8 ms·

Gordon Letwin OS/2 Usenet post (1995)

105 points by walterbell 2y ago

mrkramer 2y ago
I shared this 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30324595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30324595 Long story short: Gates and Microsoft were in domination mode and everybody else was in experimentation mode. Microsoft's management are par excellence opportunists. And if I recall correctly from watching one of the Bill's interviews from the 1990s, he even couldn't believe and wrap his head around why IBM didn't do the OS themselves and why the hell they decided to outsource it to Microsoft.
PeterStuer 2y ago
Gordon's book 'Inside OS/2' was one of the most accessible and well written texts on Operating Systems I've ever read.
irusensei 2y ago
I think people blaming OS/2's failure surely on Microsoft are missing the point that IBM grossly mismanaged the project.
- martiniturbide 2y ago
  I think it is both. IBM may missed the point in a big way. They were an slow corporation to market an OS home product. The PC became a home product and IBM was not ready to be on that kind of circus. But don't underestimate Microsoft. They went very hard to market Windows as home product and also as a server in corporations. But they also did some shady stuff. Read: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-IBMs-OS-2-project-lose-to-Microsoft-given-that-IBM-had-much-more-resources-than-Microsoft-at-that-time https://www.quora.com/Why-did-IBMs-OS-2-project-lose-to-Micr... And later with open source: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents That's why young people today, don't understand older guys from the 90's that hate Microsoft. Microsoft was really evil that decade.
  - CRConrad 2y ago
    "That decade"? Can't say I've seen any actual signs of change in that.
mediumsmart 2y ago
I really liked OS/2 the way it was. And I only read half of the usenet post.
rstuart4133 2y ago
> The miscalculation came about with the 386 coming out sooner than we expected. Different times, different world.
twoodfin 2y ago
Great bit of history. The nugget I hadn’t heard before is how the 386 enabling DOS extenders really threw the whole product strategy for a loop. I wonder if that was a happy side effect of Intel’s other goals, or if there was design intention to enable DOS to break the 640K barrier.
orionblastar 2y ago
OS/2 2.X was superior to Windows 3.0 but lacked the apps and marketing to compete with it. IBM Client Access/400 for DOS ate into the 640K layer and OS/2 used Extended RAM to keep more of the 640K for WIN-OS2 and DOS programs. Once Microsoft released Visual BASIC for 16-bit Windows, IBM had nothing for OS/2 mode like Visual BASIC. Borland had Delphi and Turbo C++ for Windows 3.0 but not for OS/2. OS/2 started as Advanced DOS at Microsoft and IBM, by the way. An open-source project called OSFree (OS/3) wants to write OS/2 from scratch: https://osfree.org/ https://osfree.org/ At my employer, I had to downgrade OS/2 2.X systems to MS-DOS 6.2 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 before OS/2 Warp 3.0 and Windows 95 came out. Microsoft also had affordable license fees for DOS, Windows, and Office. We had to have everyone on the same OS for compatibility reasons and OS/2 lost out. You can still buy the OEM version of OS/2 here: https://www.arcanoae.com/arcaos/ https://www.arcanoae.com/arcaos/
- cloudsec9 2y ago
  Slight correction - there were some Borland tools for OS/2, but after the split MS stopped putting out new tools; but IBM did have some interesting compiler stuff too.
  - walterbell 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisualAge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisualAge > In 1992, Apple and IBM cofounded Taligent, based upon Pink, an operating system with a mass of sophisticated object-oriented compiler and application framework technology from Apple. Pink became CommonPoint, the partnership was dissolved, and CommonPoint was absorbed into VisualAge starting with the Compound Document Framework to handle OLE objects in VisualAge C++ 3.5 for Windows. In February 1997, the first mass release of Taligent technology came in the form of the Open Class within VisualAge C++ 4.0 ... The original prototype which led to VisualAge was an attempt "to make something like the NeXT interface builder" within the Smalltalk/V development environment.
    - lproven 2y ago
      What eventually made it out of VisualAge into the wider FOSS world was Eclipse. https://wiki.eclipse.org/FAQ_Where_did_Eclipse_come_from%3F https://wiki.eclipse.org/FAQ_Where_did_Eclipse_come_from%3F Eclipse is the FOSS version of the C/Java rewrite of Visual Age SmallTalk -- which is still on sale as VAST. https://www.instantiations.com/company/history/ https://www.instantiations.com/company/history/
