16 ms·

Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2

329 points by jorgecastillo 13y ago

mathattack 13y ago
I remember an internal training class at a large consulting firm in the mid 90s that was using OS/2. I thought, "This is an awful sign. Are we doing this just to get some business with IBM?" They were a big user of Lotus Notes 2. You never know...
damian2000 13y ago
Incredible that companies like Apple (Mac), Atari (ST) and Commodore (Amiga) weren't able to fully capitalise on their leading position in GUI based OSes of the time, which were miles ahead of both MS and IBM.
- nl 13y ago
  Those of us around then know exactly why this was: PC Clones were too cheap and got better too quickly for other platforms to compete. Back then we all thought "computers" was a hardware game. Only Microsoft realised the hardware didn't matter, software was the main game. And yes, I realise we have swung back to the "integrated hardware/software platform" thing being important again. Picking winning strategies in platform wars is hard.
  - kickingvegas 13y ago
    To add to what nl said: Not only were MS-DOS compatible PCs cheaper, but also MS-DOS apps had a significant install base by the time OS/2 came out. The concerns of running legacy software on the then new 286 and the "just over the horizon" 386 CPUs was heavily weighted. Also, GUIs on all platforms then took up enough system resources (memory and CPU) that made enough folks pause in thinking that they could get better performance/cost running console-based apps.
  - laureny 13y ago
    > Only Microsoft realised the hardware didn't matter, software was the main game. Yes. This was one of Bill Gates' many strokes of genius. After just one year of Traf'o'Data (Microsoft's precursor), Gates saw that the future was in software, not hardware, and he created Microsoft centered around this very vision (while Apple bet the farm on hardware).
    - ams6110 13y ago
      Apple tried allowing cloners to copy the hardware and being software for a while, it nearly killed them. I don't recall if the clones were ever price-competitve with x86 clones though.
      - nl 13y ago
        TO be fair, almost everything Apple did at that time "almost killed them". The clones did expand the Mac market, but Apple was so incompetent at that point that it didn't know how to handle that.
  - kabdib 13y ago
    Also, Atari didn't get marketing (Jack Tramiel was very reluctant to spend money there). Atari really didn't get systems software, either, and never hired to the extent needed to make a good impact there. The world was basically safe from Atari being anything other than a low-end consumer computer company. And the thing that probably saved Apple in the late 80s was the desktop publishing business.
    - nl 13y ago
      Also, Atari didn't get marketing (Jack Tramiel was very reluctant to spend money there). I know that is the conventional story (and pretty similar for the Amiga). I'm not convinced. I think that both the Amiga & the Atari ST were too far ahead of their time. They were multimedia workstations, without anywhere to play that multimedia (except on other Ataris and Amigas). Like you said, the Mac managed to hit the desktop publishing wave, which was exactly right for the the paper-centric late 80's and early 90's.
      - _delirium 13y ago
        Yeah, the Amiga seems like it completely dominated the multimedia niche, but the multimedia niche of the time essentially consisted of the demoscene. Which was great, except that the demoscene was not that large.
        Keyframe 13y ago
        Huh, Amiga (1000 onwards) was big in video. Especially smaller TV stations that couldn't afford SGIs. Amiga (and SGIs) were light years ahead of Macs in graphics. People often forget this fact.
        bnastic 13y ago
        Amiga 2000 (mostly) + NewTek Video Toaster[1] were the driving force behind the TV graphics back then. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster
  - damian2000 13y ago
    Around 1989 I traded my Amiga 500 for an IBM AT clone running DOS. Each was worth around AUD$1000 at the time. It felt like I was going back in time 10 years - a mono screen and no mouse. The reason was that I needed it for uni.study purposes (Turbo pascal, Turbo C++, etc.) ...
- dhughes 13y ago
  One reason: stigma. All I recall from childhood/teen years is "IBM compatible PC" a mantra on every TV commercial IBM or others produced. A PC was for business and you were rich or a fool to spend thousands on something so useless to a regular Joe. Apple was even more expensive and even less common than a PC and even so Apple was quirky and drew pictures, ATARI and Commodore were for games. They were in totally different worlds. Back then I wouldn't have even thought to have one computer that did everything.
  - smacktoward 13y ago
    I dunno about that. At least where I grew up, if your family had a Mac or an Amiga, it was like you had domesticated a unicorn. Everybody wanted to see it, play with it. It marked you out as a member of a family possessed of either great sophistication or enormous wealth, either of which translates easily to status. If there was any stigma, it was for being on the opposite end of the spectrum -- having a computer whose primary selling point was that it was cheap, like a Commodore 64. The C64 was a fine machine for the price, but nobody was going to ooooh and aaah over it they way they would if you took them into your Dad's study and showed them MacPaint.
    - pjmlp 13y ago
      Yeah. I was the only one, among my circle of friends owning computers, that had a PC instead of an Amiga. My dad thought the Amiga were only good for playing games, for anyone serious about computers, PC was the way to go. So I was left reading 68000 Assembly manuals, some Amiga reference books, and playing with them on computer parties we used to organize. In any case, the only way to buy any of them in my home country was on credit.
  - damian2000 13y ago
    Agreed, Atari ST and Amiga especially never caught on much with businesses ... they were definitely seen as games machines, even though their capabilities were certainly on par with the IBM clones.
  - djKianoosh 13y ago
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  This is slightly counterfactual. The Mac today has a solid unix heart and runs on the best processors and technology out there, but that was not always so, and they were weakest precisely when PCs grew strongest. The internals of pre OS X Mac OS are horrific and disturbing. They are in no way superior to the internals of Windows 95 and are at best only perceived superior due to a different user experience peppered with a healthy dose of self-delusion, certainly not through stability or performance. They are infantile compared to OS/2. Moreover, over the next few years after Windows 95 was released the PC improved greatly while the Mac mostly stagnated. Around the Power Mac era things were roughly even in terms of capabilities and performance though the Mac was significantly more expensive, by the Pentium and especially Pentium II era the PC began to become objectively more powerful than the Mac. This put Apple into a freefall that they were only rescued from by the return of Steve Jobs who established style as a foundation the company rested on and pushed them into digital media and mobile devices, as well as forcing a hardware architecture migration (to the formerly hated x86 from the PowerPC architecture developed by a consortium of which Apple was a huge part of) and a complete OS rewrite (transforming Mac OS from an antiquated bucket of kludges into NeXTSTEP in Apple clothing). At the time in question though Apple was pushing old, slow hardware at a price premium in a market that was rapidly passing them by.
  - npsimons 13y ago
    Very spot on! Not many seem to remember, but OS/2 truly was technically superior to just about everything else out there in consumer computer land, excepting maybe things like 386BSD (which many of us didn't know about at the time, and probably would have peed our pants at setting up X ;). OS/2 had pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection; Apple and Microsoft didn't even come close in their offerings. Say what you will about how IBM fumbled the marketing, licensing, etc, or how the upstarts(!) won against the Evil Empire, but OS/2 was the better operating system, and Microsoft honed it's FUD by attacking IBM and OS/2, whilst offering a truly awful alternative.
    - InclinedPlane 13y ago
      Oh god. I remember setting up X back in the dark days of the early linux era. Peeing ones pants would have been preferable, it's astounding how far we've come. As for Windows vs. OS/2 it's at best complicated. It's a bit like a micro-cosm of the PC vs mainframe debate. The raison d'etre of Windows 95 was backward compatability with a low memory footprint. That may seem like a small thing, or at best not a thing to make so many enormous compromises over, but back then it was everything. The problem with doing multi-tasking "right" was that it imposed a ~4mb RAM requirement per 16-bit application being run at the same time. That is nothing today but back then 4mb was the minimum requirement for installing Windows 95, and it represented a cost of around $100 in 1995. Owning a computer powerful enough to run even a handful of 16-bit apps while running OS/2 or NT was simply above the economic means of a lot of people. And by the time technology caught up and RAM became cheap enough to make proper multi-tasking cost effective there was too much Windows 9x network effect for competitors to make much headway.
- gaius 13y ago
  An excellent book that studies that is The Future Was Here http://www.amazon.co.uk/Future-Was-Here-Commodore-Platform-ebook/dp/B007V5BVJG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1385368350&sr=8-1&keywords=the+future+was+here http://www.amazon.co.uk/Future-Was-Here-Commodore-Platform-e...
michaelhoffman 13y ago
> IBM licensed Commodore’s AREXX scripting language and included it with OS/2 2.0. I find this hard to believe, given that Rexx was developed by IBM. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rexx http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rexx
- galonk 13y ago
  Ars Technica isn't exactly big on fact checking. These days most of their short articles are rewritten press releases, and most of their long articles are personal opinion/recollection written as if it was reportage.
  - wglb 13y ago
    While they may got the part about the history of AREXX wrong, most of the article is spot on.
    - Jeremy_Reimer 13y ago
      The AREXX error was my mistake. I just read the technology transfer part backwards when I was researching. I've already fixed it in the article and updated it.
    - taspeotis 13y ago
      The original tagline was "IBM doesn't make operating systems anymore for a reason" which could have been debunked by knowing anything about IBM's product line or about 5 seconds of Googling. Disclaimer: I'm an Ars subscriber and <3 Ars but when my bullshit detector is already off the charts before the article begins ... it makes me wonder how good the article is.
- rodgerd 13y ago
  Indeed. And IBM do, in fact, still make other OSes, contrary to the subhead of the story: zVM/CMS, zOS (MVS), AIX, and whatever they're calling AS/400 these days.
  - 13y ago
lbarrow 13y ago
