8 ms·

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-

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.
    - shrubble 2y ago
      I didn't spell Microsoft with a dollar sign and I didn't portray OS/2 as a folk hero of computing. So your responses don't seem to be addressing the issues I raised.
      - wvenable 2y ago
        "What actually happened is that..." Dismisses the entire article which, as far as I can tell, is pretty factual. Admittedly I used your comment as a jumping off point for that observation about recent OS/2 commentary even beyond this particular topic on HN.
        lproven 2y ago
        The article is factual but IMHO profoundly misguided because it's profoundly biased. I got a 2000 word editorial comment piece out of it. I'll share it when it's published next week.
        wvenable 2y ago
        I have read a lot about that time and it doesn't seem particularly biased. Microsoft hated working with IBM and their horrifically old-school way doing software development (e.g. counting lines of code, etc). The bias, in my opinion, is the other way -- which is exactly what I said at the top.
        lproven 2y ago
- CRConrad 2y ago
  Bit of both, I'd think.
dblohm7 2y ago
> 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 The timing didn't happen the way you're describing it. There are numerous accounts of the tale of how David Weise and Murray Sargent got Windows running properly in protected mode as an unauthorized, personal side-project. https://news.microsoft.com/2000/09/10/i-found-a-cool-little-problem-that-i-just-couldnt-resist-solving/ https://news.microsoft.com/2000/09/10/i-found-a-cool-little-...
- shrubble 2y ago
  I didn't say anything about protect mode and the URL you included mentions Windows 2.1, which was NOT a commercial success. But Windows 3.0 was the first time that traction was truly gained in the market. That they added protected mode was great, but that didn't directly affect the MS Office juggernaut.
  - 486sx33 2y ago
    I actually read the whole article, which is a pretty good read. It specifically mentions windows 3.0 multiple times. Not 2.1.
TheAmazingRace 2y ago
Bill Gates really was a shrewd businessman, and never had a problem with being malignant if it suited his needs. He just did his sort of dirty deeds with a friendly facade. I still haven’t forgiven him for what he did to Gary Kildall.
- Suppafly 2y ago
  >I still haven’t forgiven him for what he did to Gary Kildall. You mean try to encourage him to take a good deal and instead Gary blew it? How is that Bill's fault in any way?
- WalterBright 2y ago
  I'm curious, what did Bill do to Gary?
  - frankacter 2y ago
    The background is a bit complicated, but the high level is that many believe Bill Gates stole MS-DOS from Gary to license to IBM. The nuance is that IBM contacted Bill first, who he directed to speak with Gary. While Bill was under NDA, he did give Gary a heads up "Someone is coming to see you. Treat them well, they are important people." Gary did not and missed their visit and IBM went back to Bill. Bill then bought Q-DOS (a rip off of Gary's DOS) for $75k and rebranded it MS-DOS and licensed it to IBM. There is more to it, but that is the high level.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      Gary's DOS is also quite similar to the PDP-11 operating system. I tried using CPM-86 for a while, and gave up on it. It was clearly inferior to MS-DOS. Nobody has ever been able to show a sequence of code in MS-DOS that was ripped off from CPM. Gary got first swing at the bat for a deal with IBM. > Bill then bought Q-DOS (a rip off of Gary's DOS) for $75k It was $50K. Some years later, Microsoft paid him a few million dollars more to settle any potential future claims Tim might have made.
nradov 2y ago
R&D funding provided by IBM wasn't classified as "profit". The Windows NT code base didn't use much from OS/2. In the end OS/2 was mostly worthless garbage to be thrown away; it had some good functionality in a few limited areas but was essentially a "local maximum" and had no viable path forward. If anyone wanted to turn OS/2 into a viable modern OS they would have had to start over from scratch.
- giamma 2y ago
  Link to a post I wrote some time back about OS/2 and some of its nice and unique features https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33107065#33119146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33107065#33119146
- Tor3 2y ago
