8 ms·

OS/2 Warp, PowerPC Edition (2011)

97 points by TMWNN 1y ago

tiahura 1y ago
What could have been. If the respective parties had just gotten their acts together on the PPC 615, OS/2, WordPerfect, and Lotus.
- twoodfin 1y ago
  Was there any act that would have overcome the synergy of Intel’s commodity hardware economics and Microsoft’s ecosystem dominance?
  - bombcar 1y ago
    Yes, getting stuff together and getting it out there. Windows 95 ate the world because the world was mainly still DOS; look at the numbers. It wasn't people upgrading from Win 3.1.
    - esseph 1y ago
      Hey give Windows 3.11 FOR WORKGROUPS some respect ;)
    - BLKNSLVR 1y ago
      Being at the right age when Windows 95 came out, I didn't really know that there was a "Windows" prior to 95. My dad's computer ran DOS and used something called Powermenu as an organiser for executing programs. I think I had to run Wolfenstein in a tiny window for it to be fast enough to be playable, and may have, at one point, deleted one of the required DOS system files in order to try to tweak the life out of it to try to get it playable full screen. I think that was a 286. More years ago than I care to admit.
    - linguae 1y ago
      Additionally, while this is US-centric, there were still many households in the mid-1990s whose first computers were PCs running Windows 95, just in time for the World Wide Web to be widely available, which created demand for personal computers. Additionally, this was during the time when Apple was struggling; its Performa lineup geared toward home users was not in the best of shape in 1995 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_5200_LC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_5200_LC). By the time Steve Jobs returned and Apple released the first iMac (1998), it was just about time for Windows 98.
    - 1313ed01 1y ago
      What numbers? As much as I hated Windows 3.x (which is why I upgraded from DOS to Linux, not to Windows 95, and never looked back) it did not occur to me that many by 1995 did not have some Windows 3.x installed, as it was required for so much software (even some games).
      - bombcar 1y ago
        Windows 3.1 sold 3 million copies in the first three months, Windows 95 moved ten million copies in the first year. Everyone I knew went from either no PC at all, or an older DOS 386-era machine to a Windows 95 computer.
        rkomorn 1y ago
        3M copies in 3 months is more than 10M in a year (if you assume sustained sales). I don't get what the numbers are supposed to imply.
        imchillyb 1y ago
        Windows 3.1: ~3 million in first six weeks, ~>3 million in first three months, ~25 million in first year. Windows 95: ~1 million in first 4 days, ~7 million in first five weeks, ~40 million in first year. These figures represent Microsoft’s own sales figures.
        rkomorn 1y ago
        Yeah those don't match parent's comment.
        1313ed01 1y ago
        Still don't support the claim that people were mainly updating from DOS without Windows 3.x. Anecdotally I still think almost everyone using DOS by 1995 had Windows 3.x installed as well. Not necessarily a copy of Windows that was the result of Microsoft selling a copy of course.
    - WorldMaker 1y ago
      One of the big reasons people were upgrading to OS/2 was people that wanted a stabler/cleaner Windows 3.1. Most of the hottest apps for OS/2 were Windows apps. IBM started on the back foot in that competition. Windows 95 clipped their heels because it had the stability/cleanliness for cheaper and less of a RAM footprint.
    - twoodfin 1y ago
      What numbers do you have in mind? I was paying very close attention to this world at the time, and I am confident that 90%+ of every PC that could run Win95 at the time of its release had been sold by an OEM as booting straight into the bundled copy of Win3.1. Yes, lots of people had older PCs and got Win95 with their hardware upgrade cycle. They were never in any danger of upgrading to OS/2 or anything else: Microsoft owned the OEM sales channel and the software ecosystem for the PC for a solid 5+ years before Windows 95.
  - Synaesthesia 1y ago
    Apple somehow managed to claw it's way to releavance from a weaker position in 1998 (with PoserPC!) So if they had their act together they could have done better in the early 90s. hey squandered their early lead in the US among consumers and education and also ignored the international market. Not gonna lie Wintel was a formidable force. Microsoft was ruthless in cornering the market. But technically, OS/2 and MacOS gave Windows a run for it's money, arguably superior on some respects, and you could say the same for PowerPC and Intel.
- Pocomon 1y ago
  ‘SteveB went on the road to see the top weeklies, industry analysts and business press this week to give our systems strategy. The meetings included demos of Windows 3.1 (pen and multimedia included), Windows NT, OS/2 2.0 including a performance comparison to Windows and a “bad app” that corrupted other applications and crashed the system. It was a very valuable trip and needs to be repeated by other MS executives throughout the next month so we hit all the publications and analysts.’ ‘The demos of OS/2 were excellent. Crashing the system had the intended effect – to FUD OS/2 2.0. People paid attention to this demo and were often surprised to our favor. Steve positioned it as -- OS/2 is not "bad" but that from a performance and "robustness" standpoint, it is NOT better than Windows’ "I have written a PM app that hangs the system (sometimes quite graphically)." http://iowa.gotthefacts.org/011107/PX_0860.pdf http://iowa.gotthefacts.org/011107/PX_0860.pdf http://iowa.gotthefacts.org/011107/PX_0797.pdf http://iowa.gotthefacts.org/011107/PX_0797.pdf