Great read. In the end, it seems like a classic failure to resolve the innovator's dilemma. IBM decided that the future of computing would revolve around mainframes because they liked mainframes, not because that's where the facts led them. And ultimately they paid the price for it.
- smacktoward 13y ago
  I think it's a bit more complicated than that. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who'd grown up on mainframes. The systems you're used to are fabulously expensive, sure, but their operating systems have sophisticated architectures that allow them to easily juggle multiple users running multiple programs while maintaining the security of the system overall. They are the completest expression ever realized of forty years of progress in the field of information technology. Then, one day, someone drops a PC in your lap. You are horrified. It's a single-user, single-tasking system with absolutely nothing stopping the user from trashing everything by running the wrong program. To you, this new... thing, whatever it is, is barely worth the name "computer." It feels more like a toy -- like something you would give to a child to play with. Certainly nobody would ever run critical systems on it, you think. And here's the thing. You're absolutely right! All your concerns are one hundred percent valid. But it turns out that nobody cares; the PC is much, much cheaper, and it lets everyone have their own dedicated hardware right on their desk running any software they care to install, instead of time-sharing a mainframe and begging for permission each time they want to try a new program. Or, put more bluntly, it lets them escape from having to deal with the corporate IT priesthood (i.e. you) anymore. The market speaks! You are derided as a pointy-headed nerd and swept into the dustbin of history. Now fast forward ten or fifteen years. People start taking all those PCs they bought and hooking them together into networks... and suddenly all those things you were worried about back in the day come roaring back to bite them. Users discover that their machine stops talking to the network when they click and hold the mouse button, because the OS can't walk and chew gum at the same time. And the complete lack of security makes their machines super easy to compromise. The PC vendors panic. They scramble to rewrite their old systems into systems that can live comfortably on a network. And when they're done, they roll out systems that look an awful lot like what you were insisting the baseline for a "real computer" was fifteen years ago. The world cheers and lines up to buy back all the sophistication they had happily thrown away before. In other words, it's not so much that the IBMers were wrong, it's that they were early. When OS/2 arrived, the world didn't understand yet why it needed something like OS/2. And by the time it did, OS/2 didn't exist anymore. But in this business, being early is effectively the same thing as being wrong. The market doesn't give out points for foresight.
mp99e99 13y ago
This was a great article, thanks for posting!
melling 13y ago
If anyone wants an insider's view, here's a Usenet post from one of the early Microsoft employees, Gordon Letwin: http://gunkies.org/wiki/Gordon_Letwin_OS/2_usenet_post http://gunkies.org/wiki/Gordon_Letwin_OS/2_usenet_post Somewhere in the Usenet archive is Gordon trolling the OS/2 users for weeks (or months?) on end. I can't remember the exact details, but he had a bet with several people that Windows would have multitasking, or that OS/2 wouldn't have some sort of multitasking before Windows. The bet was to fly the winner to any city of their choice and buy them dinner. The discussions were quite heated and it was particulary memorable because he was one of the first 12 employees at Microsoft. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Letwin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Letwin
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- twoodfin 13y ago
  Letwin was also the guy for OS/2 on the Microsoft side while the alliance lasted. His Inside OS/2 is a detailed account of trying to squeeze a real multitasking, protected memory OS into a '286: http://www.amazon.com/Inside-OS-2-Gordon-Letwin/dp/1556151179 http://www.amazon.com/Inside-OS-2-Gordon-Letwin/dp/155615117... The cover photo is also classic.
  - jonah 13y ago
    "Foreword by Bill Gates"
  - adamnemecek 13y ago
    The photo should be in a National Geographic captioned "A Unix beard in his natural habitat".
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      In its natural habitat. A Unix beard is genderless; it merely seems to exhibit a preference for male hosts.
jjguy 13y ago
If you liked this article, you should read Show Stopper. It's out of print, but there are ample used copies via Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0029356717/ http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0029356717/
- voltagex_ 13y ago
  Seems to be everywhere as an eBook. http://ereads.com/ecms/book_title/Showstopper http://ereads.com/ecms/book_title/Showstopper (warning, will set affiliate codes on Amazon links)
- tokenrove 13y ago
  It's not quite at the level of Soul of a New Machine, but I still think every programmer should read this book. A great story from the trenches. It gave me so much respect for Dave Cutler, and confirmed so many things I suspected about Microsoft at the time.
  - _sh 13y ago
    Yeah? My reading of that book was that there was such an inhuman marriage/life destroying crunch getting NT out the door that nobody covered themselves in glory, much less showed themselves worthy of respect. And it explained to me, in clear terms, why Windows was such a buggy pile of shit. It was created of its culture.
- mschaef 13y ago
  "FoxTales" by Kerry Nietz is also a good read. Kerry talks about his experiences joining FoxPro development as a freshout college grad. I never cared all that much for FoxPro/xbase, but the book is a good read. http://www.amazon.com/FoxTales-Behind-Scenes-Fox-Software/dp/1930919506 http://www.amazon.com/FoxTales-Behind-Scenes-Fox-Software/dp...
Stratoscope 13y ago
> Long before operating systems got exciting names based on giant cats and towns in California named after dogs, most of their names were pretty boring. Ah, yes. Mavericks, California. It's a great little offshore town, just off Pillar Point. I love that town. Kidding aside, this is a great article. Related to this story, the Windows 3.0 visual shell was originally not supposed to be Program Manager and File Manager. It was going to be a program called Ruby that I worked on with Alan Cooper and our team. Ruby was a shell construction kit with a visual editor to lay out forms and components, which we called gizmos. You would drag arrows between gizmos to connect events fired by one gizmo to actions taken on another. The shell was extensible, with an API for creating gizmos. A really weak area was the command language for the actions to be taken on an event. It was about on the level of batch files if that. But we hoped the API would allow for better command languages to be added along with more gizmos. BTW, this project was where the phrase "fire an event" came from. I was looking for a name for process of one gizmo sending a message to another. I knew that SQL had triggers, but for some reason I didn't like that name. I got frustrated one night and started firing rubber bands at my screen to help me think. It was a habit I had back then, probably more practical on a tough glass CRT than it is today. After firing a few rubber bands, I knew what to call it. (As one might guess, I've always been curious to know if the phrase "fire an event" was used before that. I wasn't aware of it, but who knows.) Anyway, Ruby didn't become the Windows 3.0 shell after all. The went with ProgMan and FileMan instead. To give Ruby a better command language, they adapted Basic and the result was Visual Basic. Gizmos were renamed "controls" (sigh), and my Gizmo API became the notorious VBX interface (sorry about that). And we still don't have a programmable visual shell in Windows.
- wglb 13y ago
  I don't think we used that exact terminology, but back in the '70s in the real-time interrupt-driven world, the concept was there. In fact, if you had used that phrase at that time, everyone would have grasped the meaning.
  - Stratoscope 13y ago
    Indeed, when I was firing those rubber bands, I didn't think I'd coined some truly novel piece of terminology. It seemed like a fairly obvious word, especially given the use of "trigger" in the SQL world. Ah, it starts to come back! In SQL, "trigger" is a noun, not a verb. It refers to a stored procedure that's executed in response to some event. I knew "trigger" could also be used as a verb, of course, but it seemed that it might be confusing to use it that way given its meaning in SQL. So that's when I started searching for words and firing rubber bands. I might have fired up something else too, but that's a story for another day...
sehugg 13y ago
OS/2 had many flaws but its multitasking was unseen on a PC at the time. I remember formatting a floppy while running two 16-bit Windows sessions (which were communicating with each other) and multiple DOS windows, thinking I was in the future. Even Windows 95 was limited by many system calls being funneled through single threaded BIOS or DOS 16-bit land.
- waterlesscloud 13y ago
  I remember installing it from the 15 billion floppies it came on and thinking much the same thing. It seems like it was on 5-1/4" disks. Can that be right? And REXX! Ha. REXX.
  - tomfakes 13y ago
    3 1/2" The IBM PS/2 only came with the smaller disk, so bigger wasn't necessary
- kenjackson 13y ago
  Couldn't the Amiga already do all that multitasking on a 256KB machine, years before?
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    He said for a PC, i.e. an IBM PC clone.
  - megablast 13y ago
    I don't think the Amiga had real multi-tasking, from what I understand. I may be wrong.
    - protomyth 13y ago
      It had real preemptive multitasking, but lacked memory protection.
    - mnw21cam 13y ago
erichocean 13y ago
I seem to recall UPS widely deploying OS/2 internally back in the 90s, with custom (internal) apps written for it. Probably all Windows by now...
kickingvegas 13y ago
A previous HN thread on OS/2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3785819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3785819
- yuhong 13y ago
  Also see these threads with my comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3785819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3785819 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3441885 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3441885
dangoldin 13y ago
I remember my dad getting a promotional shirt for OS/2 with the caption "Flight 4.0 to Chicago has been delayed, I'm taking off with OS/2" The idea being that Windows 95 was internally called Windows 4.0 with the codename Chicago. I keep on searching for it but can't find it anywhere. And Bill Gates on OS/2 in 1987: "I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time."
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  I remember seeing this article in popsci way back when: http://www.popsci.com/archive-viewer?id=vypUfjzMwlAC&pg=52 http://www.popsci.com/archive-viewer?id=vypUfjzMwlAC&pg=52 It talks about Windows 4.0 and other contemporary "next gen" operating systems.
- huxley 13y ago