shrubble 2y ago
This is typical self-serving MS-speak. What actually happened is that: a) Microsoft, then a tiny fraction of what it is now, took $400 million from IBM in co-developing OS/2 and put the profit from that money into Windows 3.0 and later NT (funny how developing NT cost only a stated $150 million just a few years later and the main cost is in software developers) b) When Windows 3.0 did well enough in the market, MS did what they have always done - they figured out how to break their agreement with IBM, and take their own stuff that they owned 100% and run with it. This is a pattern seen everywhere at all times with MS, ever since the Ed Roberts / MS BASIC days in Albuquerque.
- WillAdams 2y ago
  Two notable examples: https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html and Windows for Pen Computing vs. Go Corp.'s PenPoint as written up in: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1171250.Startup https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1171250.Startup
- wvenable 2y ago
  It's funny constantly see a kind of revisionist history where IBM is the misunderstood underdog with the superior technology that was destroyed by the big bad Microsoft. When in reality IBM is this poorly managed monstrosity that was terrible at software development and destroyed their PC market share trying to take back the PC standard and make it proprietary to them.
  - shrubble 2y ago
    It's more like an opportunistic, willing to be sleazy, smaller company grew into a very large one by continually taking underhanded advantage of anyone in their path. Ed Roberts of MITS/Altair, STAC, Wang (OLE, lawsuit resulted in MS investing in Wang), DEC (VMS, lawsuit resulted in DEC receiving money), to list just a few.
    - wvenable 2y ago
      Whether or not you spell Microsoft with dollar sign it doesn't make every other company the hero. History has turned OS/2 into some kind of folk hero rather than the bloated, mismanaged, expensive, buggy mess that it actually was. And Microsoft's technology was superior if the job of an OS was to actually run software on computers of the time.
munchler 2y ago
OS/2 was so far superior to Windows in 1992 that it wasn't even funny. Nevertheless, my company gave up on OS/2 and we had to port our Smalltalk application to Windows 3 instead. Someone had to explain segmented 16-bit addressing to me, and I was totally appalled. Fortunately, Windows 95 came out a few years later with the Win32 API and I pretty much forgot about OS/2 after that. I still feel a bit guilty, though.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  In that year I finally migrated from a Timex 2068 to a 386SX PC at home, I could have bought a PC with OS/2 and decided against it. It would have required additional 1 000€ in todays money on the bank credit, to get a PC with OS/2, instead of one with DR-DOS 5/Windows 3.1.
invalidname 2y ago
The gist of it: IBM botched the "extend" part of embrace and extend. OS/2 was better but not by enough to migrate and stay. It had no "killer app" that drew the crowd and developers kept targeting Windows which OS/2 supported. Also IBM f*ed up the OEM deals. OEMs preferred Microsoft which wasn't a direct competitor in the PC business.
- cloudsec9 2y ago
  By the time OS/2 came out, IBM wasn't a serious competitor for most OEMs -- they were high end, so were mostly competing with the likes of Compaq. The big issue that no one is mentioning is that OS/2 needed 8MB of RAM to run decently, preferably more, but this was when most machines were 2-4MB and extra RAM was still a big cost.
  - invalidname 2y ago
    100%. I ran it on 4mb and IMHO it was fine but it did need 8mb to shine.
  - lproven 2y ago
    > OS/2 needed 8MB of RAM to run decently, That's OS/2 2. OS/2 1 is the one that flopped, and nobody had 286 computers with 8MB of RAM. Hell, the IBM 286 PS/2 machines shipped with 1MB and they cost $6-7K in '87-'88!
- lproven 2y ago
  Nope. You're thinking of OS/2 2. OS/2 1.x is what flopped and OS/2 1 didn't run Windows apps because there were no Windows apps worth a damn yet.
  - invalidname 2y ago
    I am talking about 2.0 which was the IBM product mentioned in the post. 1.0 was still a joint product with Microsoft prior to the split.
    - 2y ago
peutetre 2y ago