  - tiahura 1y ago
    DOS ain’t done ‘till Lotus won’t run.
  - twoodfin 1y ago
    Great links! I don’t see how SteveB’s “bad app” was out of bounds. IBM was telling these analysts a bad app couldn’t bring down OS/2. As someone who used (and liked!) OS/2 at the time, this was indeed false: IIRC OS/2 in this era had a single-threaded UI loop, and a misbehaving app could (and occasionally did) block input for all apps and corrupt the UI. You could argue about the difference between this and a Windows “UAE”, but to the user the experience was a broken, unusable OS/2.
- thw_9a83c 1y ago
  > What could have been. If the respective parties... on the PPC 615, OS/2 There was never a chance at that time because x86 chips were produced in such volumes that PowerPC chips couldn't compete price-wise. Also, OS/2 became an instant outsider once Windows 95 was released. Two underdogs don't make a winner. The article says it all: "The OS was clearly unfinished and not entirely stable. Worst of all, there were about zero applications. Because OS/2 PPC was never truly in use, PowerPC versions of OS/2 applications were never sold."
- dan_linder 1y ago
  I remember working with a guy who was the internal IBM rep (we were in corporate tech support in the late 1990’s and we were a BIG IBM reseller, so my friend got lots of bennies at work) and he had a PPC 605 (not the 615 IIRC), but he ran AIX on it (we were in the AIX and Unix support team). Man I was jealous!
sedatk 1y ago
Didn’t know that OS/2 had a PowerPC port, but more surprisingly, Windows NT also had a PowerPC port. Never heard of those.
- giobox 1y ago
  One of the original design requirements for NT was that it be portable between different CPU architectures, it was one of the driving forces behind its creation. So much so in fact, Microsoft developed NT 3.1 first on non-x86 architectures (i860 and MIPS), then later ported to x86, to ensure no x86 specific code made it in. NT supported quite a few architectures: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platforms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platforms "Windows NT 3.1 was released for Intel x86 PC compatible and PC-98 platforms, and for DEC Alpha and ARC-compliant MIPS platforms. Windows NT 3.51 added support for the PowerPC processor in 1995"... NT is a pretty interesting bit of PC history, I can highly recommend the book "Show Stopper!" by G. Pascal Zachary that recounts its development, and also dives a bit into why making the OS portable across CPU architectures was so important to the team at the time.
  - sedatk 1y ago
    I know, I was a Windows engineer, I knew it had been ported to many architectures, but somehow I missed PowerPC :)
  - spijdar 1y ago
    Something I didn't realize until recently was that the original MIPS version of Windows NT was Big Endian. I'd always heard it said that WinNT was strictly, 100%, absolutely always little endian, and the fact that every CPU that got a port (or was going to get a port) was either little or bi endian confirmed this. Well, it is true, but Windows did run BE on the original MIPS R3000 platform. And only on the R3K[0]. The CPU architecture flag is still defined on modern Windows as IMAGE_FILE_MACHINE_R3000BE. There's an early test build of Win3.1 + GDI somewhere that runs on this platform. The actual first release of WinNT 3.1 only supported MIPS R4000 and higher, I think. In little endian mode. [0] I know the Xbox used a modified NT kernel, I've seen claims that the Xbox 360 also was, which would make it the second NT system to run big endian. Not familiar enough with sources better than wikipedia to trust that it actually was.
nxobject 1y ago
I’m always curious how these projects come about and survive: why go to all of the effort to port for a dead-end product line? As technically sweet as it is? I imagine they would’ve found a decent market if they’d ported to Power Mac. (Also, was the x86 emulation implemented in-house? I wouldn’t be surprised if some niche small company had a x86 emulator for PPC product that they could be paid to port.)
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  There was definitely VirtualPC for PowerPC Macs, I used it to run TurboTax way back in the day.
- twoodfin 1y ago
  I think oddities like this were a consequence of a hardware world that was rocketing along the heart of Moore’s Law, alongside a software world that hadn’t matured past multi-year product cycles. When OS/2 for PowerPC was set in motion, that Intel would “Make CISC Great Again” with the Pentium was far from clear.
  - bombcar 1y ago
    I remember that the "general consensus" was that RISC was gonna win, it was just a matter of when (and when it could be affordable). What was NOT certain was which RISC architecture would come out ahead, so there was a bunch of porting to "remove the risk" - later they would unport most everything and "remove the RISC". Pentium shook that tree a bit, and Pentium II really razzle-dazzled it.
    - LeFantome 1y ago