  You can find many of Microsoft's codenames here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_codenames#Windows_3.1x.2F9x http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_codenames#Win... My favourite codename sniping had to do with Windows NT (codename Cairo) and NeXT. When announcing NeXTSTEP 4.0 (codename Mecca), Jobs quipped, "Why stop at Cairo when you can go all the way to Mecca?" http://www.paullynch.org/NeXTSTEP/Expo.1994.htmld/ http://www.paullynch.org/NeXTSTEP/Expo.1994.htmld/
steven2012 13y ago
I actually bought a copy of OS/2 Warp when it came out because I was interested in its preemptive multi-tasking, and it was a decent operating system for what it's worth. I was definitely more stable than Window 3.11, but its real problem was compatibility. Back in the early 90s, everything was about getting compatibility, and while OS/2 had good compatibility, didn't have perfect compatibility. As well, I worked at a bank, and as the article correctly stated, the entire bank was run on OS/2, most notably the ATMs, except the ATMs I worked with was using OS/2 2.0. However, when Windows NT 3.51 came out, that was the game changer. I was the only person I knew who even knew what it was (I read about it in a magazine at the time), and I was able to get a student-priced copy at my college bookstore. I started using it, and it was awesome, everything just worked, except for some games. You couldn't even compare NT 3.51 to OS/2, it wasn't even in the same level. The look and feel of NT was exactly the same as Windows 3.11, and all the programs worked.
- jonah 13y ago
  My computer had 8mb RAM at the time and NT required 16 to install so I "borrowed" another 8 from one of the school computers, installed NT and then returned the memory. It ran well enough on 8.
  - steven2012 13y ago
    I was lucky enough to have a 486DX-50 (not a DX2-66)with 16 MB of RAM, so it ran perfectly for me. Even with what was bleeding edge hardware at the time, I still remember trying to finish writing my senior project using Corel Draw and Microsoft Word on Windows 3.11, and having my computer crash ever 30-45 mins, and my project partner eventually broke down and started crying because of how frustrating it was.
    - jonah 13y ago
      Yeah, mine was a Pentium 90! (I decided to scrimp on RAM and get the 90 in stead of the 66.) It was a huge jump from the 286 I had before. (Upgrading memory meant socketing rows of individual DIPs.)
yuhong 13y ago
The sad thing is that I have never seen an article on the entire MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco that is what I call complete and detailed and many omitting for example the unethical attacks MS did against OS/2 such as "Microsoft Munchkins". I try with my own blog article, but I admit it is not very good either.
- michaelwww 13y ago
  Wikipedia has some interesting things to say about it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_OS/2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_OS/2
mbennett 13y ago
>Finally, and most importantly for the future of the company, Bill Gates hired the architect of the industrial-strength minicomputer operating system VMS and put him in charge of the OS/2 3.0 NT group. Dave Cutler’s first directive was to throw away all the old OS/2 code and start from scratch. The company wanted to build a high-performance, fault-tolerant, platform-independent, and fully networkable operating system. It would be known as Windows NT. A couple of decades later, Dave Cutler is still around at Microsoft and worked on the hypervisor for the Xbox One at the ripe young age of 71, allowing games to run seamlessly beside apps. From http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/8/5075216/xbox-one-tv-microsofts-plan-to-take-over-the-living-room http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/8/5075216/xbox-one-tv-micros... >Underneath it all lies the magic — a system layer called the hypervisor that manages resources and keeps both platforms running optimally even as users bounce back and forth between games, apps, and TV. >To build the hypervisor, Multerer recruited the heaviest hitter he could find: David Cutler, a legendary 71-year-old Microsoft senior technical fellow who wrote the VMS mainframe operating system in 1975 and then came to Microsoft and served as the chief architect of Windows NT. >It appears his work bridging the two sides of the One has gone swimmingly: jumping between massively complex games like Forza Motorsport 5, TV, and apps like Skype and Internet Explorer was seamless when I got to play with a system in Redmond. Switching in and out of Forza was particularly impressive: the game instantly resumed, with no loading times at all. "It all just works for people," says Henshaw as he walks me through the demo. "They don’t have to think about what operating system is there."
- pjmlp 13y ago
  Yes, many like to bash Windows, but the NT family is actually a VMS at heart, spoiled by a not so good user land experience. I once attend a session by him about the Windows kernel design, quite interesting.
  - gjm11 13y ago
    VMS + 1 = WNT, in the same way as IBM - 1 = HAL. (So far as I know, both of these are just amusing coincidences.)
    - 13y ago
protomyth 13y ago
I bought OS/2 for work to run on some DEC PC (not the damn Rainbow, the decent 486 DEC sold). The graphic card (S3) wasn't supported out of the box, so I called the IBM and got nowhere other than an acknowledgement it existed. I called DEC and they too believed it existed, so they (while I was still on the line) called their contact at IBM. After being transferred twice, we arrived at the person who could mail me the driver, but I would have to sign an NDA. Myself and the DEC rep explained we didn't want source or a beta driver, just the release one. He insisted every customer had to sign. I said I'd think about it. After hanging up, the DEC rep couldn't stop laughing. He asked if I wanted a free copy of NT compliments of DEC. I took it and it had the correct driver. I tried, but they had no chance.
- baldfat 13y ago
  > not the damn Rainbow Hey I had a Rainbow! It was pretty amazing IF it had it's full potential it would have been the best computer until the Amiga came out. Rainbow: CPUs - Z80 (8 Bit) and a Intel 8080 OS - CP/M and MS-DOS Could be upgraded to 286 later. Would have been perfect BUT they didn't get things setup correctly and I was really stuck in Z80 CP/M land.
  - protomyth 13y ago
    One man's innovation is another man's Frankenstein Monster. It was actually an 8088 not an 8080. Anyone who had to deal with people using those damn Rainbow floppy disk drives has my eternal sympathy. I really, really want to know what they were thinking on both the format and how you inserted those disks.
    - Someone 13y ago
      Had to look up what that was about. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_100#Floppy_disk_drives http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_100#Floppy_disk_drives, they could do away with one drive motor, with only a 'minor' disadvantage: "Of note was the single motor used to drive both disk drives via a common spindle, which were arranged one on top of the other. That meant that one disk went underneath the first but inserted upside-down."
jboggan 13y ago
Up until March of last year a lot of ATMs in the US were still running OS/2 . . . I "upgraded" a lot of them to Windows XP. Yuck. When I would take the OS/2 system offline and replace it with a Windows cage the payment network would sometimes tell me the uptime on the deprecated machines . . . one network operator claimed 8 years of uptime at one particular machine. I have no way of confirming that, but I definitely felt the OS/2 machines were rock solid, especially compared to the vulnerable Windows machines. Most small banks with NCR machines are running two software packages (APTRA Edge or Advance) with default admin passwords and are really behind on the monthly bug patches. Eek. The OS/2 machines required you to input config info in hex though, so I was glad I didn't have to work on them in the field too much.
- gnaffle 13y ago
  When you think of it, 8 years of uptime isn't special for a machine running on a UPS and not needing a reboot for software updates. There simply isn't a reason for a well-built operating system running on solid hardware to crash.
  - marshray 13y ago
    Cosmic rays, but yeah, that's solid.
  - LinaLauneBaer 13y ago
    ATMs usually do not have a UPS.
    - TallGuyShort 13y ago
      Then I'm more impressed by the local utilities than the OS :)
  - jboggan 13y ago
    No UPS for a lot of machines. I can't imagine the OS/2 getting an update simply because core ATM features haven't changed since the 80's. But it was still impressive uptime because ATMs are generally cantankerous creatures. A software upgrade on the XP machines was ridiculous. It usually involved 3-4 hours of loading and booting and restarting with several different CDs. The other techs and I were convinced that NCR padded the installs/updates to take longer since their certified field techs billed out at around $300/hour.
kabdib 13y ago
When OS/2 Warp came out, I remember it being insanely cheap ($20?), so in a what-the-hell mood I bought it. Took it home and tried to install it. It was a hopeless mess of disks, both optical and floppy, and I never got it to run. One of my cow-orkers at Apple had worked on the OS/2 Presentation Manager at IBM. I tried talking with her about it, but she said the experience had been "absolutely awful" and she didn't want to say much else. IBM never had a chance.
- baruch 13y ago
  I have OS/2 Warp 3 and 4, both boxes at home. They both worked on my computer at the time and run my tiny BBS and allowed me to work on the computer flawlessly. This was much better than my peers who had to dedicate a computer to this. But then I had a loaner modem and a shared voice/BBS line and they had a private line for the BBS too. It worked nicely and the install wasn't bad, it was quite a few disks but than Windows didn't fare much better in that regard. It was also a mess of many floppy disks to perform an install. I remember fondly the Team OS/2 meetings where we could geek out our love for OS/2 and mourn the inefficiency of IBM marketing to push it. And then I found Linux.
zura 13y ago
Hah, I was thinking to Ask HN these days about the availability of exotic jobs, including OS/2 (or eComStation) programming jobs. I also wouldn't mind to take Motif jobs. Feel free to contact me if you have any ;)
- yuhong 13y ago
  Motif was recently GPLed, as it happened.
nikbackm 13y ago
Interesting read. This part really brought the current Windows 8 push by Microsoft to mind. "These machines were meant to wrestle control of the PC industry away from the clone makers, but they were also meant to subtly push people back toward a world where PCs were the servants and mainframes were the masters. They were never allowed to be too fast or run a proper operating system that would take advantage of the 32-bit computing power available with the 386 chip. In trying to do two contradictory things at once, they failed at both." Not quite the same situation, but they have many similarities.
forgottenpaswrd 13y ago
"Version 3.0 was going to up the graphical ante with an exciting new 3D beveled design (which had first appeared with OS/2 1.2)" I think it was Next computers who got first on this.
justincormack 13y ago
As this article admits, it is just a rewrite of "Triumph of the Nerds".
- jfb 13y ago
  Yeah, it's typical of Ars these days. Not particularly artful rehashing of existing info.