> Standardization is a big plus in the computer field. You're much better off having thousands of products and vendors compatible with a single standard, even a mediocre one, than having dozens of products, one or two each for each of a dozen fragmented standards. A lesson North America decided to relearn the hard way for EV charging. Europe got it right. North America's eventual EV charging future is CCS charging with the J3400 plug. But it's still got a ways a go with wasted money on adapters and retrofits in the meantime.
pavlov 2y ago
> “Originally I'd planned on posting this on Aug 24” For context, Aug 24, 1995 was the release date for Windows 95. It was a huge deal back then. Microsoft was spending hundreds of millions on marketing, which was unprecedented in the software market. OS/2 fans had seen the writing on the wall. Everybody already knew what the new 32-bit consumer Windows was like because it had been in beta testing for years. (Things moved more slowly when a large-scale software release meant manufacturing millions of floppies and CDs, putting them in shrinkwrap boxes, and shipping them to retailers. No online patches either because Windows 95 didn’t even include a web browser. So it just had to work on millions of PCs out there.)
- canucker2016 2y ago
  OS/2 2.1 had included a copy of Windows 3.x for users to run 16-bit Windows programs at the cost of IBM paying Microsoft for a Windows license. Later versions of OS/2 could use user-installed versions of Windows, which helped IBM avoid paying for a Windows license. Since Win95 used Win32 APIs, unavailable to Windows 3.1, 32-bit Win95-apps couldn't run on OS/2 at all. So that spanking new version of Office 95? Not on OS/2.
  - lproven 2y ago
    > Win32 APIs, unavailable to Windows 3.1 "I think you'll find it's a little bit more complicated than that." Windows 3 could run Win32 code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win32s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win32s It's still out there: https://winworldpc.com/product/win32s/130 https://winworldpc.com/product/win32s/130 It's a good way to get the old tiny fast Freecell on Windows 11. The FREECELL.EXE binary in Win32s runs fine on Windows 11 x86-64. (And on Arm64 come to that.) And OS/2 could run Win32s: https://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php/Win32s https://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php/Win32s ... At least until the final version, 1.30c (IIRC) when MS found a way to nobble it so OS/2 couldn't run it any more.
    - sillywalk 2y ago
      Nitpick: Win32s was limited, and missed a lot of functionality. From the linked Wikipedia article: The "s" in Win32s signifies subset, as Win32s lacked a number of Windows NT functions, including multi-threading, asynchronous I/O, newer serial port functions and many GDI extensions. This generally limited it to "Win32s applications" which were specifically designed for the Win32s platform." There was a MS knowledge base article with the long list of limitations, archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/20110524062145/http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q131896/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110524062145/http://support.mi...
block_dagger 2y ago
Remember two spaces after every sentence? The good old days.
- gnfargbl 2y ago
  How do you feel about the loſs of the long s?
  - Timwi 2y ago
    A traveſty.
  - Koshkin 2y ago
    That, &c.
- cbm-vic-20 2y ago
  As an oldster, I have to force myself to not use two spaces, so I don't reveal my oldness to the youngsters. Once space still looks weird to me.
  - layer8 2y ago
    Two spaces always put me off typographically in monospace. The sentence-ending dot plus a single space already create a much larger gap visually in monospace than in proportional fonts, and with an additional space it just becomes ridiculous. It would be fine in proportional font I guess.
  - Suppafly 2y ago
    >As an oldster, I have to force myself to not use two spaces, so I don't reveal my oldness to the youngsters. Once space still looks weird to me. People make weird claims that two spaces was from typewriter days to keep them from jamming or something, but honestly two spaces is so much more readable and it's annoying that web things and work processors try to remove them.
- lizknope 2y ago
  I always do that when I type. It's just normal to me.
Hilift 2y ago
In August 1995, OS/2 was already dead. Windows NT 3.1 was already released in 1993, Windows NT 3.5 in 1994, and NT 3.51 (Daytona) around the same time as Windows 95. Those NT releases eventually replaced Windows 9x entirely. IBM wasn't even focused on the real product because they were rope a doped into making the world's worst character-driven graphics UI.
- lproven 2y ago