      Well, the thing is that RISC did win. It is just that the RISC that won is the one that Intel baked into their x86 chips. The Pentium introduced the idea of micro op codes though the Pentium Pro was the first chip to really run with it. The CISC x86 instructions were converted into simpler instructions internally. These micro op codes could be pipe-lined, executed in parallel, and executed out-of-order. If the Pentium II really razzle-dazzled, it did it with RISC architecture at its core. The CISC instruction decoder added a bit of die size but that did not matter much and Intel had leading-edge manufacturing tech. The internal parallelism was also put to good use by adding SIMD instructions (MMX). These first appeared in the Pentium MMX and Pentium II but the Pentium III did it much better and of course Intel has continued to add more powerful SIMD stuff over time. RISC did not win only inside Intel chips of course. Every successful ISA since the 90's has been RISC including ARM and RISC-V. But even RISC chips feature some complex instructions these days.
dhosek 1y ago
I remember at the time there was also going to be the wonderful new kernel that would allow OS/2 and MacOS to coexist on the same machine. As someone who had a Mac and an OS/2 machine side-by-side on his desk, this seemed like it could be a wonderful thing, but alas, it was never to come to be.
- linguae 1y ago
  I was just a kid during the 1990s when all of this was happening, but a few years ago I remember reading about an IBM project named GUTS where one kernel would run multiple OS "personalities": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_OS The 1990s were quite a time for personal and workstation computing.
  - LeFantome 1y ago
    This was the same design goal that Windows NT had. In fact, it launched with Win32 (Windows), OS/2, and POSIX (UNIX). I think the OS/2 subsystem was 16-bit OS/2 1.x so nobody cared and the POSIX subsystem was just compliant enough to win government contracts. This design is why we have the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" (a name everybody hates) because "Windows Subsystems" were already a thing in Windows. Docker, Distrobox, and even Flatpak are one kernel with multiple "personalities" but they are all still Linux I guess. You can also argue have this on our desktops today with things like KVM in Linux and Hyper-V in Windows.
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      Back then if POSIX support was actually serious I would never have bothered to play with Linux, by buying the first edition of Linux Unleashed book. I also bet that many others would not have cared, and used UNIX/NT personality if that was the case.
  - aryonoco 1y ago
    Microsoft technically delivered something very close to OS/2’s “Personalities” in Windows NT 4. They called it "Environment subsystems". Each subsystem could run applications written for different operating systems, the 3 available ones were Win32, OS/2 and POSIX. Then there was the "Integral subsystem", which operated system-specific functions on behalf of environment subsystems. But every subsystem other than Win32 was kneecapped mostly due to politics and market positioning. In late 90s Microsoft bought a company which had developed a more enhanced Unix subsystem and rebranded it as Interix and marketed as Windows Subsytem for Unix (SFU). I believe the original WSL was a resurrection of SFU before WSL2 pivoted to a VM-based approach.
jmspring 1y ago
I miss OS/2 a lot. For what it was at the time (intel, not ppc) it worked really well. When I was at Netscape, my build machine was OS/2 so I could do windows builds and still actually work. Machines then were much less capable than now, but I rarely had any bogging down of the system.
seanmcdirmid 1y ago
I did my first internship at Boca Raton in the OS/2 device driver support group. They announced OS/2 PPC while I was there, and also BeOS was dropped around the same time. Suffice it to say it was an exciting time for PPC hardware that I could never afford on my own (Windows 95 also came out that year, it was all so nuts).
10729287 1y ago
Never used OS/2 Warp. Is the Document shredder icon the recycle bin ? Love it.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- haunter 1y ago
  Yes and no. It was a permanent delete, no visible GUI with deleted files. But there was an actual UNDELETE command that could be used to recover files (or not) Shredder https://files.catbox.moe/ciheyq.png https://files.catbox.moe/ciheyq.png Undelete https://files.catbox.moe/ny7xbs.png https://files.catbox.moe/ny7xbs.png
  - 10729287 1y ago
    Thank you for the explaination. Yeah, that make sense. Never tried to get back stuff from shredder but that must be challenging.
gradstudent 1y ago
To the nostalgics among us: what made OS/2 special? 32bit support? I recall trying OS/2 2.0 or 2.1 back in the day, coming from a DOS/Win3.11 setup. It seemed to have the same basic features as DOS/Windows but wasn't properly compatible with my existing software. Admittedly, this was before I knew anything about programming. I discovered Linux not much later. It wasn't compatible with anything either, but seemed like a totally different and much more compelling proposition.
- rlkf 1y ago
  > To the nostalgics among us: what made OS/2 special? I started out with OS/2 v1.1. It had threads, DLLs, multi-tasking, much larger memory space, and from v1.2 a somewhat decent filesystem. Coming from DOS 3.2/Win 2.0 this was an incredible leap, in particular the SDK was amazing compared to the ragtag assembly of info I was used to. The _delta_ between two systems haven't been this large ever since, and I think that is what contributes to the "magic" feeling.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Multitasking, SOM (contrary to COM, it does implementation inheratance across languages, multiple inheritance and has meta-classes), object based desktop, Smalltalk for business application development (basically a similar role as VB and .NET have gotten latter on on Windows), Visual Age for C++ had a Smalltalk like experience (although ported to Windows as well). However this also meant a more beefy hardware than the DOS/Windows 3.x combo.