jlebrech 13y ago
don't outsource for the sake of a few months, if things take time, then they take time.
mnw21cam 13y ago
The article says that the Mac OS was the only OS to ship that ran on PowerPC CPUs. This is not true - later versions of the Amiga OS ran on PowerPC.
mschaef 13y ago
I have fond memories of OS/2 from the summer of 1995. At the time, I was a undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin, and IBM needed summer intern testers for a product they were calling "OS/2 Lan Server Enterprise". OS/2 LSE was IBM's effort to re-platform OS/2 LAN Server on top of OS/2 DCE (in development on the lab next door to LSE). The general idea was to provide a way to scale up OS/2 so that it would interoperate with other DCE-based systems (mainly RS/6000 AIX, IIRC). Anyway, the machine IBM gave me to use was a PS/2 Model 80. This was a 1988-era machine that had been brought to the semi-modern era with 20MB of RAM memory installed via several MCA expansion cards. Against my best expectations, the machine ran well, despite the fact that its CPU was at least 10% the speed of the then-state of the art. From what I remember, the OS/2 LSE product itself was fairly solid. However, the biggest memory I have from that summer was the afternoon we spent playing around with the Microsoft Windows 95 beta disk we received for compatability testing. Towards the end of the afternoon, we tried to DriveSpace (compress) the disk. We got bored during the wait for the compress, so we pulled the power on the machine thinking that would be the end of it. However, once we powered the machine back up to install OS/2, Windows 95 just resumed compressing away like nothing happened. A few weeks later, a friend and I went to CompUSA for the Windows95 launch. Even at midnight, there was a line out the door, winding past the Windows 95 boxes, then the Plus Pack, then Office 95, and then memory upgrades... Didn't hear much about OS/2 after that...
swampboy 13y ago
I enjoyed the article. It was a nice trip down memory lane. Regarding development tools, there were 2 commercial IDEs based on REXX: Watcom VX-REXX and VisPro REXX. I used Watcom's VX-REXX and it was a joy to use and allowed for incredibly fast and powerful application development. I heard the same about VisPro REXX. IBM's early set of tools C/2 and C Set++ were a bit painful to use. VisualAge C++ 3.0 was a decent toolset once you got over the weirdness of it. For a while, if you wanted to write C or C++ code using sockets you had to purchase IBM's TCP/IP SDK for $100. The SIQ was a "synchronous" input queue and the problem has been understated in the article and comments. It was really bad. The base OS was incredibly stable, but the GUI shell, not so much due to the SIQ problem. There were a number of Unix and Unix-like systems in addition to the ones already listed: Coherent, Interactive, and SCO are some that come to mind. They were pretty expensive IIRC, around $1000 to license.
mdip 13y ago
I worked at a large computer chain (R.I.P. Softwarehouse / CompUSA) from 1993 - 1996 and had been building clone computers for businesses from 1990-1993. I remember how this played out very well. At the time, IBM had sent in scores of company reps to train up our floor staff on the advantages of OS/2 over the always-soon-to-be-released Chicago. They did a good job getting all of us to "drink the Kool Aid". I received a free (not pirated, promotional) copy of blue OS/2 Warp 3.0. It was a fantastic operating system for running a DOS based multi-node Telegard BBS and it did well with Win16 applications. The impact of Windows 95 coming on the scene, though, is difficult to fully appreciate unless you were there. We had been selling pre-orders for months and there were a myriad of promos. I remember some of those preorders were sold under the threat that there wouldn't be enough copies to go around on release day. I had been playing with pirated copies of the betas of Windows 95 for the prior two months. Even in its beta form, it ran circles around Windows 3.0/3.1 in terms of reliability. I even remember reloading my PC with the most recent beta after release because a DOS application I used ran more reliably in it than in the RTM code. Then launch day came. It was unlike anything I had ever seen in terms of a software release. We closed up at 9:00 PM and re-opened at 12:00 midnight to a line of customers that went around the building --- A line of customers ... for an operating system. We joked at the time that "Windows really was that bad". There were tons of additional promotions to ensure people came and lined up--Some RAM / hard disks selling under "cost" and others. And the atmosphere of the store felt like a party. We had theme music playing (start me up?) and some Microsoft video playing on our higher-end multi-media PCs. It was obvious to us, on the floor, trained by IBMs marketing machine, that Warp died that day. As an anecdote to the stories about IBMs marketing being a little off: I remember around the release of Warp 4.0 I saw an advertisement at a subway station something along the lines of "Warp Obliterated my PC!"-- that tagline, evidently, meant to be some hip new use of the word obliterated.
- techsupporter 13y ago
  > We closed up at 9:00 PM and re-opened at 12:00 midnight to a line of customers that went around the building --- A line of customers ... for an operating system. I grew up in Dallas, SoftWarehouse (somebody else remembers that name, awesome)/CompUSA's original stomping grounds and this story kept coming back to me throughout the whole article. Windows 95 was considered revolutionary at the time, even to those of us lined up at the Lewisville, Texas store at 10:30PM to buy an operating system. (Incidentally, the first time I ever talked my dad into taking me to an overnight release of anything.) Windows 95 was the first operating system I ever saw non-technical people set out intentionally to buy and I spent months installing it for friends and family. > We had theme music playing (start me up?) and some Microsoft video playing on our higher-end multi-media PCs. Yep, it was "Start Me Up" by the Rolling Stones. If I remember correctly, the video was a demo reel of everything new in Windows 95 and was highlighted by the huge Start button popping in at the end of the video, then fading to black. It even had a snippet of the waving Windows 3.1 flag and the bear from the "Help / About" Easter Egg hidden in 3.1.
zenbowman 13y ago
Thank you for sharing, a great article indeed. I'm glad it ended up the way it did, Microsoft at the time was betting on openness being a feature, and I think they helped move the computer and software industries they have gone in since, towards greater openness (and thereby professionalism). People associate Microsoft with closed source, but it is of course relative, they were in their day the vendor who was banking on openness and courting developers harder than the others.
picomancer 13y ago
Here's a perspective from the founder of a successful bootstrapped software startup that began by developing native OS/2 applications: http://www.stardock.com/stardock/articles/article_sdos2.html http://www.stardock.com/stardock/articles/article_sdos2.html I own a copy of the OS/2 Galactic Civilizations 2.
outworlder 13y ago
And not a single mention of Babylon 5. The special effects were created on Amigas: http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/making/effects.html http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/making/effects.html Also, while looking at Video Toaster's entry on Wikipedia, I found this gem: "An updated version called Video Toaster 4000 was later released, using the Amiga 4000's video slot. The 4000 was co-developed by actor Wil Wheaton, who worked on product testing and quality control.[6][7] He later used his public profile to serve as a technology evangelist for the product.[8] The Amiga Video Toaster 4000 source code was released in 2004 by NewTek & DiscreetFX." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster
nnq 13y ago
Why aren't the unix-family OSs of the era part of the story? Why didn't IBM even consider porting a unix-family OS to the PCs instead of paying an unproven company like Microsoft to write an OS? (...all the events from this stretch of computing history seem so weird to me, like from a steampunk-like alternate reality movie. There's surely lots of context missing and stories that nobody will ever tell, since most of the decisions taken by all the key players seem so anti-business. Computers may have changed a lot from back then, but business is still business and all the decisions made seem either "irrational" or based on "hidden information" that is not part of the story.)
- vesinisa 13y ago
  I guess because, as the article describes, IBM was all for protecting its workstation business as well as the lucrative mainframe business. A workstation back then was defined as an expensive high-end computer that was designed to be used by only one user at a time (i.e. not a multi-user mainframe), yet was suitable for high-performance applications. They were intended mostly for corporations and academia where extra juice was needed and that could afford to buy workstations (think scientific computing, CAD and graphic design in the 1980s). IBM did at this time already manufacture workstations with UNIX as the operating system (see e.g. http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=867&st=1 http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=867&st=1 ) But they were way too expensive for the home user. PC (personal computer) was the low-end product that you could afford with a normal salary. I understand UNIX back then was a mainframe and workstation operating system. Licensing was expensive and the hardware requirements beyond that of a PC. Few people had access to UNIX, mostly at universities and at big corporations. These were the very reasons why GNU and Linux were born - to provide a mostly-compatible UNIX clone for the home users with an affordable IBM PC compatible. So my theory is that IBM was protecting its mainframe business - it did not want to put the powerful UNIX to the PC because it wanted to sell more expensive special hardware to those who wanted UNIX. So it hired a maverick company (Microsoft) to write a low-end, feature-poor operating system for PC (DOS). It was (and continues to be) a business strategy to bundle better software with better hardware so that you can ask customers that want only the superior software for a higher price (still essentially the business model of a certain Cupertino, California based manufacturer)
derleth 13y ago
> So the new System/360 mainframe line would run the also brand-new OS/360. Bad example. Really bad example: Not even IBM could standardize on a single OS for the System/360. The System/360 went through a few OS iterations before OS/360 came along: OS/360 was late, as recounted in The Mythical Man-Month, so DOS/360 came along, then BOS/360, then TOS/360, and even PCP, which didn't support multiprogramming. Other OSes were CP-67, which became VM, MFT, MVT, and still more OSes on top of that. To this day, there are multiple OSes for the architecture descended from the System/360, including Linux.
jgeorge 13y ago
One of my fondest memories of OS/2 (there weren't many, sorry) was finding a media file on one of the diskettes called IBMRALLY.MID which was a little piano rendition of "Ever Onward, IBM" from way back when in the Way Back When Days of IBM.