  Yes, but mostly no. Yes, OS/2 was dead software walking by then. That is not a big revelation: it is the central theme of this email, and it was only a year before the last ever major version of OS/2, Warp 4, released 25 September 1996. So, yes, we know that. What is more interesting for me is that Letwin's post misses the real point -- he mentions it, then moves on, not realising he just stated the core problem -- and that you seize upon a trivial, minor point of the message. > rope a doped into making the world's worst character-driven graphics UI. What?! NO! That was TopView. That was a whole decade earlier. It was before OS/2, before Windows 1.0, before this story even started. Forget TopView. TopView: March 1985 Windows 1.0: November 1985. The only thing that matters about TopView is that it inspired DESQview, and that is entirely irrelevant to OS/2. No, it's not about UI at all. The real domino falling that killed OS/2 wasn't that OS/2 2.x ran Windows apps. That's a red herring. It's true but it was a symptom of the decline, not a cause of it. The reason why is trivial to work out without deep knowledge of the history, so I will parenthesize it. (OS/2 2.x didn't get native apps because it could run Windows 3.x apps. This means: All the important stuff was on Windows. This means: Windows was already dominant. This means: a good version of Windows was already out when OS/2 2.x appeared. In other words: OS/2 2.0 followed Windows 3.0. This means: OS/2 had already lost the battle. The war was already won. Why? Because OS/2 1.x had flopped. Why? Because OS/2 1.x was limited to the 16-bit 80286. So? So because OS/2 1.x flopped, Microsoft launched a product that fixed the key weakness of OS/2 1.x. That was Windows 3, which ran on 286 machines but the same binaries ALSO ran on 32-bit 80386 PCS, and used the hardware to give better multitasking of the market-dominating DOS apps than OS/2. Win3 beat OS/2 1.x, because OS/2 1.x was crippled, so it flopped, allowing Windows to gain the upper hand.) The really important bit of Letwin's post isn't what he thinks it is. (And it's definitely not that footnote about text-mode UIs.) The really important bit is not Windows apps; it's why Windows was able to gain that dominance. It is this part: « The miscalculation came about with the 386 coming out sooner than we expected. [...] When the 386 did come out earlier than expected and we saw what was happening, Microsoft wanted to abandon OS/2 1.0 before it was released and work on a 386-only version, one that would be able to emulate more than one DOS box and do a better job, at that. »
unwind 2y ago
As someone with both feet in the embedded development world, reading this from 1995 is fun: Note that even the RS232 port itself is a standard. And an inferior one; sending stuff at 9600 baud over a 7 wire connection is a travesty by modern standards. Note: RS232 is still around, and still relevant on modern systems. Not perhaps "actual" RS232 with the large voltage swing and negative voltage, but the UART signalling. Also, I wonder what he would have preferred, USB was really really young then.
- relaxing 2y ago
  There were some SCSI modems at the time.
  - EricE 2y ago
    My favorite were SCSI network adapters and SCSI "graphics cards". Ah, the days before USB!
- lizknope 2y ago
  Around 2010 I met a former coworker for lunch and he told me how they were running serial stuff really fast. I told him I was also working on high speed serial stuff. I asked him how fast and he said 115 kilobit/s. I told him I was working on 8 gigabit/s or around 70,000 times faster. At that point I had not used RS232 in over 10 years. I have a friend who still uses RS232 for lots of industrial factory type stuff in 2024.
- sillywalk 2y ago
  Nitpick: USB 1.0 wasn't released until 1996.
  - lproven 2y ago
    Yup. Windows 95 first release did not support it. In only appeared with Windows 95 OSR2 a year later, alongside FAT32. In 1996 I got an IBM Pentium PC to review at PC Pro and it had these weird little rectangular ports on the back, with no pins, and a trident logo. I called IBM and asked what they were, and after bouncing around a dozen people until I got a techie, he told me they were "this new Intel thing" called a "unversal serial bus". I asked if it was some debugging kit, and he said no, it's meant to be this universal I/O standard. Then I got another long game of phone tag at Intel where nobody press-facing had ever heard of it. But nobody had any drivers for it, and there was nothing to plug into it, so it never even became a story. I can't remember now if I even wrote about it, but probably it was a passing mention. If so, I think I probably gave it the first coverage in the world.