- cobbaut 1y ago
  Back in 1995 it was, to my knowledge, the only OS capable of sharing CD-ROM's on the network. Even MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 machines could access it. It was also capable of sharing Mainframe printers using a real null-printer-driver, which was not possible on Windows NT3.51 or NT4.0. Windows always messed with the Mainframe codes that it could not understand. It was also easy to set up OS/2 as a gateway between different network hardware and protocols (Token Ring to Ethernet, or NetBios to IPX/SPX, ...) It had REXX!
dogman1050 1y ago
I had a brush with the PS/2 and OS/2 back in the day. IBM offered the PS/2-based Personal/370 on the platform with a card that could execute S/370 SW. My team built the I/O channel card for connecting 3480 tapes and the like. It was funny seeing the fat bus and tag cables attached to a little box through an adapter pigtail.
SirFatty 1y ago
Nortel Meridian PBX systems ran OS/2 Warp on a PowerPC processor.. those systems were rarely rebooted. I bet there are many still running.
- wkat4242 1y ago
  Probably some but those old towers were not VoIP capable and the handsets are no longer sold. I doubt there's many around. The voicemail card was basically an 8088 and i think still used floppies IIRC. I didn't work with them directly but I used symposium heavily as an admin (symposium was the callcenter solution)
  - SirFatty 1y ago
    I just saw one last week in a building we're looking to purchase. Still in use by the current occupant.
- xp84 1y ago
  Wow, PPC? I once had a Norstar NAM for voicemail, and did connect a monitor and keyboard and witness OS/2 on that. I think the NAM was an x86-based system. But I know the Meridian PBXs themselves were completely distinct from Norstar that I used. Never knew Nortel used PPC. Very neat! Though my time with them came only as non-IP phone systems started to be considered obsolete, I am still a huge fan of the rock-solid stability and realtime speed of those digital systems. Not to mention their lack of a need for subscription services to operate.
  - SirFatty 1y ago
    Some ran the AMD K6-2 as well...
BirAdam 1y ago
I absolutely loved OS/2. It was an absolutely phenomenal operating system. I really wish that IBM had put more effort behind it. Today, if MS and IBM could actually cooperate with one another, it'd be great to get it open sourced. Sadly, by the time OS/2 was really competitive, MS had taken the market, and there was little reason for most users to go buy another operating system when Win3 or Win95 came on their machines, and NT was shipping on workstations.
- duxup 1y ago
  I wish I could find it but there was a article written by someone who I think had some connection to sales about how OS/2 was effectively "sold wrong" by IBM who just didn't seem to know how to sell software like OS/2. I remember posting that article on a company intranet once and a bunch of former IBM sales folks (who now worked at the same company I did) chimed in to echo the idea that IBM had a neat product with OS/2 but as an organization had no idea what to do with it. Not to say it would have overtaken Windows, but it also struggled because it was sold by a company who didn't know what to do with it.
  - dardeaup 1y ago
    "IBM who just didn't seem to know how to sell software like OS/2" Clearly, IBM was never that great at marketing much of anything IMO. However, many at the time also believed that in addition to not being that good at marketing, IBM (collectively) wasn't really overly interested in marketing OS/2.
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    I remember in the warp days they were throwing free cdroms at anyone who asked, full licensed. I got several at trade shows. They were trying to sell it for sure.
  - twoodfin 1y ago
    No marketing campaign or OEM sales strategy would have saved OS/2. All the things that made it better than Windows 3.0/3.1 also meant it was totally unsuited to fill the disruptive low-end of the PC market that ate Windows up. The resulting Microsoft platform dominance led to ecosystem dominance led to software library dominance and that was the ballgame.
dardeaup 1y ago
In the OS/2 2.x days my primary means of interacting with other OS/2 folks was the Canopus (Wil Zachman) forum on Compuserve (75060,264 checking in). Weird that I still remember my Comuserve user id! At that time, there was a somewhat common saying "Annoy IBM, support OS/2!". This was essentially mocking the ineptness (disdain?) of IBM marketing for OS/2.
- reaperducer 1y ago
  (75060,264 checking in). Weird that I still remember my Comuserve user id! Over 40 years later, and I still remember mine, too. I have no idea why. Something about those octets that sticks in your brain like phone numbers used to.
wkat4242 1y ago
Huh I wonder if this would run on my G4 Mac mini. Or my G4 iMac. I still have both. Would be cool to try.
bluedino 1y ago
After returning a 'Reader Service Card' I found in Info World magazine, I started getting catalogs from Indelible Blue. They were _the_ big reseller of OS/2 software. Lots of good stuff in there, plus they had articles evangelizing OS/2 and ReXX scripting.

