4 ms·

All in all, I think IBM did mostly the right thing. Given that they published their hardware and software interface standards, they must have expected to be cre

All in all, I think IBM did mostly the right thing. Given that they published their hardware and software interface standards, they must have expected to be creating a platform as well as a product. They might not have adequately anticipated the resilience of DOS when they tried to come out with OS/2.

MrRadar 5y ago
They definitely underestimated the market's requirements for DOS compatibility. Microsoft in contrast understood that which is why Windows (though technically inferior to OS/2 in many respects, at least until Windows 95) ultimately won. The Digital Antiquarian blog has an excellent (if long) series of articles covering the history of Windows from its original conception as a product up through Windows 3.1, including looks at OS/2 and other competing products: https://www.filfre.net/2018/06/doing-windows-part-1-ms-dos-and-its-discontents/ https://www.filfre.net/2018/06/doing-windows-part-1-ms-dos-a...
- cameldrv 5y ago
  It was technically inferior in many respects, but mostly not ones that mattered. I ran OS/2 2.0 and 2.1 for a while, and it was dog slow and consumed massive amounts of memory compared to Windows. The main selling point of OS/2 was supposed to be that it had preemptive multitasking and protected memory, which was supposed to make it much more stable compared to the (constantly crashing) Windows 3.0/3.1. The problem was that the Workplace Shell (the GUI) had some sort of single message queue that could be blocked by a misbehaving program. This would cause the GUI to hang. While it was true that the system would continue to task switch, and you could even telnet into the machine after this happened, from the console, the system was completely unresponsive, so it was functionally equivalent to the OS crashing. IBM as an organization didn't seem to understand what features were actually relevant to normal users and prioritize them. It could do a bunch of things like smoothly multitasking multiple DOS apps, that were technically impressive but not that important to users.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > The problem was that the Workplace Shell (the GUI) had some sort of single message queue that could be blocked by a misbehaving program. This would cause the GUI to hang. Windows 9x had very similar issues, and even early versions in the Windows NT series weren't altogether free of them. The viable fix was to hit CTRL+ALT+DEL and force close the misbehaving application.
    - dmz73 5y ago
      Windows 9x had driver and stability issues but you could always kill an application if it stopped responding. Linux today is similar to OS/2 - the OS keeps working but UI is unresponsive so if you have another computer you can ssh in but if you don't you may have to reboot. I know that sometimes you can switch to terminal using keyboard and try to kill the application from there but that is not as easy as CTRL+ALT+DEL + Task Manager and killing the application. Of course, there are times you don't have the keyboard attcahed (tablets) and then frozen UI is equivalent to the crashed OS. And just to add - these days MS has made Windows much less resilient as misbehaving applications can freeze the UI to the point where CTRL+ALT+DEL and Task Manager do not respond any more so I guess OS/2 has won in the end - two of three most used Desktop OSes emulate the bad UI behavior.
      - sumedh 5y ago
        > but you could always kill an application if it stopped responding. Wasnt Windows famous for BSOD?
        pjmlp 5y ago
        Sure, but those were kernel panics, mostly caused by misbehaving drivers. Hence why nowadays all drivers have to be certified, and graphics drivers are again in userspace.
        hyperman1 5y ago
        At the win95 time plenty of BSODs came from microsoft bugs, from userspace accidentally weitingbovervkernel data, or even from running out of resources. You have to remember the barrier between kernel and userspace was very porous, applications had their own address space but e.g. DLLs were projected at identical addresses and shared some resources. Kernel memory was mapped in userspace, if I'm remembering it right. Basically, apps had their own cubicle, not their own apartment.