105 points by walterbell 2y ago

I shared this 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30324595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30324595 Long story short: Gates and Microsoft were in domination mode and everybody else was in experimentation mode. Microsoft's management are par excellence opportunists. And if I recall correctly from watching one of the Bill's interviews from the 1990s, he even couldn't believe and wrap his head around why IBM didn't do the OS themselves and why the hell they decided to outsource it to Microsoft.

PeterStuer 2y ago

Gordon's book 'Inside OS/2' was one of the most accessible and well written texts on Operating Systems I've ever read.

irusensei 2y ago

I think people blaming OS/2's failure surely on Microsoft are missing the point that IBM grossly mismanaged the project.

martiniturbide 2y ago
I think it is both. IBM may missed the point in a big way. They were an slow corporation to market an OS home product. The PC became a home product and IBM was not ready to be on that kind of circus. But don't underestimate Microsoft. They went very hard to market Windows as home product and also as a server in corporations. But they also did some shady stuff. Read: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-IBMs-OS-2-project-lose-to-Microsoft-given-that-IBM-had-much-more-resources-than-Microsoft-at-that-time https://www.quora.com/Why-did-IBMs-OS-2-project-lose-to-Micr... And later with open source: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents That's why young people today, don't understand older guys from the 90's that hate Microsoft. Microsoft was really evil that decade.
- CRConrad 2y ago
  "That decade"? Can't say I've seen any actual signs of change in that.

mediumsmart 2y ago

I really liked OS/2 the way it was. And I only read half of the usenet post.

rstuart4133 2y ago

> The miscalculation came about with the 386 coming out sooner than we expected. Different times, different world.

twoodfin 2y ago

Great bit of history. The nugget I hadn’t heard before is how the 386 enabling DOS extenders really threw the whole product strategy for a loop. I wonder if that was a happy side effect of Intel’s other goals, or if there was design intention to enable DOS to break the 640K barrier.

orionblastar 2y ago

OS/2 2.X was superior to Windows 3.0 but lacked the apps and marketing to compete with it. IBM Client Access/400 for DOS ate into the 640K layer and OS/2 used Extended RAM to keep more of the 640K for WIN-OS2 and DOS programs. Once Microsoft released Visual BASIC for 16-bit Windows, IBM had nothing for OS/2 mode like Visual BASIC. Borland had Delphi and Turbo C++ for Windows 3.0 but not for OS/2. OS/2 started as Advanced DOS at Microsoft and IBM, by the way. An open-source project called OSFree (OS/3) wants to write OS/2 from scratch: https://osfree.org/ https://osfree.org/ At my employer, I had to downgrade OS/2 2.X systems to MS-DOS 6.2 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 before OS/2 Warp 3.0 and Windows 95 came out. Microsoft also had affordable license fees for DOS, Windows, and Office. We had to have everyone on the same OS for compatibility reasons and OS/2 lost out. You can still buy the OEM version of OS/2 here: https://www.arcanoae.com/arcaos/ https://www.arcanoae.com/arcaos/

cloudsec9 2y ago
Slight correction - there were some Borland tools for OS/2, but after the split MS stopped putting out new tools; but IBM did have some interesting compiler stuff too.
- walterbell 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisualAge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisualAge > In 1992, Apple and IBM cofounded Taligent, based upon Pink, an operating system with a mass of sophisticated object-oriented compiler and application framework technology from Apple. Pink became CommonPoint, the partnership was dissolved, and CommonPoint was absorbed into VisualAge starting with the Compound Document Framework to handle OLE objects in VisualAge C++ 3.5 for Windows. In February 1997, the first mass release of Taligent technology came in the form of the Open Class within VisualAge C++ 4.0 ... The original prototype which led to VisualAge was an attempt "to make something like the NeXT interface builder" within the Smalltalk/V development environment.
  - lproven 2y ago
    What eventually made it out of VisualAge into the wider FOSS world was Eclipse. https://wiki.eclipse.org/FAQ_Where_did_Eclipse_come_from%3F https://wiki.eclipse.org/FAQ_Where_did_Eclipse_come_from%3F Eclipse is the FOSS version of the C/Java rewrite of Visual Age SmallTalk -- which is still on sale as VAST. https://www.instantiations.com/company/history/ https://www.instantiations.com/company/history/