97 points by TMWNN 1y ago

What could have been. If the respective parties had just gotten their acts together on the PPC 615, OS/2, WordPerfect, and Lotus.

twoodfin 1y ago
Was there any act that would have overcome the synergy of Intel’s commodity hardware economics and Microsoft’s ecosystem dominance?
- bombcar 1y ago
  Yes, getting stuff together and getting it out there. Windows 95 ate the world because the world was mainly still DOS; look at the numbers. It wasn't people upgrading from Win 3.1.
  - esseph 1y ago
    Hey give Windows 3.11 FOR WORKGROUPS some respect ;)
  - BLKNSLVR 1y ago
    Being at the right age when Windows 95 came out, I didn't really know that there was a "Windows" prior to 95. My dad's computer ran DOS and used something called Powermenu as an organiser for executing programs. I think I had to run Wolfenstein in a tiny window for it to be fast enough to be playable, and may have, at one point, deleted one of the required DOS system files in order to try to tweak the life out of it to try to get it playable full screen. I think that was a 286. More years ago than I care to admit.
  - linguae 1y ago
    Additionally, while this is US-centric, there were still many households in the mid-1990s whose first computers were PCs running Windows 95, just in time for the World Wide Web to be widely available, which created demand for personal computers. Additionally, this was during the time when Apple was struggling; its Performa lineup geared toward home users was not in the best of shape in 1995 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_5200_LC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_5200_LC). By the time Steve Jobs returned and Apple released the first iMac (1998), it was just about time for Windows 98.
  - 1313ed01 1y ago
    What numbers? As much as I hated Windows 3.x (which is why I upgraded from DOS to Linux, not to Windows 95, and never looked back) it did not occur to me that many by 1995 did not have some Windows 3.x installed, as it was required for so much software (even some games).
    - bombcar 1y ago
      Windows 3.1 sold 3 million copies in the first three months, Windows 95 moved ten million copies in the first year. Everyone I knew went from either no PC at all, or an older DOS 386-era machine to a Windows 95 computer.
      - rkomorn 1y ago
        3M copies in 3 months is more than 10M in a year (if you assume sustained sales). I don't get what the numbers are supposed to imply.
        imchillyb 1y ago
        Windows 3.1: ~3 million in first six weeks, ~>3 million in first three months, ~25 million in first year. Windows 95: ~1 million in first 4 days, ~7 million in first five weeks, ~40 million in first year. These figures represent Microsoft’s own sales figures.
        rkomorn 1y ago
        Yeah those don't match parent's comment.
        1313ed01 1y ago
        Still don't support the claim that people were mainly updating from DOS without Windows 3.x. Anecdotally I still think almost everyone using DOS by 1995 had Windows 3.x installed as well. Not necessarily a copy of Windows that was the result of Microsoft selling a copy of course.
  - WorldMaker 1y ago
    One of the big reasons people were upgrading to OS/2 was people that wanted a stabler/cleaner Windows 3.1. Most of the hottest apps for OS/2 were Windows apps. IBM started on the back foot in that competition. Windows 95 clipped their heels because it had the stability/cleanliness for cheaper and less of a RAM footprint.
  - twoodfin 1y ago
    What numbers do you have in mind? I was paying very close attention to this world at the time, and I am confident that 90%+ of every PC that could run Win95 at the time of its release had been sold by an OEM as booting straight into the bundled copy of Win3.1. Yes, lots of people had older PCs and got Win95 with their hardware upgrade cycle. They were never in any danger of upgrading to OS/2 or anything else: Microsoft owned the OEM sales channel and the software ecosystem for the PC for a solid 5+ years before Windows 95.
- Synaesthesia 1y ago
  Apple somehow managed to claw it's way to releavance from a weaker position in 1998 (with PoserPC!) So if they had their act together they could have done better in the early 90s. hey squandered their early lead in the US among consumers and education and also ignored the international market. Not gonna lie Wintel was a formidable force. Microsoft was ruthless in cornering the market. But technically, OS/2 and MacOS gave Windows a run for it's money, arguably superior on some respects, and you could say the same for PowerPC and Intel.
Pocomon 1y ago
‘SteveB went on the road to see the top weeklies, industry analysts and business press this week to give our systems strategy. The meetings included demos of Windows 3.1 (pen and multimedia included), Windows NT, OS/2 2.0 including a performance comparison to Windows and a “bad app” that corrupted other applications and crashed the system. It was a very valuable trip and needs to be repeated by other MS executives throughout the next month so we hit all the publications and analysts.’ ‘The demos of OS/2 were excellent. Crashing the system had the intended effect – to FUD OS/2 2.0. People paid attention to this demo and were often surprised to our favor. Steve positioned it as -- OS/2 is not "bad" but that from a performance and "robustness" standpoint, it is NOT better than Windows’ "I have written a PM app that hangs the system (sometimes quite graphically)." http://iowa.gotthefacts.org/011107/PX_0860.pdf http://iowa.gotthefacts.org/011107/PX_0860.pdf http://iowa.gotthefacts.org/011107/PX_0797.pdf http://iowa.gotthefacts.org/011107/PX_0797.pdf
- tiahura 1y ago
  DOS ain’t done ‘till Lotus won’t run.
- twoodfin 1y ago
  Great links! I don’t see how SteveB’s “bad app” was out of bounds. IBM was telling these analysts a bad app couldn’t bring down OS/2. As someone who used (and liked!) OS/2 at the time, this was indeed false: IIRC OS/2 in this era had a single-threaded UI loop, and a misbehaving app could (and occasionally did) block input for all apps and corrupt the UI. You could argue about the difference between this and a Windows “UAE”, but to the user the experience was a broken, unusable OS/2.
thw_9a83c 1y ago
> What could have been. If the respective parties... on the PPC 615, OS/2 There was never a chance at that time because x86 chips were produced in such volumes that PowerPC chips couldn't compete price-wise. Also, OS/2 became an instant outsider once Windows 95 was released. Two underdogs don't make a winner. The article says it all: "The OS was clearly unfinished and not entirely stable. Worst of all, there were about zero applications. Because OS/2 PPC was never truly in use, PowerPC versions of OS/2 applications were never sold."
dan_linder 1y ago
I remember working with a guy who was the internal IBM rep (we were in corporate tech support in the late 1990’s and we were a BIG IBM reseller, so my friend got lots of bennies at work) and he had a PPC 605 (not the 615 IIRC), but he ran AIX on it (we were in the AIX and Unix support team). Man I was jealous!