329 points by jorgecastillo 13y ago

I remember an internal training class at a large consulting firm in the mid 90s that was using OS/2. I thought, "This is an awful sign. Are we doing this just to get some business with IBM?" They were a big user of Lotus Notes 2. You never know...

damian2000 13y ago

Incredible that companies like Apple (Mac), Atari (ST) and Commodore (Amiga) weren't able to fully capitalise on their leading position in GUI based OSes of the time, which were miles ahead of both MS and IBM.

nl 13y ago
Those of us around then know exactly why this was: PC Clones were too cheap and got better too quickly for other platforms to compete. Back then we all thought "computers" was a hardware game. Only Microsoft realised the hardware didn't matter, software was the main game. And yes, I realise we have swung back to the "integrated hardware/software platform" thing being important again. Picking winning strategies in platform wars is hard.
- kickingvegas 13y ago
  To add to what nl said: Not only were MS-DOS compatible PCs cheaper, but also MS-DOS apps had a significant install base by the time OS/2 came out. The concerns of running legacy software on the then new 286 and the "just over the horizon" 386 CPUs was heavily weighted. Also, GUIs on all platforms then took up enough system resources (memory and CPU) that made enough folks pause in thinking that they could get better performance/cost running console-based apps.
- laureny 13y ago
  > Only Microsoft realised the hardware didn't matter, software was the main game. Yes. This was one of Bill Gates' many strokes of genius. After just one year of Traf'o'Data (Microsoft's precursor), Gates saw that the future was in software, not hardware, and he created Microsoft centered around this very vision (while Apple bet the farm on hardware).
  - ams6110 13y ago
    Apple tried allowing cloners to copy the hardware and being software for a while, it nearly killed them. I don't recall if the clones were ever price-competitve with x86 clones though.
    - nl 13y ago
      TO be fair, almost everything Apple did at that time "almost killed them". The clones did expand the Mac market, but Apple was so incompetent at that point that it didn't know how to handle that.
- kabdib 13y ago
  Also, Atari didn't get marketing (Jack Tramiel was very reluctant to spend money there). Atari really didn't get systems software, either, and never hired to the extent needed to make a good impact there. The world was basically safe from Atari being anything other than a low-end consumer computer company. And the thing that probably saved Apple in the late 80s was the desktop publishing business.
  - nl 13y ago
    Also, Atari didn't get marketing (Jack Tramiel was very reluctant to spend money there). I know that is the conventional story (and pretty similar for the Amiga). I'm not convinced. I think that both the Amiga & the Atari ST were too far ahead of their time. They were multimedia workstations, without anywhere to play that multimedia (except on other Ataris and Amigas). Like you said, the Mac managed to hit the desktop publishing wave, which was exactly right for the the paper-centric late 80's and early 90's.
    - _delirium 13y ago
      Yeah, the Amiga seems like it completely dominated the multimedia niche, but the multimedia niche of the time essentially consisted of the demoscene. Which was great, except that the demoscene was not that large.
      - Keyframe 13y ago
        Huh, Amiga (1000 onwards) was big in video. Especially smaller TV stations that couldn't afford SGIs. Amiga (and SGIs) were light years ahead of Macs in graphics. People often forget this fact.
        bnastic 13y ago
        Amiga 2000 (mostly) + NewTek Video Toaster[1] were the driving force behind the TV graphics back then. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster
- damian2000 13y ago
  Around 1989 I traded my Amiga 500 for an IBM AT clone running DOS. Each was worth around AUD$1000 at the time. It felt like I was going back in time 10 years - a mono screen and no mouse. The reason was that I needed it for uni.study purposes (Turbo pascal, Turbo C++, etc.) ...
dhughes 13y ago
One reason: stigma. All I recall from childhood/teen years is "IBM compatible PC" a mantra on every TV commercial IBM or others produced. A PC was for business and you were rich or a fool to spend thousands on something so useless to a regular Joe. Apple was even more expensive and even less common than a PC and even so Apple was quirky and drew pictures, ATARI and Commodore were for games. They were in totally different worlds. Back then I wouldn't have even thought to have one computer that did everything.
- smacktoward 13y ago
  I dunno about that. At least where I grew up, if your family had a Mac or an Amiga, it was like you had domesticated a unicorn. Everybody wanted to see it, play with it. It marked you out as a member of a family possessed of either great sophistication or enormous wealth, either of which translates easily to status. If there was any stigma, it was for being on the opposite end of the spectrum -- having a computer whose primary selling point was that it was cheap, like a Commodore 64. The C64 was a fine machine for the price, but nobody was going to ooooh and aaah over it they way they would if you took them into your Dad's study and showed them MacPaint.
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    Yeah. I was the only one, among my circle of friends owning computers, that had a PC instead of an Amiga. My dad thought the Amiga were only good for playing games, for anyone serious about computers, PC was the way to go. So I was left reading 68000 Assembly manuals, some Amiga reference books, and playing with them on computer parties we used to organize. In any case, the only way to buy any of them in my home country was on credit.
- damian2000 13y ago
  Agreed, Atari ST and Amiga especially never caught on much with businesses ... they were definitely seen as games machines, even though their capabilities were certainly on par with the IBM clones.
- djKianoosh 13y ago
InclinedPlane 13y ago
This is slightly counterfactual. The Mac today has a solid unix heart and runs on the best processors and technology out there, but that was not always so, and they were weakest precisely when PCs grew strongest. The internals of pre OS X Mac OS are horrific and disturbing. They are in no way superior to the internals of Windows 95 and are at best only perceived superior due to a different user experience peppered with a healthy dose of self-delusion, certainly not through stability or performance. They are infantile compared to OS/2. Moreover, over the next few years after Windows 95 was released the PC improved greatly while the Mac mostly stagnated. Around the Power Mac era things were roughly even in terms of capabilities and performance though the Mac was significantly more expensive, by the Pentium and especially Pentium II era the PC began to become objectively more powerful than the Mac. This put Apple into a freefall that they were only rescued from by the return of Steve Jobs who established style as a foundation the company rested on and pushed them into digital media and mobile devices, as well as forcing a hardware architecture migration (to the formerly hated x86 from the PowerPC architecture developed by a consortium of which Apple was a huge part of) and a complete OS rewrite (transforming Mac OS from an antiquated bucket of kludges into NeXTSTEP in Apple clothing). At the time in question though Apple was pushing old, slow hardware at a price premium in a market that was rapidly passing them by.
- npsimons 13y ago
  Very spot on! Not many seem to remember, but OS/2 truly was technically superior to just about everything else out there in consumer computer land, excepting maybe things like 386BSD (which many of us didn't know about at the time, and probably would have peed our pants at setting up X ;). OS/2 had pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection; Apple and Microsoft didn't even come close in their offerings. Say what you will about how IBM fumbled the marketing, licensing, etc, or how the upstarts(!) won against the Evil Empire, but OS/2 was the better operating system, and Microsoft honed it's FUD by attacking IBM and OS/2, whilst offering a truly awful alternative.
  - InclinedPlane 13y ago
    Oh god. I remember setting up X back in the dark days of the early linux era. Peeing ones pants would have been preferable, it's astounding how far we've come. As for Windows vs. OS/2 it's at best complicated. It's a bit like a micro-cosm of the PC vs mainframe debate. The raison d'etre of Windows 95 was backward compatability with a low memory footprint. That may seem like a small thing, or at best not a thing to make so many enormous compromises over, but back then it was everything. The problem with doing multi-tasking "right" was that it imposed a ~4mb RAM requirement per 16-bit application being run at the same time. That is nothing today but back then 4mb was the minimum requirement for installing Windows 95, and it represented a cost of around $100 in 1995. Owning a computer powerful enough to run even a handful of 16-bit apps while running OS/2 or NT was simply above the economic means of a lot of people. And by the time technology caught up and RAM became cheap enough to make proper multi-tasking cost effective there was too much Windows 9x network effect for competitors to make much headway.
gaius 13y ago
An excellent book that studies that is The Future Was Here http://www.amazon.co.uk/Future-Was-Here-Commodore-Platform-ebook/dp/B007V5BVJG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1385368350&sr=8-1&keywords=the+future+was+here http://www.amazon.co.uk/Future-Was-Here-Commodore-Platform-e...