shrubble 2y ago

This is typical self-serving MS-speak. What actually happened is that: a) Microsoft, then a tiny fraction of what it is now, took $400 million from IBM in co-developing OS/2 and put the profit from that money into Windows 3.0 and later NT (funny how developing NT cost only a stated $150 million just a few years later and the main cost is in software developers) b) When Windows 3.0 did well enough in the market, MS did what they have always done - they figured out how to break their agreement with IBM, and take their own stuff that they owned 100% and run with it. This is a pattern seen everywhere at all times with MS, ever since the Ed Roberts / MS BASIC days in Albuquerque.

WillAdams 2y ago
Two notable examples: https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html and Windows for Pen Computing vs. Go Corp.'s PenPoint as written up in: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1171250.Startup https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1171250.Startup
wvenable 2y ago
It's funny constantly see a kind of revisionist history where IBM is the misunderstood underdog with the superior technology that was destroyed by the big bad Microsoft. When in reality IBM is this poorly managed monstrosity that was terrible at software development and destroyed their PC market share trying to take back the PC standard and make it proprietary to them.
- shrubble 2y ago
  It's more like an opportunistic, willing to be sleazy, smaller company grew into a very large one by continually taking underhanded advantage of anyone in their path. Ed Roberts of MITS/Altair, STAC, Wang (OLE, lawsuit resulted in MS investing in Wang), DEC (VMS, lawsuit resulted in DEC receiving money), to list just a few.
  - wvenable 2y ago
    Whether or not you spell Microsoft with dollar sign it doesn't make every other company the hero. History has turned OS/2 into some kind of folk hero rather than the bloated, mismanaged, expensive, buggy mess that it actually was. And Microsoft's technology was superior if the job of an OS was to actually run software on computers of the time.

munchler 2y ago

OS/2 was so far superior to Windows in 1992 that it wasn't even funny. Nevertheless, my company gave up on OS/2 and we had to port our Smalltalk application to Windows 3 instead. Someone had to explain segmented 16-bit addressing to me, and I was totally appalled. Fortunately, Windows 95 came out a few years later with the Win32 API and I pretty much forgot about OS/2 after that. I still feel a bit guilty, though.

pjmlp 2y ago
In that year I finally migrated from a Timex 2068 to a 386SX PC at home, I could have bought a PC with OS/2 and decided against it. It would have required additional 1 000€ in todays money on the bank credit, to get a PC with OS/2, instead of one with DR-DOS 5/Windows 3.1.

invalidname 2y ago

The gist of it: IBM botched the "extend" part of embrace and extend. OS/2 was better but not by enough to migrate and stay. It had no "killer app" that drew the crowd and developers kept targeting Windows which OS/2 supported. Also IBM f*ed up the OEM deals. OEMs preferred Microsoft which wasn't a direct competitor in the PC business.

cloudsec9 2y ago
By the time OS/2 came out, IBM wasn't a serious competitor for most OEMs -- they were high end, so were mostly competing with the likes of Compaq. The big issue that no one is mentioning is that OS/2 needed 8MB of RAM to run decently, preferably more, but this was when most machines were 2-4MB and extra RAM was still a big cost.
- invalidname 2y ago
  100%. I ran it on 4mb and IMHO it was fine but it did need 8mb to shine.
- lproven 2y ago
  > OS/2 needed 8MB of RAM to run decently, That's OS/2 2. OS/2 1 is the one that flopped, and nobody had 286 computers with 8MB of RAM. Hell, the IBM 286 PS/2 machines shipped with 1MB and they cost $6-7K in '87-'88!
lproven 2y ago
Nope. You're thinking of OS/2 2. OS/2 1.x is what flopped and OS/2 1 didn't run Windows apps because there were no Windows apps worth a damn yet.
- invalidname 2y ago
  I am talking about 2.0 which was the IBM product mentioned in the post. 1.0 was still a joint product with Microsoft prior to the split.
  - 2y ago

peutetre 2y ago

> Standardization is a big plus in the computer field. You're much better off having thousands of products and vendors compatible with a single standard, even a mediocre one, than having dozens of products, one or two each for each of a dozen fragmented standards. A lesson North America decided to relearn the hard way for EV charging. Europe got it right. North America's eventual EV charging future is CCS charging with the J3400 plug. But it's still got a ways a go with wasted money on adapters and retrofits in the meantime.