sedatk 1y ago

Didn’t know that OS/2 had a PowerPC port, but more surprisingly, Windows NT also had a PowerPC port. Never heard of those.

giobox 1y ago
One of the original design requirements for NT was that it be portable between different CPU architectures, it was one of the driving forces behind its creation. So much so in fact, Microsoft developed NT 3.1 first on non-x86 architectures (i860 and MIPS), then later ported to x86, to ensure no x86 specific code made it in. NT supported quite a few architectures: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platforms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platforms "Windows NT 3.1 was released for Intel x86 PC compatible and PC-98 platforms, and for DEC Alpha and ARC-compliant MIPS platforms. Windows NT 3.51 added support for the PowerPC processor in 1995"... NT is a pretty interesting bit of PC history, I can highly recommend the book "Show Stopper!" by G. Pascal Zachary that recounts its development, and also dives a bit into why making the OS portable across CPU architectures was so important to the team at the time.
- sedatk 1y ago
  I know, I was a Windows engineer, I knew it had been ported to many architectures, but somehow I missed PowerPC :)
- spijdar 1y ago
  Something I didn't realize until recently was that the original MIPS version of Windows NT was Big Endian. I'd always heard it said that WinNT was strictly, 100%, absolutely always little endian, and the fact that every CPU that got a port (or was going to get a port) was either little or bi endian confirmed this. Well, it is true, but Windows did run BE on the original MIPS R3000 platform. And only on the R3K[0]. The CPU architecture flag is still defined on modern Windows as IMAGE_FILE_MACHINE_R3000BE. There's an early test build of Win3.1 + GDI somewhere that runs on this platform. The actual first release of WinNT 3.1 only supported MIPS R4000 and higher, I think. In little endian mode. [0] I know the Xbox used a modified NT kernel, I've seen claims that the Xbox 360 also was, which would make it the second NT system to run big endian. Not familiar enough with sources better than wikipedia to trust that it actually was.

nxobject 1y ago

I’m always curious how these projects come about and survive: why go to all of the effort to port for a dead-end product line? As technically sweet as it is? I imagine they would’ve found a decent market if they’d ported to Power Mac. (Also, was the x86 emulation implemented in-house? I wouldn’t be surprised if some niche small company had a x86 emulator for PPC product that they could be paid to port.)

SoftTalker 1y ago
There was definitely VirtualPC for PowerPC Macs, I used it to run TurboTax way back in the day.
twoodfin 1y ago
I think oddities like this were a consequence of a hardware world that was rocketing along the heart of Moore’s Law, alongside a software world that hadn’t matured past multi-year product cycles. When OS/2 for PowerPC was set in motion, that Intel would “Make CISC Great Again” with the Pentium was far from clear.
- bombcar 1y ago
  I remember that the "general consensus" was that RISC was gonna win, it was just a matter of when (and when it could be affordable). What was NOT certain was which RISC architecture would come out ahead, so there was a bunch of porting to "remove the risk" - later they would unport most everything and "remove the RISC". Pentium shook that tree a bit, and Pentium II really razzle-dazzled it.
  - LeFantome 1y ago
    Well, the thing is that RISC did win. It is just that the RISC that won is the one that Intel baked into their x86 chips. The Pentium introduced the idea of micro op codes though the Pentium Pro was the first chip to really run with it. The CISC x86 instructions were converted into simpler instructions internally. These micro op codes could be pipe-lined, executed in parallel, and executed out-of-order. If the Pentium II really razzle-dazzled, it did it with RISC architecture at its core. The CISC instruction decoder added a bit of die size but that did not matter much and Intel had leading-edge manufacturing tech. The internal parallelism was also put to good use by adding SIMD instructions (MMX). These first appeared in the Pentium MMX and Pentium II but the Pentium III did it much better and of course Intel has continued to add more powerful SIMD stuff over time. RISC did not win only inside Intel chips of course. Every successful ISA since the 90's has been RISC including ARM and RISC-V. But even RISC chips feature some complex instructions these days.

