- pmarreck 7y agoOS/2 was the most impressive "prosumer" OS of the time. Wasn't as impressed by anything else that was not from Apple or Microsoft except NeXTStep and BeOS.
- astrodust 7y agoWhen Windows 95 launched I was largely underwhelmed. It was like an ugly version of OS/2 with more bugs. They stole the right-click menu and the Blue Screen of Death.
- sedatk 7y agoStole? You need to read about Windows 95’s development history.
- astrodust 7y agoThey took IBM's money and spent a bunch of it on developing a competitor to OS/2. They also baited a bunch of their competitors into developing for OS/2 because it had IBM's support, then made their own products for Windows. WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 for OS/2 were great products for the wrong OS.
- icedchai 7y agoWhat did you think of the Amiga? Early 90's Amiga OS was contemporary with OS/2 2.x. It had preemptive multitasking, but lacked memory protection.
- tom_ 7y agoLike everything about the Amiga: in 1985, implausible; in 1989, excusable; in 1991, unforgivable. And by 1994: punishable by death. (See also, though with timeline offset and/or scaled: RISC OS, MacOS.)
- pmarreck 7y agoI liked it. Was extremely focused on games instead of regular computing, though (save for Video Toaster, possibly the first "killer app")
- dang 7y agoDiscussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6792010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6792010 One comment from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14070102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14070102
- WalterBright 7y agoI liked OS/2 and used it simply because it meant I could develop 16 bit code using a protected mode operating system, which made development much faster. Only as the last step was it ported to real mode DOS.
- Gibbon1 7y agoCombine 16 bit mode with pointer magic --> bird shot the OS.
- WalterBright 7y agoUsually it's the interrupt vector table that got scrambled. Enough to scramble your hard disk. I would always simply reboot after any erratic program behavior. This is why OS/2 was soooo much better for development. Intel made a large mistake putting the interrupt table at 0000. It should have put the boot ROM there.
- colejohnson66 7y agoIs there any known reason for why the IDT is initially at address 0 and the boot address is 0xFFFFFFF0?
- Gibbon1 7y agoI don't think there is any technical reason it couldn't be anywhere. Except that they were expecting the IDT table to be mapped to DRAM. And you have basically two memory areas, DRAM and the BIOS in ROM. If the addresses don't start at 0 and max memory then you end up with RAM being non contiguous which is a fat wart. Pick your poison. Also remember too C and C++ weren't really a thing back in 1977. C and C++ tends to love splating low memory when you mess up your pointer magic. Other languages didn't have that problem.
- Thorrez 7y ago>Long before operating systems got exciting names based on giant cats and towns in California named after dogs What operating systems were named after towns in California named after dogs?
- EdwardDiego 7y agoNot a town, but I'm guessing a reference to this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mavericks,_California#Origin_of_the_name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mavericks,_California#Origin_o... > In early March 1967, Alex Matienzo, Jim Thompson, and Dick Notmeyer surfed the distant waves of Pillar Point. With them was Matienzo's roommate's white-haired German Shepherd, Maverick, who was accustomed to swimming with his owner and Matienzo while they were surfing.
- anon4242 7y ago> IBM rules about confidentiality meant that some Microsoft employees were unable to talk to other Microsoft employees without a legal translator between them. Haha, this is so ironic. I've worked on projects for MS that were just the same. We had to have code names for their code names and a code name for MS itself. Even our own code names had to be uttered with caution. Maybe they learned from IBM? Edit: Thinking about it some more, maybe they really did. None of the other big tech companies we did work for were that secretive.
- audition 7y agoThis thread brings back the memories - I was an editor at a Ziff-Davis computer magazine back in the day. Looking back on all this, the only lasting legacy I can identify is the linux windows emulation layer (wine), which exists only because Microsoft was required to make the Windows API public so it could be used by OS/2. Given the difficulty of getting an ancient version of Windows running on currently available hardware, linux/wine is now the only practical way to run a lot of old Microsoft Windows application software. If it weren't for wine (which was made possible by OS/2), that application software would be unusable.
- rozab 7y ago> The Ziff-Davis magazines were pay-to-play in editorial content and they plugged Microsoft as being the better choice all the time. And pre-Internet they were a big source of information. Any comment on this? (from a reply below)