  Can you be a bit more explicit in describing what the problems were? I don't immediately see why that wouldn't apply way more to Windows at the time. I did not use OS/2 much, but.. I did write some communication software so that we could work on a remote computer (this was via X.25, which was the option at the time for companies staying connected), and that was easy. Modern, I would say. Thread model easy to work with. I wrote a DMA driver as well. Again, a great API to work with, and overall a good experience. The user interface (GUI)? Any problems? A roadblock for the future? Can't really remember how it worked, but again - compared with Windows (even NT, which came about later), I can't recall anything "worthless garbage" with no path forward.
  - nradov 2y ago
    The most fundamental problem with OS/2 is that it wasn't designed as a multi-user OS from the start. It had some multi-user functionality but there were core architectural problems that made it impossible to move forward without a complete rewrite. On the UI side it also had a single input queue. Which was such a stupid design decision that I can't imagine what they were thinking. Fixing that would have also required a major rewrite.
  - pavlov 2y ago
    It sounds like the grandparent poster is maybe talking about OS/2 1.x, which was definitely hamstrung by 286 compatibility. But OS/2 2.0 was practically a 32-bit rewrite of the entire system with a new GUI too. It certainly was competitive with the first versions of Windows NT.
zvrba 2y ago
Microsoft hired Dave Cutler to develop WinNT. Prior to that, he worked on VMS.
- shrubble 2y ago
  DEC sued Microsoft once they read the Windows NT Internals documentation, due to its similarity with VMS : https://www.techmonitor.ai/technology/dec_forced_microsoft_into_alliance_with_legal_threat https://www.techmonitor.ai/technology/dec_forced_microsoft_i...
  - ssrc 2y ago
    Yep, if you have in one hand "Inside Windows NT" by Helen Custer (or one of its successors, "Windows Internals"[0]) and on the other "VMS Internals and Data Structures"[1]... [0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/resources/windows-internals https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/resources/win... [1]: https://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/vax/vms/training/ https://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/vax/vms/training/
- matrix12 2y ago
  VMS++ == WNT
  - CRConrad 2y ago
    I still can't make my mind up as to whether that's an in-joke or just coinkydink.
- lproven 2y ago
  That's getting cause and effect back to front. DEC cancelled Cutler's pet projects Mica and Prism, a 64-bit RISC chip and a portable multi-personality next-gen OS to run on it. He was upset. Ripe for head-hunting. MS did so, but he insisted on bringing his core team. MS did not know what to do with him and put the team to work on some corner of LAN Manager. Then Windows 3.0 was a hit, which led to IBM and Microsoft divorcing. IBM kept OS/2 1.x (16-bit, for the '286) and OS/2 2.x (32-bit, for the '386). Microsoft got OS/2 3.x, a planned CPU-independent portable OS. It was working on it on Intel's RISC chip, the i860, codenamed N-Ten. The OS was named after it: OS/2 NT. Then, with Windows now suddenly a big deal, getting a next-gen Windows working was suddenly a big urgent issue. Cutler got the job: finish OS/2 NT and make it work. OS/2 NT was renamed Windows NT, and as it was barely a skeleton of an OS, Cutler took a lot of the design of Mica -- the cancelled next-gen VMS -- and built NT around that. DEC found out and sued, and DEC got very sweet deals on NT and Exchange and things as a result. (Compaq totally blew this and died as a result. It deserved worse.) DEC also salvaged the Prism project and it was launched as DEC Alpha, the first 64-bit RISC chip. Alpha was the first 64-bit platform NT ran on, and it was also the first non-x86 platform Linux ran on.
msh 2y ago
Well if OS2 had succeeded we would have PC's controlled by the OG evil tech monopoly which have had their business dealings in far worse things (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust) than microsoft ever did.
- t43562 2y ago
  ... what does that practically matter to people living in the Microsoft era?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - paulryanrogers 2y ago
    Perhaps as evidence we need anti-trust because we cannot rely on happy accidents like IBM allowing an upstart frenemy to thrive.
    - CRConrad 2y ago
      Especially since it's now the erstwhile upstart frenemy that sits in the driver's seat. They have institutional memory of where they came from, so they know to be on their guard against the same thing happening to themselves.

