5 ms·

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 a

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.
        pjmlp 5y ago
        Win95 was still a special flower OS due to its backwards compatibility compromises, where you could even kill the kernel with task manager, not really a good idea. Eventually NT 4.0 became a better option, if you could get all the required software and weren't doing DOS games.
chaoticmass 5y ago
OS/2 is one of the only operating systems that I know of where a version successor actually had lower hardware requirements (assuming you already had a 386. If you were on a 286 then not much changed) than the version it replaced. You could upgrade from OS/2 2.1 to OS/2 Warp without upgrading hardware and it would run faster. By that time though, it was too little, too late. It speaks to how inefficient OS/2 2.1 was.

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.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Win95 was still a special flower OS due to its backwards compatibility compromises, where you could even kill the kernel with task manager, not really a good idea. Eventually NT 4.0 became a better option, if you could get all the required software and weren't doing DOS games.

chaoticmass 5y ago

OS/2 is one of the only operating systems that I know of where a version successor actually had lower hardware requirements (assuming you already had a 386. If you were on a 286 then not much changed) than the version it replaced. You could upgrade from OS/2 2.1 to OS/2 Warp without upgrading hardware and it would run faster. By that time though, it was too little, too late. It speaks to how inefficient OS/2 2.1 was.