michaelhoffman 13y ago

> IBM licensed Commodore’s AREXX scripting language and included it with OS/2 2.0. I find this hard to believe, given that Rexx was developed by IBM. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rexx http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rexx

galonk 13y ago
Ars Technica isn't exactly big on fact checking. These days most of their short articles are rewritten press releases, and most of their long articles are personal opinion/recollection written as if it was reportage.
- wglb 13y ago
  While they may got the part about the history of AREXX wrong, most of the article is spot on.
  - Jeremy_Reimer 13y ago
    The AREXX error was my mistake. I just read the technology transfer part backwards when I was researching. I've already fixed it in the article and updated it.
  - taspeotis 13y ago
    The original tagline was "IBM doesn't make operating systems anymore for a reason" which could have been debunked by knowing anything about IBM's product line or about 5 seconds of Googling. Disclaimer: I'm an Ars subscriber and <3 Ars but when my bullshit detector is already off the charts before the article begins ... it makes me wonder how good the article is.
rodgerd 13y ago
Indeed. And IBM do, in fact, still make other OSes, contrary to the subhead of the story: zVM/CMS, zOS (MVS), AIX, and whatever they're calling AS/400 these days.
- 13y ago

lbarrow 13y ago

Great read. In the end, it seems like a classic failure to resolve the innovator's dilemma. IBM decided that the future of computing would revolve around mainframes because they liked mainframes, not because that's where the facts led them. And ultimately they paid the price for it.

smacktoward 13y ago
I think it's a bit more complicated than that. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who'd grown up on mainframes. The systems you're used to are fabulously expensive, sure, but their operating systems have sophisticated architectures that allow them to easily juggle multiple users running multiple programs while maintaining the security of the system overall. They are the completest expression ever realized of forty years of progress in the field of information technology. Then, one day, someone drops a PC in your lap. You are horrified. It's a single-user, single-tasking system with absolutely nothing stopping the user from trashing everything by running the wrong program. To you, this new... thing, whatever it is, is barely worth the name "computer." It feels more like a toy -- like something you would give to a child to play with. Certainly nobody would ever run critical systems on it, you think. And here's the thing. You're absolutely right! All your concerns are one hundred percent valid. But it turns out that nobody cares; the PC is much, much cheaper, and it lets everyone have their own dedicated hardware right on their desk running any software they care to install, instead of time-sharing a mainframe and begging for permission each time they want to try a new program. Or, put more bluntly, it lets them escape from having to deal with the corporate IT priesthood (i.e. you) anymore. The market speaks! You are derided as a pointy-headed nerd and swept into the dustbin of history. Now fast forward ten or fifteen years. People start taking all those PCs they bought and hooking them together into networks... and suddenly all those things you were worried about back in the day come roaring back to bite them. Users discover that their machine stops talking to the network when they click and hold the mouse button, because the OS can't walk and chew gum at the same time. And the complete lack of security makes their machines super easy to compromise. The PC vendors panic. They scramble to rewrite their old systems into systems that can live comfortably on a network. And when they're done, they roll out systems that look an awful lot like what you were insisting the baseline for a "real computer" was fifteen years ago. The world cheers and lines up to buy back all the sophistication they had happily thrown away before. In other words, it's not so much that the IBMers were wrong, it's that they were early. When OS/2 arrived, the world didn't understand yet why it needed something like OS/2. And by the time it did, OS/2 didn't exist anymore. But in this business, being early is effectively the same thing as being wrong. The market doesn't give out points for foresight.

mp99e99 13y ago

This was a great article, thanks for posting!

melling 13y ago

If anyone wants an insider's view, here's a Usenet post from one of the early Microsoft employees, Gordon Letwin: http://gunkies.org/wiki/Gordon_Letwin_OS/2_usenet_post http://gunkies.org/wiki/Gordon_Letwin_OS/2_usenet_post Somewhere in the Usenet archive is Gordon trolling the OS/2 users for weeks (or months?) on end. I can't remember the exact details, but he had a bet with several people that Windows would have multitasking, or that OS/2 wouldn't have some sort of multitasking before Windows. The bet was to fly the winner to any city of their choice and buy them dinner. The discussions were quite heated and it was particulary memorable because he was one of the first 12 employees at Microsoft. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Letwin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Letwin

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
twoodfin 13y ago
Letwin was also the guy for OS/2 on the Microsoft side while the alliance lasted. His Inside OS/2 is a detailed account of trying to squeeze a real multitasking, protected memory OS into a '286: http://www.amazon.com/Inside-OS-2-Gordon-Letwin/dp/1556151179 http://www.amazon.com/Inside-OS-2-Gordon-Letwin/dp/155615117... The cover photo is also classic.
- jonah 13y ago
  "Foreword by Bill Gates"
- adamnemecek 13y ago
  The photo should be in a National Geographic captioned "A Unix beard in his natural habitat".
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    In its natural habitat. A Unix beard is genderless; it merely seems to exhibit a preference for male hosts.

jjguy 13y ago

If you liked this article, you should read Show Stopper. It's out of print, but there are ample used copies via Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0029356717/ http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0029356717/

voltagex_ 13y ago
Seems to be everywhere as an eBook. http://ereads.com/ecms/book_title/Showstopper http://ereads.com/ecms/book_title/Showstopper (warning, will set affiliate codes on Amazon links)
tokenrove 13y ago
It's not quite at the level of Soul of a New Machine, but I still think every programmer should read this book. A great story from the trenches. It gave me so much respect for Dave Cutler, and confirmed so many things I suspected about Microsoft at the time.
- _sh 13y ago
  Yeah? My reading of that book was that there was such an inhuman marriage/life destroying crunch getting NT out the door that nobody covered themselves in glory, much less showed themselves worthy of respect. And it explained to me, in clear terms, why Windows was such a buggy pile of shit. It was created of its culture.
mschaef 13y ago
"FoxTales" by Kerry Nietz is also a good read. Kerry talks about his experiences joining FoxPro development as a freshout college grad. I never cared all that much for FoxPro/xbase, but the book is a good read. http://www.amazon.com/FoxTales-Behind-Scenes-Fox-Software/dp/1930919506 http://www.amazon.com/FoxTales-Behind-Scenes-Fox-Software/dp...

Stratoscope 13y ago

> Long before operating systems got exciting names based on giant cats and towns in California named after dogs, most of their names were pretty boring. Ah, yes. Mavericks, California. It's a great little offshore town, just off Pillar Point. I love that town. Kidding aside, this is a great article. Related to this story, the Windows 3.0 visual shell was originally not supposed to be Program Manager and File Manager. It was going to be a program called Ruby that I worked on with Alan Cooper and our team. Ruby was a shell construction kit with a visual editor to lay out forms and components, which we called gizmos. You would drag arrows between gizmos to connect events fired by one gizmo to actions taken on another. The shell was extensible, with an API for creating gizmos. A really weak area was the command language for the actions to be taken on an event. It was about on the level of batch files if that. But we hoped the API would allow for better command languages to be added along with more gizmos. BTW, this project was where the phrase "fire an event" came from. I was looking for a name for process of one gizmo sending a message to another. I knew that SQL had triggers, but for some reason I didn't like that name. I got frustrated one night and started firing rubber bands at my screen to help me think. It was a habit I had back then, probably more practical on a tough glass CRT than it is today. After firing a few rubber bands, I knew what to call it. (As one might guess, I've always been curious to know if the phrase "fire an event" was used before that. I wasn't aware of it, but who knows.) Anyway, Ruby didn't become the Windows 3.0 shell after all. The went with ProgMan and FileMan instead. To give Ruby a better command language, they adapted Basic and the result was Visual Basic. Gizmos were renamed "controls" (sigh), and my Gizmo API became the notorious VBX interface (sorry about that). And we still don't have a programmable visual shell in Windows.

wglb 13y ago
I don't think we used that exact terminology, but back in the '70s in the real-time interrupt-driven world, the concept was there. In fact, if you had used that phrase at that time, everyone would have grasped the meaning.
- Stratoscope 13y ago
  Indeed, when I was firing those rubber bands, I didn't think I'd coined some truly novel piece of terminology. It seemed like a fairly obvious word, especially given the use of "trigger" in the SQL world. Ah, it starts to come back! In SQL, "trigger" is a noun, not a verb. It refers to a stored procedure that's executed in response to some event. I knew "trigger" could also be used as a verb, of course, but it seemed that it might be confusing to use it that way given its meaning in SQL. So that's when I started searching for words and firing rubber bands. I might have fired up something else too, but that's a story for another day...

sehugg 13y ago

OS/2 had many flaws but its multitasking was unseen on a PC at the time. I remember formatting a floppy while running two 16-bit Windows sessions (which were communicating with each other) and multiple DOS windows, thinking I was in the future. Even Windows 95 was limited by many system calls being funneled through single threaded BIOS or DOS 16-bit land.

waterlesscloud 13y ago
I remember installing it from the 15 billion floppies it came on and thinking much the same thing. It seems like it was on 5-1/4" disks. Can that be right? And REXX! Ha. REXX.
- tomfakes 13y ago
  3 1/2" The IBM PS/2 only came with the smaller disk, so bigger wasn't necessary
kenjackson 13y ago
Couldn't the Amiga already do all that multitasking on a 256KB machine, years before?
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  He said for a PC, i.e. an IBM PC clone.
- megablast 13y ago
  I don't think the Amiga had real multi-tasking, from what I understand. I may be wrong.
  - protomyth 13y ago
    It had real preemptive multitasking, but lacked memory protection.
  - mnw21cam 13y ago

erichocean 13y ago

I seem to recall UPS widely deploying OS/2 internally back in the 90s, with custom (internal) apps written for it. Probably all Windows by now...

kickingvegas 13y ago

A previous HN thread on OS/2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3785819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3785819

yuhong 13y ago
Also see these threads with my comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3785819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3785819 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3441885 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3441885

dangoldin 13y ago

I remember my dad getting a promotional shirt for OS/2 with the caption "Flight 4.0 to Chicago has been delayed, I'm taking off with OS/2" The idea being that Windows 95 was internally called Windows 4.0 with the codename Chicago. I keep on searching for it but can't find it anywhere. And Bill Gates on OS/2 in 1987: "I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time."