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.
  - shrubble 2y ago
    I didn't spell Microsoft with a dollar sign and I didn't portray OS/2 as a folk hero of computing. So your responses don't seem to be addressing the issues I raised.
    - wvenable 2y ago
      "What actually happened is that..." Dismisses the entire article which, as far as I can tell, is pretty factual. Admittedly I used your comment as a jumping off point for that observation about recent OS/2 commentary even beyond this particular topic on HN.
      - lproven 2y ago
        The article is factual but IMHO profoundly misguided because it's profoundly biased. I got a 2000 word editorial comment piece out of it. I'll share it when it's published next week.
        wvenable 2y ago
        I have read a lot about that time and it doesn't seem particularly biased. Microsoft hated working with IBM and their horrifically old-school way doing software development (e.g. counting lines of code, etc). The bias, in my opinion, is the other way -- which is exactly what I said at the top.
        lproven 2y ago
CRConrad 2y ago
Bit of both, I'd think.

dblohm7 2y ago

> 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 The timing didn't happen the way you're describing it. There are numerous accounts of the tale of how David Weise and Murray Sargent got Windows running properly in protected mode as an unauthorized, personal side-project. https://news.microsoft.com/2000/09/10/i-found-a-cool-little-problem-that-i-just-couldnt-resist-solving/ https://news.microsoft.com/2000/09/10/i-found-a-cool-little-...

shrubble 2y ago
I didn't say anything about protect mode and the URL you included mentions Windows 2.1, which was NOT a commercial success. But Windows 3.0 was the first time that traction was truly gained in the market. That they added protected mode was great, but that didn't directly affect the MS Office juggernaut.
- 486sx33 2y ago
  I actually read the whole article, which is a pretty good read. It specifically mentions windows 3.0 multiple times. Not 2.1.

TheAmazingRace 2y ago

Bill Gates really was a shrewd businessman, and never had a problem with being malignant if it suited his needs. He just did his sort of dirty deeds with a friendly facade. I still haven’t forgiven him for what he did to Gary Kildall.

Suppafly 2y ago
>I still haven’t forgiven him for what he did to Gary Kildall. You mean try to encourage him to take a good deal and instead Gary blew it? How is that Bill's fault in any way?
WalterBright 2y ago
I'm curious, what did Bill do to Gary?
- frankacter 2y ago
  The background is a bit complicated, but the high level is that many believe Bill Gates stole MS-DOS from Gary to license to IBM. The nuance is that IBM contacted Bill first, who he directed to speak with Gary. While Bill was under NDA, he did give Gary a heads up "Someone is coming to see you. Treat them well, they are important people." Gary did not and missed their visit and IBM went back to Bill. Bill then bought Q-DOS (a rip off of Gary's DOS) for $75k and rebranded it MS-DOS and licensed it to IBM. There is more to it, but that is the high level.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    Gary's DOS is also quite similar to the PDP-11 operating system. I tried using CPM-86 for a while, and gave up on it. It was clearly inferior to MS-DOS. Nobody has ever been able to show a sequence of code in MS-DOS that was ripped off from CPM. Gary got first swing at the bat for a deal with IBM. > Bill then bought Q-DOS (a rip off of Gary's DOS) for $75k It was $50K. Some years later, Microsoft paid him a few million dollars more to settle any potential future claims Tim might have made.

nradov 2y ago

R&D funding provided by IBM wasn't classified as "profit". The Windows NT code base didn't use much from OS/2. In the end OS/2 was mostly worthless garbage to be thrown away; it had some good functionality in a few limited areas but was essentially a "local maximum" and had no viable path forward. If anyone wanted to turn OS/2 into a viable modern OS they would have had to start over from scratch.

