3 ms·

I was too young to experience OS/2. Looking at the screenshots, I am amazed at how much Windows 3/3.1/3.11 ripped off OS/2.

by sshine 3y ago

bananaflag 3y ago
It wasn't ripped off, just reused. The OS/2 1.x PM was co-developed by Microsoft, and I think they had more of a say in it, since the IBM OS/2 2.x PM had a different look.
tempaway35641 3y ago
I believe it was the other way round, e.g. OS 2 v1.1 was the first version to have a GUI and was released in 1988 six months after Windows 2.0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2
- jsjohnst 3y ago
  > The promised user interface, Presentation Manager, was introduced with OS/2 1.1 in October 1988.[15] It had a similar user interface to Windows 2.1, which was released in May of that year. (The interface was replaced in versions 1.2 and 1.3 by a look closer in appearance to Windows 3.0.) To quote the relevant section of parent’s link.
jsjohnst 3y ago
Microsoft and IBM were very close in those days. In fact, Microsoft wrote (some? most? all?) of the first version of OS/2 under contract for IBM. It was in fact a disagreement between IBM and Microsoft over Windows 3.x that ultimately severed that partnership supposedly. It’s been many years since I read this, but if memory serves it was Ballmer’s handling of IBM that led to the term BOGUS having a special meaning at Microsoft in the late 80s / early 90s. Wish I could remember which book that was in because I’m finding it difficult to discover a reference today searching. Edit: It’s not the original reference I’m remembering as this was published in 2022, but did find a mention of the term in this book: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Thank_You_Ibm_Next_Edition/LaaaEAAAQBAJ?hl=en https://www.google.com/books/edition/Thank_You_Ibm_Next_Edit...
- bacchusracine 3y ago
  Oh? I thought you may have been thinking of the 1993 book by Paul Carroll, Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM which is where I know it from. It gets mentioned on page 103.
  - jsjohnst 3y ago
    It was a 90s era book I was originally remembering, so very possibly could’ve been that book. The one I linked above was definitely not the book, but also had a reference to the term. It also might’ve been Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry
k12sosse 3y ago
Visit Dave's Garage on YouTube for some computer history of a unique time
- IntelMiner 3y ago
  Just watch out for when he tells lies, like "Linux is proprietary too!" https://i.imgur.com/qUNkpi0.png https://i.imgur.com/qUNkpi0.png
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    Given Dave's wicked sense of humor sharp enough to cut through blocks of steel, that reply feels like he was simply returning the disingenuous attitude back. Remember, this is the guy who wrote Task Manager among many other things we now take for granted in Windows.
  - tombert 3y ago
    I think part of this is wrong (the part that only Linus knows about), but doesn’t the kernel ship with binary blobs for some of the drivers/firmware? I thought that was the whole impetus of the Linux Libre project [1]. I am willing to give benefits of doubt that Dave heard about the binary blobs and mistakenly assumed that they were proprietary to Linus himself. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux-libre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux-libre
G3rn0ti 3y ago
OS/2 started out as a joint venture between MS and IBM. So MS was not stealing from OS/2 but rather provided a lot of technology from the start in the late eighties. I used OS/2 Warp 3 daily on my private machine back from 1995-1996. It was a nice OS with some innovative features: - It came with HPFS (high performance file system) that worked nicely with large hard disks (I personally used it on a 540 MB drive I could afford back then.) and, more importantly, support long file names and extended file attributes which you could use to store sophisticated meta information inside. However, it was not doing any kind of journalling so would still be prone to file corruptions similar to ext2. - It used preemptive multitasking that worked rather well even back on my DX4/100 MHz. You could play videos in the background and work on a text document without problems. You could even run multiple virtualized DOS games in little windoes next to each other on a single core CPU -- they would work but would, of course, drop some frames. However, there was this infamous design flaw of using a "Synchronous Input Queue" inside the "presentation manager" sending UI events to programs that (when they stopped servicing those) could still bring down all of the UI. - It came with the "enhanced text editor" leveraging 32-bits to support editing large files and was extensible to a point you could use for software developing. Although, back then, I did not do much of that as a teenager. I rather ran Visual Basic 3.0 on OS/2 to did simple GUI programs. - It came with WINOS2 being a full native windows 3.1 runtime so you could run windows apps seamlessly on your OS/2 desktop. If you had enough memory you could run a separate Windows core for each application and, this way, get a much more stable execution environment for Windows programs. IBM had full rights to use, ship and modify 16-bit Windows to keep it compatible with OS/2. That, of course, would not fly starting with WIN95. - It used 386's "virtual real mode" to run full DOS environments for DOS programs. It had nice GUI support for allowing you to tweak DOS settings for each program separately to get as much conventional memory as you wanted for it. Even DOOM ran nice inside of OS/2 (but did not support Sound Blaster sound). - The desktop supported the notion of "templates" you could create documents from. So, basically, you would not need to open an application to create documents but just dragged a new file from a template icon enabling "document centric" work flows. Or you could drag a file directly to the printer icon. - IBM even provided a web browser for free on OS/2's bonus disk -- "Web Explorer". That worked actually quite well in the beginning. Later I switched to Netscape Navigator in its OS/2 version. - OS/2 Warp 4 shipped with a speech recognition system for controlling the shell and even dictate text. That was seriously cool back then!
icedchai 3y ago
Microsoft built both of them. Were they ripping off themselves?