InclinedPlane 13y ago
I remember seeing this article in popsci way back when: http://www.popsci.com/archive-viewer?id=vypUfjzMwlAC&pg=52 http://www.popsci.com/archive-viewer?id=vypUfjzMwlAC&pg=52 It talks about Windows 4.0 and other contemporary "next gen" operating systems.
huxley 13y ago
You can find many of Microsoft's codenames here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_codenames#Windows_3.1x.2F9x http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_codenames#Win... My favourite codename sniping had to do with Windows NT (codename Cairo) and NeXT. When announcing NeXTSTEP 4.0 (codename Mecca), Jobs quipped, "Why stop at Cairo when you can go all the way to Mecca?" http://www.paullynch.org/NeXTSTEP/Expo.1994.htmld/ http://www.paullynch.org/NeXTSTEP/Expo.1994.htmld/

steven2012 13y ago

I actually bought a copy of OS/2 Warp when it came out because I was interested in its preemptive multi-tasking, and it was a decent operating system for what it's worth. I was definitely more stable than Window 3.11, but its real problem was compatibility. Back in the early 90s, everything was about getting compatibility, and while OS/2 had good compatibility, didn't have perfect compatibility. As well, I worked at a bank, and as the article correctly stated, the entire bank was run on OS/2, most notably the ATMs, except the ATMs I worked with was using OS/2 2.0. However, when Windows NT 3.51 came out, that was the game changer. I was the only person I knew who even knew what it was (I read about it in a magazine at the time), and I was able to get a student-priced copy at my college bookstore. I started using it, and it was awesome, everything just worked, except for some games. You couldn't even compare NT 3.51 to OS/2, it wasn't even in the same level. The look and feel of NT was exactly the same as Windows 3.11, and all the programs worked.

jonah 13y ago
My computer had 8mb RAM at the time and NT required 16 to install so I "borrowed" another 8 from one of the school computers, installed NT and then returned the memory. It ran well enough on 8.
- steven2012 13y ago
  I was lucky enough to have a 486DX-50 (not a DX2-66)with 16 MB of RAM, so it ran perfectly for me. Even with what was bleeding edge hardware at the time, I still remember trying to finish writing my senior project using Corel Draw and Microsoft Word on Windows 3.11, and having my computer crash ever 30-45 mins, and my project partner eventually broke down and started crying because of how frustrating it was.
  - jonah 13y ago
    Yeah, mine was a Pentium 90! (I decided to scrimp on RAM and get the 90 in stead of the 66.) It was a huge jump from the 286 I had before. (Upgrading memory meant socketing rows of individual DIPs.)

yuhong 13y ago

The sad thing is that I have never seen an article on the entire MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco that is what I call complete and detailed and many omitting for example the unethical attacks MS did against OS/2 such as "Microsoft Munchkins". I try with my own blog article, but I admit it is not very good either.

michaelwww 13y ago
Wikipedia has some interesting things to say about it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_OS/2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_OS/2

mbennett 13y ago

>Finally, and most importantly for the future of the company, Bill Gates hired the architect of the industrial-strength minicomputer operating system VMS and put him in charge of the OS/2 3.0 NT group. Dave Cutler’s first directive was to throw away all the old OS/2 code and start from scratch. The company wanted to build a high-performance, fault-tolerant, platform-independent, and fully networkable operating system. It would be known as Windows NT. A couple of decades later, Dave Cutler is still around at Microsoft and worked on the hypervisor for the Xbox One at the ripe young age of 71, allowing games to run seamlessly beside apps. From http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/8/5075216/xbox-one-tv-microsofts-plan-to-take-over-the-living-room http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/8/5075216/xbox-one-tv-micros... >Underneath it all lies the magic — a system layer called the hypervisor that manages resources and keeps both platforms running optimally even as users bounce back and forth between games, apps, and TV. >To build the hypervisor, Multerer recruited the heaviest hitter he could find: David Cutler, a legendary 71-year-old Microsoft senior technical fellow who wrote the VMS mainframe operating system in 1975 and then came to Microsoft and served as the chief architect of Windows NT. >It appears his work bridging the two sides of the One has gone swimmingly: jumping between massively complex games like Forza Motorsport 5, TV, and apps like Skype and Internet Explorer was seamless when I got to play with a system in Redmond. Switching in and out of Forza was particularly impressive: the game instantly resumed, with no loading times at all. "It all just works for people," says Henshaw as he walks me through the demo. "They don’t have to think about what operating system is there."

pjmlp 13y ago
Yes, many like to bash Windows, but the NT family is actually a VMS at heart, spoiled by a not so good user land experience. I once attend a session by him about the Windows kernel design, quite interesting.
- gjm11 13y ago
  VMS + 1 = WNT, in the same way as IBM - 1 = HAL. (So far as I know, both of these are just amusing coincidences.)
  - 13y ago

protomyth 13y ago

I bought OS/2 for work to run on some DEC PC (not the damn Rainbow, the decent 486 DEC sold). The graphic card (S3) wasn't supported out of the box, so I called the IBM and got nowhere other than an acknowledgement it existed. I called DEC and they too believed it existed, so they (while I was still on the line) called their contact at IBM. After being transferred twice, we arrived at the person who could mail me the driver, but I would have to sign an NDA. Myself and the DEC rep explained we didn't want source or a beta driver, just the release one. He insisted every customer had to sign. I said I'd think about it. After hanging up, the DEC rep couldn't stop laughing. He asked if I wanted a free copy of NT compliments of DEC. I took it and it had the correct driver. I tried, but they had no chance.

baldfat 13y ago
> not the damn Rainbow Hey I had a Rainbow! It was pretty amazing IF it had it's full potential it would have been the best computer until the Amiga came out. Rainbow: CPUs - Z80 (8 Bit) and a Intel 8080 OS - CP/M and MS-DOS Could be upgraded to 286 later. Would have been perfect BUT they didn't get things setup correctly and I was really stuck in Z80 CP/M land.
- protomyth 13y ago
  One man's innovation is another man's Frankenstein Monster. It was actually an 8088 not an 8080. Anyone who had to deal with people using those damn Rainbow floppy disk drives has my eternal sympathy. I really, really want to know what they were thinking on both the format and how you inserted those disks.
  - Someone 13y ago
    Had to look up what that was about. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_100#Floppy_disk_drives http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_100#Floppy_disk_drives, they could do away with one drive motor, with only a 'minor' disadvantage: "Of note was the single motor used to drive both disk drives via a common spindle, which were arranged one on top of the other. That meant that one disk went underneath the first but inserted upside-down."

jboggan 13y ago

Up until March of last year a lot of ATMs in the US were still running OS/2 . . . I "upgraded" a lot of them to Windows XP. Yuck. When I would take the OS/2 system offline and replace it with a Windows cage the payment network would sometimes tell me the uptime on the deprecated machines . . . one network operator claimed 8 years of uptime at one particular machine. I have no way of confirming that, but I definitely felt the OS/2 machines were rock solid, especially compared to the vulnerable Windows machines. Most small banks with NCR machines are running two software packages (APTRA Edge or Advance) with default admin passwords and are really behind on the monthly bug patches. Eek. The OS/2 machines required you to input config info in hex though, so I was glad I didn't have to work on them in the field too much.

gnaffle 13y ago
When you think of it, 8 years of uptime isn't special for a machine running on a UPS and not needing a reboot for software updates. There simply isn't a reason for a well-built operating system running on solid hardware to crash.
- marshray 13y ago
  Cosmic rays, but yeah, that's solid.
- LinaLauneBaer 13y ago
  ATMs usually do not have a UPS.
  - TallGuyShort 13y ago
    Then I'm more impressed by the local utilities than the OS :)
- jboggan 13y ago
  No UPS for a lot of machines. I can't imagine the OS/2 getting an update simply because core ATM features haven't changed since the 80's. But it was still impressive uptime because ATMs are generally cantankerous creatures. A software upgrade on the XP machines was ridiculous. It usually involved 3-4 hours of loading and booting and restarting with several different CDs. The other techs and I were convinced that NCR padded the installs/updates to take longer since their certified field techs billed out at around $300/hour.