giamma 2y ago
Link to a post I wrote some time back about OS/2 and some of its nice and unique features https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33107065#33119146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33107065#33119146
Tor3 2y ago
Can you be a bit more explicit in describing what the problems were? I don't immediately see why that wouldn't apply way more to Windows at the time. I did not use OS/2 much, but.. I did write some communication software so that we could work on a remote computer (this was via X.25, which was the option at the time for companies staying connected), and that was easy. Modern, I would say. Thread model easy to work with. I wrote a DMA driver as well. Again, a great API to work with, and overall a good experience. The user interface (GUI)? Any problems? A roadblock for the future? Can't really remember how it worked, but again - compared with Windows (even NT, which came about later), I can't recall anything "worthless garbage" with no path forward.
- nradov 2y ago
  The most fundamental problem with OS/2 is that it wasn't designed as a multi-user OS from the start. It had some multi-user functionality but there were core architectural problems that made it impossible to move forward without a complete rewrite. On the UI side it also had a single input queue. Which was such a stupid design decision that I can't imagine what they were thinking. Fixing that would have also required a major rewrite.
- pavlov 2y ago
  It sounds like the grandparent poster is maybe talking about OS/2 1.x, which was definitely hamstrung by 286 compatibility. But OS/2 2.0 was practically a 32-bit rewrite of the entire system with a new GUI too. It certainly was competitive with the first versions of Windows NT.

zvrba 2y ago

Microsoft hired Dave Cutler to develop WinNT. Prior to that, he worked on VMS.

shrubble 2y ago
DEC sued Microsoft once they read the Windows NT Internals documentation, due to its similarity with VMS : https://www.techmonitor.ai/technology/dec_forced_microsoft_into_alliance_with_legal_threat https://www.techmonitor.ai/technology/dec_forced_microsoft_i...
- ssrc 2y ago
  Yep, if you have in one hand "Inside Windows NT" by Helen Custer (or one of its successors, "Windows Internals"[0]) and on the other "VMS Internals and Data Structures"[1]... [0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/resources/windows-internals https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/resources/win... [1]: https://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/vax/vms/training/ https://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/vax/vms/training/
matrix12 2y ago
VMS++ == WNT
- CRConrad 2y ago
  I still can't make my mind up as to whether that's an in-joke or just coinkydink.
lproven 2y ago
That's getting cause and effect back to front. DEC cancelled Cutler's pet projects Mica and Prism, a 64-bit RISC chip and a portable multi-personality next-gen OS to run on it. He was upset. Ripe for head-hunting. MS did so, but he insisted on bringing his core team. MS did not know what to do with him and put the team to work on some corner of LAN Manager. Then Windows 3.0 was a hit, which led to IBM and Microsoft divorcing. IBM kept OS/2 1.x (16-bit, for the '286) and OS/2 2.x (32-bit, for the '386). Microsoft got OS/2 3.x, a planned CPU-independent portable OS. It was working on it on Intel's RISC chip, the i860, codenamed N-Ten. The OS was named after it: OS/2 NT. Then, with Windows now suddenly a big deal, getting a next-gen Windows working was suddenly a big urgent issue. Cutler got the job: finish OS/2 NT and make it work. OS/2 NT was renamed Windows NT, and as it was barely a skeleton of an OS, Cutler took a lot of the design of Mica -- the cancelled next-gen VMS -- and built NT around that. DEC found out and sued, and DEC got very sweet deals on NT and Exchange and things as a result. (Compaq totally blew this and died as a result. It deserved worse.) DEC also salvaged the Prism project and it was launched as DEC Alpha, the first 64-bit RISC chip. Alpha was the first 64-bit platform NT ran on, and it was also the first non-x86 platform Linux ran on.

msh 2y ago

Well if OS2 had succeeded we would have PC's controlled by the OG evil tech monopoly which have had their business dealings in far worse things (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust) than microsoft ever did.

t43562 2y ago
... what does that practically matter to people living in the Microsoft era?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- paulryanrogers 2y ago
  Perhaps as evidence we need anti-trust because we cannot rely on happy accidents like IBM allowing an upstart frenemy to thrive.
  - CRConrad 2y ago
    Especially since it's now the erstwhile upstart frenemy that sits in the driver's seat. They have institutional memory of where they came from, so they know to be on their guard against the same thing happening to themselves.