I was too young to experience OS/2. Looking at the screenshots, I am amazed at how much Windows 3/3.1/3.11 ripped off OS/2.

by sshine 3y ago

I was too young to experience OS/2. Looking at the screenshots, I am amazed at how much Windows 3/3.1/3.11 ripped off OS/2.

bananaflag 3y ago

It wasn't ripped off, just reused. The OS/2 1.x PM was co-developed by Microsoft, and I think they had more of a say in it, since the IBM OS/2 2.x PM had a different look.

tempaway35641 3y ago

I believe it was the other way round, e.g. OS 2 v1.1 was the first version to have a GUI and was released in 1988 six months after Windows 2.0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2

jsjohnst 3y ago
> The promised user interface, Presentation Manager, was introduced with OS/2 1.1 in October 1988.[15] It had a similar user interface to Windows 2.1, which was released in May of that year. (The interface was replaced in versions 1.2 and 1.3 by a look closer in appearance to Windows 3.0.) To quote the relevant section of parent’s link.

jsjohnst 3y ago

Microsoft and IBM were very close in those days. In fact, Microsoft wrote (some? most? all?) of the first version of OS/2 under contract for IBM. It was in fact a disagreement between IBM and Microsoft over Windows 3.x that ultimately severed that partnership supposedly. It’s been many years since I read this, but if memory serves it was Ballmer’s handling of IBM that led to the term BOGUS having a special meaning at Microsoft in the late 80s / early 90s. Wish I could remember which book that was in because I’m finding it difficult to discover a reference today searching. Edit: It’s not the original reference I’m remembering as this was published in 2022, but did find a mention of the term in this book: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Thank_You_Ibm_Next_Edition/LaaaEAAAQBAJ?hl=en https://www.google.com/books/edition/Thank_You_Ibm_Next_Edit...

bacchusracine 3y ago
Oh? I thought you may have been thinking of the 1993 book by Paul Carroll, Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM which is where I know it from. It gets mentioned on page 103.
- jsjohnst 3y ago
  It was a 90s era book I was originally remembering, so very possibly could’ve been that book. The one I linked above was definitely not the book, but also had a reference to the term. It also might’ve been Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry

k12sosse 3y ago

Visit Dave's Garage on YouTube for some computer history of a unique time

IntelMiner 3y ago
Just watch out for when he tells lies, like "Linux is proprietary too!" https://i.imgur.com/qUNkpi0.png https://i.imgur.com/qUNkpi0.png
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  Given Dave's wicked sense of humor sharp enough to cut through blocks of steel, that reply feels like he was simply returning the disingenuous attitude back. Remember, this is the guy who wrote Task Manager among many other things we now take for granted in Windows.
- tombert 3y ago
  I think part of this is wrong (the part that only Linus knows about), but doesn’t the kernel ship with binary blobs for some of the drivers/firmware? I thought that was the whole impetus of the Linux Libre project [1]. I am willing to give benefits of doubt that Dave heard about the binary blobs and mistakenly assumed that they were proprietary to Linus himself. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux-libre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux-libre

G3rn0ti 3y ago

OS/2 started out as a joint venture between MS and IBM. So MS was not stealing from OS/2 but rather provided a lot of technology from the start in the late eighties. I used OS/2 Warp 3 daily on my private machine back from 1995-1996. It was a nice OS with some innovative features: - It came with HPFS (high performance file system) that worked nicely with large hard disks (I personally used it on a 540 MB drive I could afford back then.) and, more importantly, support long file names and extended file attributes which you could use to store sophisticated meta information inside. However, it was not doing any kind of journalling so would still be prone to file corruptions similar to ext2. - It used preemptive multitasking that worked rather well even back on my DX4/100 MHz. You could play videos in the background and work on a text document without problems. You could even run multiple virtualized DOS games in little windoes next to each other on a single core CPU -- they would work but would, of course, drop some frames. However, there was this infamous design flaw of using a "Synchronous Input Queue" inside the "presentation manager" sending UI events to programs that (when they stopped servicing those) could still bring down all of the UI. - It came with the "enhanced text editor" leveraging 32-bits to support editing large files and was extensible to a point you could use for software developing. Although, back then, I did not do much of that as a teenager. I rather ran Visual Basic 3.0 on OS/2 to did simple GUI programs. - It came with WINOS2 being a full native windows 3.1 runtime so you could run windows apps seamlessly on your OS/2 desktop. If you had enough memory you could run a separate Windows core for each application and, this way, get a much more stable execution environment for Windows programs. IBM had full rights to use, ship and modify 16-bit Windows to keep it compatible with OS/2. That, of course, would not fly starting with WIN95. - It used 386's "virtual real mode" to run full DOS environments for DOS programs. It had nice GUI support for allowing you to tweak DOS settings for each program separately to get as much conventional memory as you wanted for it. Even DOOM ran nice inside of OS/2 (but did not support Sound Blaster sound). - The desktop supported the notion of "templates" you could create documents from. So, basically, you would not need to open an application to create documents but just dragged a new file from a template icon enabling "document centric" work flows. Or you could drag a file directly to the printer icon. - IBM even provided a web browser for free on OS/2's bonus disk -- "Web Explorer". That worked actually quite well in the beginning. Later I switched to Netscape Navigator in its OS/2 version. - OS/2 Warp 4 shipped with a speech recognition system for controlling the shell and even dictate text. That was seriously cool back then!

icedchai 3y ago

Microsoft built both of them. Were they ripping off themselves?