dhosek 1y ago

I remember at the time there was also going to be the wonderful new kernel that would allow OS/2 and MacOS to coexist on the same machine. As someone who had a Mac and an OS/2 machine side-by-side on his desk, this seemed like it could be a wonderful thing, but alas, it was never to come to be.

linguae 1y ago
I was just a kid during the 1990s when all of this was happening, but a few years ago I remember reading about an IBM project named GUTS where one kernel would run multiple OS "personalities": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_OS The 1990s were quite a time for personal and workstation computing.
- LeFantome 1y ago
  This was the same design goal that Windows NT had. In fact, it launched with Win32 (Windows), OS/2, and POSIX (UNIX). I think the OS/2 subsystem was 16-bit OS/2 1.x so nobody cared and the POSIX subsystem was just compliant enough to win government contracts. This design is why we have the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" (a name everybody hates) because "Windows Subsystems" were already a thing in Windows. Docker, Distrobox, and even Flatpak are one kernel with multiple "personalities" but they are all still Linux I guess. You can also argue have this on our desktops today with things like KVM in Linux and Hyper-V in Windows.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Back then if POSIX support was actually serious I would never have bothered to play with Linux, by buying the first edition of Linux Unleashed book. I also bet that many others would not have cared, and used UNIX/NT personality if that was the case.
- aryonoco 1y ago
  Microsoft technically delivered something very close to OS/2’s “Personalities” in Windows NT 4. They called it "Environment subsystems". Each subsystem could run applications written for different operating systems, the 3 available ones were Win32, OS/2 and POSIX. Then there was the "Integral subsystem", which operated system-specific functions on behalf of environment subsystems. But every subsystem other than Win32 was kneecapped mostly due to politics and market positioning. In late 90s Microsoft bought a company which had developed a more enhanced Unix subsystem and rebranded it as Interix and marketed as Windows Subsytem for Unix (SFU). I believe the original WSL was a resurrection of SFU before WSL2 pivoted to a VM-based approach.

jmspring 1y ago

I miss OS/2 a lot. For what it was at the time (intel, not ppc) it worked really well. When I was at Netscape, my build machine was OS/2 so I could do windows builds and still actually work. Machines then were much less capable than now, but I rarely had any bogging down of the system.

seanmcdirmid 1y ago

I did my first internship at Boca Raton in the OS/2 device driver support group. They announced OS/2 PPC while I was there, and also BeOS was dropped around the same time. Suffice it to say it was an exciting time for PPC hardware that I could never afford on my own (Windows 95 also came out that year, it was all so nuts).

10729287 1y ago

Never used OS/2 Warp. Is the Document shredder icon the recycle bin ? Love it.

deleted 1y ago
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haunter 1y ago
Yes and no. It was a permanent delete, no visible GUI with deleted files. But there was an actual UNDELETE command that could be used to recover files (or not) Shredder https://files.catbox.moe/ciheyq.png https://files.catbox.moe/ciheyq.png Undelete https://files.catbox.moe/ny7xbs.png https://files.catbox.moe/ny7xbs.png
- 10729287 1y ago
  Thank you for the explaination. Yeah, that make sense. Never tried to get back stuff from shredder but that must be challenging.

gradstudent 1y ago

To the nostalgics among us: what made OS/2 special? 32bit support? I recall trying OS/2 2.0 or 2.1 back in the day, coming from a DOS/Win3.11 setup. It seemed to have the same basic features as DOS/Windows but wasn't properly compatible with my existing software. Admittedly, this was before I knew anything about programming. I discovered Linux not much later. It wasn't compatible with anything either, but seemed like a totally different and much more compelling proposition.