- temac 5y ago
  > Windows (though technically inferior to OS/2 in many respects, at least until Windows 95) In many respects maybe, but which aspects matter for success is highly contextual, and some just didn't really matter for the general public. Is the system in protected mode? Does not really matter during that era. What did matter however, was resource consumption. Maybe for speed of legacy programs OS/2 1.x targeting only 286 was not good, compared to even Windows 2.1x which had Windows/386. On the memory front, OS/2 1.1 requested 3MB of RAM. Windows 2.x/386 requested 640kB. Windows 3.1 requested 2MB (or even just 1MB in standard mode). OS.2 2.0 requested 4MB (release date 92). Windows 95 requested 4MB too... So OS/2 was arguably kind of technically inferior to Windows on many other points, and that was the points that were actually important for most people at the time. Windows NT was "far better" (abstracting away e.g. the resources required) than both, but was out of reach of consumer system for years... On the other hand, Mac OS on 68k was quite problematic until its end but it was not what made successes and failures of Mac during that era. The success of Windows was certainly not only about backward compat. It was also about requirements. And price. And add to that, of course, about what was provided by default by nearly all OEMs... Sure OS/2 was with a certain modernist view of things "technically better" than some Windows, but you know what else was even better in 92? A SPARCstation 10 :D
  - flomo 5y ago
    > Windows NT was "far better" than both, but was out of reach of consumer system for years... Microsoft had a far better developer roadmap with "32 bit protected mode with just a recompile." They sandwiched OS/2 v2/3 from the bottom and top. When memory prices dropped, the period when OS/2 had a significant hardware cost advantage over NT was rather short.
- analog31 5y ago
  In my view, people started developing for DOS, and it became a standard for small scale and casual developers. Even into the Windows era, a lot of utilities ran under DOS, such as early embedded development tools. Programming any Windowed OS was too hard, and we had only been programming for a few years, in relative isolation from one another and beholden to crappy documentation. Especially with tools like Turbo Pascal, writing "software" that looked like commercial software was relatively easy and got the job done. Maintaining and growing any kind of platform becomes a whole new ball game when "what are its specs" is replaced by "will it run my apps?"
flomo 5y ago
I believe you are correct. The IBM PC's direct competition was not so much Apple but 'business standard' CP/M Z80/8080 machines from a variety of vendors. Also IBM was under an antitrust decree requiring reasonable and discriminatory licensing, so they didn't have much choice in the matter. Once this was lifted, they went the Microchannel route.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  Yes - everyone seems to forget that S-100 CP/M business machines had been around since 1976. It wasn't a huge market, but it definitely wasn't negligible. And there were some home users, although most preferred Apple. So IBM didn't invent the PC. IBM invented mass marketing for its own brand of PC. And also - after a while - IBM started the constant upgrade treadmill. S-100 was more backward looking. You could get 8086 and 68000 cards for S100, but it was really a Z80 ecosystem. There was no clean upgrade path with backward compatibility. This was a showstopper for most businesses, which needed access to old data and software. IBM screwed themselves by hugely overcharging for PS/2, and Compaq stole their lunch. As soon as other clones appeared IBM were out.
  - analog31 5y ago
    Award BIOS was probably a huge game changer. Knowing the contents of BIOS wasn't enough, after Franklin lost their lawsuit with Apple. Someone had to come up with a functional equivalent. A third party BIOS meant that anybody could crank out a machine.