pavlov 2y ago

> “Originally I'd planned on posting this on Aug 24” For context, Aug 24, 1995 was the release date for Windows 95. It was a huge deal back then. Microsoft was spending hundreds of millions on marketing, which was unprecedented in the software market. OS/2 fans had seen the writing on the wall. Everybody already knew what the new 32-bit consumer Windows was like because it had been in beta testing for years. (Things moved more slowly when a large-scale software release meant manufacturing millions of floppies and CDs, putting them in shrinkwrap boxes, and shipping them to retailers. No online patches either because Windows 95 didn’t even include a web browser. So it just had to work on millions of PCs out there.)

canucker2016 2y ago
OS/2 2.1 had included a copy of Windows 3.x for users to run 16-bit Windows programs at the cost of IBM paying Microsoft for a Windows license. Later versions of OS/2 could use user-installed versions of Windows, which helped IBM avoid paying for a Windows license. Since Win95 used Win32 APIs, unavailable to Windows 3.1, 32-bit Win95-apps couldn't run on OS/2 at all. So that spanking new version of Office 95? Not on OS/2.
- lproven 2y ago
  > Win32 APIs, unavailable to Windows 3.1 "I think you'll find it's a little bit more complicated than that." Windows 3 could run Win32 code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win32s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win32s It's still out there: https://winworldpc.com/product/win32s/130 https://winworldpc.com/product/win32s/130 It's a good way to get the old tiny fast Freecell on Windows 11. The FREECELL.EXE binary in Win32s runs fine on Windows 11 x86-64. (And on Arm64 come to that.) And OS/2 could run Win32s: https://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php/Win32s https://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php/Win32s ... At least until the final version, 1.30c (IIRC) when MS found a way to nobble it so OS/2 couldn't run it any more.
  - sillywalk 2y ago
    Nitpick: Win32s was limited, and missed a lot of functionality. From the linked Wikipedia article: The "s" in Win32s signifies subset, as Win32s lacked a number of Windows NT functions, including multi-threading, asynchronous I/O, newer serial port functions and many GDI extensions. This generally limited it to "Win32s applications" which were specifically designed for the Win32s platform." There was a MS knowledge base article with the long list of limitations, archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/20110524062145/http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q131896/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110524062145/http://support.mi...

block_dagger 2y ago

Remember two spaces after every sentence? The good old days.

gnfargbl 2y ago
How do you feel about the loſs of the long s?
- Timwi 2y ago
  A traveſty.
- Koshkin 2y ago
  That, &c.
cbm-vic-20 2y ago
As an oldster, I have to force myself to not use two spaces, so I don't reveal my oldness to the youngsters. Once space still looks weird to me.
- layer8 2y ago
  Two spaces always put me off typographically in monospace. The sentence-ending dot plus a single space already create a much larger gap visually in monospace than in proportional fonts, and with an additional space it just becomes ridiculous. It would be fine in proportional font I guess.
- Suppafly 2y ago
  >As an oldster, I have to force myself to not use two spaces, so I don't reveal my oldness to the youngsters. Once space still looks weird to me. People make weird claims that two spaces was from typewriter days to keep them from jamming or something, but honestly two spaces is so much more readable and it's annoying that web things and work processors try to remove them.
lizknope 2y ago
I always do that when I type. It's just normal to me.