rlkf 1y ago
> To the nostalgics among us: what made OS/2 special? I started out with OS/2 v1.1. It had threads, DLLs, multi-tasking, much larger memory space, and from v1.2 a somewhat decent filesystem. Coming from DOS 3.2/Win 2.0 this was an incredible leap, in particular the SDK was amazing compared to the ragtag assembly of info I was used to. The _delta_ between two systems haven't been this large ever since, and I think that is what contributes to the "magic" feeling.
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pjmlp 1y ago
Multitasking, SOM (contrary to COM, it does implementation inheratance across languages, multiple inheritance and has meta-classes), object based desktop, Smalltalk for business application development (basically a similar role as VB and .NET have gotten latter on on Windows), Visual Age for C++ had a Smalltalk like experience (although ported to Windows as well). However this also meant a more beefy hardware than the DOS/Windows 3.x combo.
cobbaut 1y ago
Back in 1995 it was, to my knowledge, the only OS capable of sharing CD-ROM's on the network. Even MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 machines could access it. It was also capable of sharing Mainframe printers using a real null-printer-driver, which was not possible on Windows NT3.51 or NT4.0. Windows always messed with the Mainframe codes that it could not understand. It was also easy to set up OS/2 as a gateway between different network hardware and protocols (Token Ring to Ethernet, or NetBios to IPX/SPX, ...) It had REXX!

dogman1050 1y ago

I had a brush with the PS/2 and OS/2 back in the day. IBM offered the PS/2-based Personal/370 on the platform with a card that could execute S/370 SW. My team built the I/O channel card for connecting 3480 tapes and the like. It was funny seeing the fat bus and tag cables attached to a little box through an adapter pigtail.

SirFatty 1y ago

Nortel Meridian PBX systems ran OS/2 Warp on a PowerPC processor.. those systems were rarely rebooted. I bet there are many still running.

wkat4242 1y ago
Probably some but those old towers were not VoIP capable and the handsets are no longer sold. I doubt there's many around. The voicemail card was basically an 8088 and i think still used floppies IIRC. I didn't work with them directly but I used symposium heavily as an admin (symposium was the callcenter solution)
- SirFatty 1y ago
  I just saw one last week in a building we're looking to purchase. Still in use by the current occupant.
xp84 1y ago
Wow, PPC? I once had a Norstar NAM for voicemail, and did connect a monitor and keyboard and witness OS/2 on that. I think the NAM was an x86-based system. But I know the Meridian PBXs themselves were completely distinct from Norstar that I used. Never knew Nortel used PPC. Very neat! Though my time with them came only as non-IP phone systems started to be considered obsolete, I am still a huge fan of the rock-solid stability and realtime speed of those digital systems. Not to mention their lack of a need for subscription services to operate.
- SirFatty 1y ago
  Some ran the AMD K6-2 as well...

BirAdam 1y ago

I absolutely loved OS/2. It was an absolutely phenomenal operating system. I really wish that IBM had put more effort behind it. Today, if MS and IBM could actually cooperate with one another, it'd be great to get it open sourced. Sadly, by the time OS/2 was really competitive, MS had taken the market, and there was little reason for most users to go buy another operating system when Win3 or Win95 came on their machines, and NT was shipping on workstations.

duxup 1y ago
I wish I could find it but there was a article written by someone who I think had some connection to sales about how OS/2 was effectively "sold wrong" by IBM who just didn't seem to know how to sell software like OS/2. I remember posting that article on a company intranet once and a bunch of former IBM sales folks (who now worked at the same company I did) chimed in to echo the idea that IBM had a neat product with OS/2 but as an organization had no idea what to do with it. Not to say it would have overtaken Windows, but it also struggled because it was sold by a company who didn't know what to do with it.
- dardeaup 1y ago
  "IBM who just didn't seem to know how to sell software like OS/2" Clearly, IBM was never that great at marketing much of anything IMO. However, many at the time also believed that in addition to not being that good at marketing, IBM (collectively) wasn't really overly interested in marketing OS/2.
- wkat4242 1y ago
  I remember in the warp days they were throwing free cdroms at anyone who asked, full licensed. I got several at trade shows. They were trying to sell it for sure.
- twoodfin 1y ago
  No marketing campaign or OEM sales strategy would have saved OS/2. All the things that made it better than Windows 3.0/3.1 also meant it was totally unsuited to fill the disruptive low-end of the PC market that ate Windows up. The resulting Microsoft platform dominance led to ecosystem dominance led to software library dominance and that was the ballgame.

dardeaup 1y ago

In the OS/2 2.x days my primary means of interacting with other OS/2 folks was the Canopus (Wil Zachman) forum on Compuserve (75060,264 checking in). Weird that I still remember my Comuserve user id! At that time, there was a somewhat common saying "Annoy IBM, support OS/2!". This was essentially mocking the ineptness (disdain?) of IBM marketing for OS/2.

reaperducer 1y ago
(75060,264 checking in). Weird that I still remember my Comuserve user id! Over 40 years later, and I still remember mine, too. I have no idea why. Something about those octets that sticks in your brain like phone numbers used to.

wkat4242 1y ago

Huh I wonder if this would run on my G4 Mac mini. Or my G4 iMac. I still have both. Would be cool to try.

bluedino 1y ago

After returning a 'Reader Service Card' I found in Info World magazine, I started getting catalogs from Indelible Blue. They were _the_ big reseller of OS/2 software. Lots of good stuff in there, plus they had articles evangelizing OS/2 and ReXX scripting.