MrRadar 5y ago

They definitely underestimated the market's requirements for DOS compatibility. Microsoft in contrast understood that which is why Windows (though technically inferior to OS/2 in many respects, at least until Windows 95) ultimately won. The Digital Antiquarian blog has an excellent (if long) series of articles covering the history of Windows from its original conception as a product up through Windows 3.1, including looks at OS/2 and other competing products: https://www.filfre.net/2018/06/doing-windows-part-1-ms-dos-and-its-discontents/ https://www.filfre.net/2018/06/doing-windows-part-1-ms-dos-a...

cameldrv 5y ago
It was technically inferior in many respects, but mostly not ones that mattered. I ran OS/2 2.0 and 2.1 for a while, and it was dog slow and consumed massive amounts of memory compared to Windows. The main selling point of OS/2 was supposed to be that it had preemptive multitasking and protected memory, which was supposed to make it much more stable compared to the (constantly crashing) Windows 3.0/3.1. The problem was that the Workplace Shell (the GUI) had some sort of single message queue that could be blocked by a misbehaving program. This would cause the GUI to hang. While it was true that the system would continue to task switch, and you could even telnet into the machine after this happened, from the console, the system was completely unresponsive, so it was functionally equivalent to the OS crashing. IBM as an organization didn't seem to understand what features were actually relevant to normal users and prioritize them. It could do a bunch of things like smoothly multitasking multiple DOS apps, that were technically impressive but not that important to users.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > The problem was that the Workplace Shell (the GUI) had some sort of single message queue that could be blocked by a misbehaving program. This would cause the GUI to hang. Windows 9x had very similar issues, and even early versions in the Windows NT series weren't altogether free of them. The viable fix was to hit CTRL+ALT+DEL and force close the misbehaving application.
  - dmz73 5y ago
    Windows 9x had driver and stability issues but you could always kill an application if it stopped responding. Linux today is similar to OS/2 - the OS keeps working but UI is unresponsive so if you have another computer you can ssh in but if you don't you may have to reboot. I know that sometimes you can switch to terminal using keyboard and try to kill the application from there but that is not as easy as CTRL+ALT+DEL + Task Manager and killing the application. Of course, there are times you don't have the keyboard attcahed (tablets) and then frozen UI is equivalent to the crashed OS. And just to add - these days MS has made Windows much less resilient as misbehaving applications can freeze the UI to the point where CTRL+ALT+DEL and Task Manager do not respond any more so I guess OS/2 has won in the end - two of three most used Desktop OSes emulate the bad UI behavior.
    - sumedh 5y ago
      > but you could always kill an application if it stopped responding. Wasnt Windows famous for BSOD?
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Sure, but those were kernel panics, mostly caused by misbehaving drivers. Hence why nowadays all drivers have to be certified, and graphics drivers are again in userspace.
        hyperman1 5y ago
        At the win95 time plenty of BSODs came from microsoft bugs, from userspace accidentally weitingbovervkernel data, or even from running out of resources. You have to remember the barrier between kernel and userspace was very porous, applications had their own address space but e.g. DLLs were projected at identical addresses and shared some resources. Kernel memory was mapped in userspace, if I'm remembering it right. Basically, apps had their own cubicle, not their own apartment.
temac 5y ago
> Windows (though technically inferior to OS/2 in many respects, at least until Windows 95) In many respects maybe, but which aspects matter for success is highly contextual, and some just didn't really matter for the general public. Is the system in protected mode? Does not really matter during that era. What did matter however, was resource consumption. Maybe for speed of legacy programs OS/2 1.x targeting only 286 was not good, compared to even Windows 2.1x which had Windows/386. On the memory front, OS/2 1.1 requested 3MB of RAM. Windows 2.x/386 requested 640kB. Windows 3.1 requested 2MB (or even just 1MB in standard mode). OS.2 2.0 requested 4MB (release date 92). Windows 95 requested 4MB too... So OS/2 was arguably kind of technically inferior to Windows on many other points, and that was the points that were actually important for most people at the time. Windows NT was "far better" (abstracting away e.g. the resources required) than both, but was out of reach of consumer system for years... On the other hand, Mac OS on 68k was quite problematic until its end but it was not what made successes and failures of Mac during that era. The success of Windows was certainly not only about backward compat. It was also about requirements. And price. And add to that, of course, about what was provided by default by nearly all OEMs... Sure OS/2 was with a certain modernist view of things "technically better" than some Windows, but you know what else was even better in 92? A SPARCstation 10 :D
- flomo 5y ago
  > Windows NT was "far better" than both, but was out of reach of consumer system for years... Microsoft had a far better developer roadmap with "32 bit protected mode with just a recompile." They sandwiched OS/2 v2/3 from the bottom and top. When memory prices dropped, the period when OS/2 had a significant hardware cost advantage over NT was rather short.
analog31 5y ago
In my view, people started developing for DOS, and it became a standard for small scale and casual developers. Even into the Windows era, a lot of utilities ran under DOS, such as early embedded development tools. Programming any Windowed OS was too hard, and we had only been programming for a few years, in relative isolation from one another and beholden to crappy documentation. Especially with tools like Turbo Pascal, writing "software" that looked like commercial software was relatively easy and got the job done. Maintaining and growing any kind of platform becomes a whole new ball game when "what are its specs" is replaced by "will it run my apps?"

flomo 5y ago

I believe you are correct. The IBM PC's direct competition was not so much Apple but 'business standard' CP/M Z80/8080 machines from a variety of vendors. Also IBM was under an antitrust decree requiring reasonable and discriminatory licensing, so they didn't have much choice in the matter. Once this was lifted, they went the Microchannel route.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
Yes - everyone seems to forget that S-100 CP/M business machines had been around since 1976. It wasn't a huge market, but it definitely wasn't negligible. And there were some home users, although most preferred Apple. So IBM didn't invent the PC. IBM invented mass marketing for its own brand of PC. And also - after a while - IBM started the constant upgrade treadmill. S-100 was more backward looking. You could get 8086 and 68000 cards for S100, but it was really a Z80 ecosystem. There was no clean upgrade path with backward compatibility. This was a showstopper for most businesses, which needed access to old data and software. IBM screwed themselves by hugely overcharging for PS/2, and Compaq stole their lunch. As soon as other clones appeared IBM were out.
- analog31 5y ago
  Award BIOS was probably a huge game changer. Knowing the contents of BIOS wasn't enough, after Franklin lost their lawsuit with Apple. Someone had to come up with a functional equivalent. A third party BIOS meant that anybody could crank out a machine.