Hilift 2y ago

In August 1995, OS/2 was already dead. Windows NT 3.1 was already released in 1993, Windows NT 3.5 in 1994, and NT 3.51 (Daytona) around the same time as Windows 95. Those NT releases eventually replaced Windows 9x entirely. IBM wasn't even focused on the real product because they were rope a doped into making the world's worst character-driven graphics UI.

lproven 2y ago
Yes, but mostly no. Yes, OS/2 was dead software walking by then. That is not a big revelation: it is the central theme of this email, and it was only a year before the last ever major version of OS/2, Warp 4, released 25 September 1996. So, yes, we know that. What is more interesting for me is that Letwin's post misses the real point -- he mentions it, then moves on, not realising he just stated the core problem -- and that you seize upon a trivial, minor point of the message. > rope a doped into making the world's worst character-driven graphics UI. What?! NO! That was TopView. That was a whole decade earlier. It was before OS/2, before Windows 1.0, before this story even started. Forget TopView. TopView: March 1985 Windows 1.0: November 1985. The only thing that matters about TopView is that it inspired DESQview, and that is entirely irrelevant to OS/2. No, it's not about UI at all. The real domino falling that killed OS/2 wasn't that OS/2 2.x ran Windows apps. That's a red herring. It's true but it was a symptom of the decline, not a cause of it. The reason why is trivial to work out without deep knowledge of the history, so I will parenthesize it. (OS/2 2.x didn't get native apps because it could run Windows 3.x apps. This means: All the important stuff was on Windows. This means: Windows was already dominant. This means: a good version of Windows was already out when OS/2 2.x appeared. In other words: OS/2 2.0 followed Windows 3.0. This means: OS/2 had already lost the battle. The war was already won. Why? Because OS/2 1.x had flopped. Why? Because OS/2 1.x was limited to the 16-bit 80286. So? So because OS/2 1.x flopped, Microsoft launched a product that fixed the key weakness of OS/2 1.x. That was Windows 3, which ran on 286 machines but the same binaries ALSO ran on 32-bit 80386 PCS, and used the hardware to give better multitasking of the market-dominating DOS apps than OS/2. Win3 beat OS/2 1.x, because OS/2 1.x was crippled, so it flopped, allowing Windows to gain the upper hand.) The really important bit of Letwin's post isn't what he thinks it is. (And it's definitely not that footnote about text-mode UIs.) The really important bit is not Windows apps; it's why Windows was able to gain that dominance. It is this part: « The miscalculation came about with the 386 coming out sooner than we expected. [...] When the 386 did come out earlier than expected and we saw what was happening, Microsoft wanted to abandon OS/2 1.0 before it was released and work on a 386-only version, one that would be able to emulate more than one DOS box and do a better job, at that. »

unwind 2y ago

As someone with both feet in the embedded development world, reading this from 1995 is fun: Note that even the RS232 port itself is a standard. And an inferior one; sending stuff at 9600 baud over a 7 wire connection is a travesty by modern standards. Note: RS232 is still around, and still relevant on modern systems. Not perhaps "actual" RS232 with the large voltage swing and negative voltage, but the UART signalling. Also, I wonder what he would have preferred, USB was really really young then.

relaxing 2y ago
There were some SCSI modems at the time.
- EricE 2y ago
  My favorite were SCSI network adapters and SCSI "graphics cards". Ah, the days before USB!
lizknope 2y ago
Around 2010 I met a former coworker for lunch and he told me how they were running serial stuff really fast. I told him I was also working on high speed serial stuff. I asked him how fast and he said 115 kilobit/s. I told him I was working on 8 gigabit/s or around 70,000 times faster. At that point I had not used RS232 in over 10 years. I have a friend who still uses RS232 for lots of industrial factory type stuff in 2024.
sillywalk 2y ago
Nitpick: USB 1.0 wasn't released until 1996.
- lproven 2y ago
  Yup. Windows 95 first release did not support it. In only appeared with Windows 95 OSR2 a year later, alongside FAT32. In 1996 I got an IBM Pentium PC to review at PC Pro and it had these weird little rectangular ports on the back, with no pins, and a trident logo. I called IBM and asked what they were, and after bouncing around a dozen people until I got a techie, he told me they were "this new Intel thing" called a "unversal serial bus". I asked if it was some debugging kit, and he said no, it's meant to be this universal I/O standard. Then I got another long game of phone tag at Intel where nobody press-facing had ever heard of it. But nobody had any drivers for it, and there was nothing to plug into it, so it never even became a story. I can't remember now if I even wrote about it, but probably it was a passing mention. If so, I think I probably gave it the first coverage in the world.