kabdib 13y ago

When OS/2 Warp came out, I remember it being insanely cheap ($20?), so in a what-the-hell mood I bought it. Took it home and tried to install it. It was a hopeless mess of disks, both optical and floppy, and I never got it to run. One of my cow-orkers at Apple had worked on the OS/2 Presentation Manager at IBM. I tried talking with her about it, but she said the experience had been "absolutely awful" and she didn't want to say much else. IBM never had a chance.

baruch 13y ago
I have OS/2 Warp 3 and 4, both boxes at home. They both worked on my computer at the time and run my tiny BBS and allowed me to work on the computer flawlessly. This was much better than my peers who had to dedicate a computer to this. But then I had a loaner modem and a shared voice/BBS line and they had a private line for the BBS too. It worked nicely and the install wasn't bad, it was quite a few disks but than Windows didn't fare much better in that regard. It was also a mess of many floppy disks to perform an install. I remember fondly the Team OS/2 meetings where we could geek out our love for OS/2 and mourn the inefficiency of IBM marketing to push it. And then I found Linux.

zura 13y ago

Hah, I was thinking to Ask HN these days about the availability of exotic jobs, including OS/2 (or eComStation) programming jobs. I also wouldn't mind to take Motif jobs. Feel free to contact me if you have any ;)

yuhong 13y ago
Motif was recently GPLed, as it happened.

nikbackm 13y ago

Interesting read. This part really brought the current Windows 8 push by Microsoft to mind. "These machines were meant to wrestle control of the PC industry away from the clone makers, but they were also meant to subtly push people back toward a world where PCs were the servants and mainframes were the masters. They were never allowed to be too fast or run a proper operating system that would take advantage of the 32-bit computing power available with the 386 chip. In trying to do two contradictory things at once, they failed at both." Not quite the same situation, but they have many similarities.

forgottenpaswrd 13y ago

"Version 3.0 was going to up the graphical ante with an exciting new 3D beveled design (which had first appeared with OS/2 1.2)" I think it was Next computers who got first on this.

justincormack 13y ago

As this article admits, it is just a rewrite of "Triumph of the Nerds".

jfb 13y ago
Yeah, it's typical of Ars these days. Not particularly artful rehashing of existing info.

jlebrech 13y ago

don't outsource for the sake of a few months, if things take time, then they take time.

mnw21cam 13y ago

The article says that the Mac OS was the only OS to ship that ran on PowerPC CPUs. This is not true - later versions of the Amiga OS ran on PowerPC.

mschaef 13y ago

I have fond memories of OS/2 from the summer of 1995. At the time, I was a undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin, and IBM needed summer intern testers for a product they were calling "OS/2 Lan Server Enterprise". OS/2 LSE was IBM's effort to re-platform OS/2 LAN Server on top of OS/2 DCE (in development on the lab next door to LSE). The general idea was to provide a way to scale up OS/2 so that it would interoperate with other DCE-based systems (mainly RS/6000 AIX, IIRC). Anyway, the machine IBM gave me to use was a PS/2 Model 80. This was a 1988-era machine that had been brought to the semi-modern era with 20MB of RAM memory installed via several MCA expansion cards. Against my best expectations, the machine ran well, despite the fact that its CPU was at least 10% the speed of the then-state of the art. From what I remember, the OS/2 LSE product itself was fairly solid. However, the biggest memory I have from that summer was the afternoon we spent playing around with the Microsoft Windows 95 beta disk we received for compatability testing. Towards the end of the afternoon, we tried to DriveSpace (compress) the disk. We got bored during the wait for the compress, so we pulled the power on the machine thinking that would be the end of it. However, once we powered the machine back up to install OS/2, Windows 95 just resumed compressing away like nothing happened. A few weeks later, a friend and I went to CompUSA for the Windows95 launch. Even at midnight, there was a line out the door, winding past the Windows 95 boxes, then the Plus Pack, then Office 95, and then memory upgrades... Didn't hear much about OS/2 after that...

swampboy 13y ago

I enjoyed the article. It was a nice trip down memory lane. Regarding development tools, there were 2 commercial IDEs based on REXX: Watcom VX-REXX and VisPro REXX. I used Watcom's VX-REXX and it was a joy to use and allowed for incredibly fast and powerful application development. I heard the same about VisPro REXX. IBM's early set of tools C/2 and C Set++ were a bit painful to use. VisualAge C++ 3.0 was a decent toolset once you got over the weirdness of it. For a while, if you wanted to write C or C++ code using sockets you had to purchase IBM's TCP/IP SDK for $100. The SIQ was a "synchronous" input queue and the problem has been understated in the article and comments. It was really bad. The base OS was incredibly stable, but the GUI shell, not so much due to the SIQ problem. There were a number of Unix and Unix-like systems in addition to the ones already listed: Coherent, Interactive, and SCO are some that come to mind. They were pretty expensive IIRC, around $1000 to license.

mdip 13y ago

I worked at a large computer chain (R.I.P. Softwarehouse / CompUSA) from 1993 - 1996 and had been building clone computers for businesses from 1990-1993. I remember how this played out very well. At the time, IBM had sent in scores of company reps to train up our floor staff on the advantages of OS/2 over the always-soon-to-be-released Chicago. They did a good job getting all of us to "drink the Kool Aid". I received a free (not pirated, promotional) copy of blue OS/2 Warp 3.0. It was a fantastic operating system for running a DOS based multi-node Telegard BBS and it did well with Win16 applications. The impact of Windows 95 coming on the scene, though, is difficult to fully appreciate unless you were there. We had been selling pre-orders for months and there were a myriad of promos. I remember some of those preorders were sold under the threat that there wouldn't be enough copies to go around on release day. I had been playing with pirated copies of the betas of Windows 95 for the prior two months. Even in its beta form, it ran circles around Windows 3.0/3.1 in terms of reliability. I even remember reloading my PC with the most recent beta after release because a DOS application I used ran more reliably in it than in the RTM code. Then launch day came. It was unlike anything I had ever seen in terms of a software release. We closed up at 9:00 PM and re-opened at 12:00 midnight to a line of customers that went around the building --- A line of customers ... for an operating system. We joked at the time that "Windows really was that bad". There were tons of additional promotions to ensure people came and lined up--Some RAM / hard disks selling under "cost" and others. And the atmosphere of the store felt like a party. We had theme music playing (start me up?) and some Microsoft video playing on our higher-end multi-media PCs. It was obvious to us, on the floor, trained by IBMs marketing machine, that Warp died that day. As an anecdote to the stories about IBMs marketing being a little off: I remember around the release of Warp 4.0 I saw an advertisement at a subway station something along the lines of "Warp Obliterated my PC!"-- that tagline, evidently, meant to be some hip new use of the word obliterated.

techsupporter 13y ago
> We closed up at 9:00 PM and re-opened at 12:00 midnight to a line of customers that went around the building --- A line of customers ... for an operating system. I grew up in Dallas, SoftWarehouse (somebody else remembers that name, awesome)/CompUSA's original stomping grounds and this story kept coming back to me throughout the whole article. Windows 95 was considered revolutionary at the time, even to those of us lined up at the Lewisville, Texas store at 10:30PM to buy an operating system. (Incidentally, the first time I ever talked my dad into taking me to an overnight release of anything.) Windows 95 was the first operating system I ever saw non-technical people set out intentionally to buy and I spent months installing it for friends and family. > We had theme music playing (start me up?) and some Microsoft video playing on our higher-end multi-media PCs. Yep, it was "Start Me Up" by the Rolling Stones. If I remember correctly, the video was a demo reel of everything new in Windows 95 and was highlighted by the huge Start button popping in at the end of the video, then fading to black. It even had a snippet of the waving Windows 3.1 flag and the bear from the "Help / About" Easter Egg hidden in 3.1.

zenbowman 13y ago

Thank you for sharing, a great article indeed. I'm glad it ended up the way it did, Microsoft at the time was betting on openness being a feature, and I think they helped move the computer and software industries they have gone in since, towards greater openness (and thereby professionalism). People associate Microsoft with closed source, but it is of course relative, they were in their day the vendor who was banking on openness and courting developers harder than the others.

picomancer 13y ago

Here's a perspective from the founder of a successful bootstrapped software startup that began by developing native OS/2 applications: http://www.stardock.com/stardock/articles/article_sdos2.html http://www.stardock.com/stardock/articles/article_sdos2.html I own a copy of the OS/2 Galactic Civilizations 2.

outworlder 13y ago

And not a single mention of Babylon 5. The special effects were created on Amigas: http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/making/effects.html http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/making/effects.html Also, while looking at Video Toaster's entry on Wikipedia, I found this gem: "An updated version called Video Toaster 4000 was later released, using the Amiga 4000's video slot. The 4000 was co-developed by actor Wil Wheaton, who worked on product testing and quality control.[6][7] He later used his public profile to serve as a technology evangelist for the product.[8] The Amiga Video Toaster 4000 source code was released in 2004 by NewTek & DiscreetFX." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster

nnq 13y ago

Why aren't the unix-family OSs of the era part of the story? Why didn't IBM even consider porting a unix-family OS to the PCs instead of paying an unproven company like Microsoft to write an OS? (...all the events from this stretch of computing history seem so weird to me, like from a steampunk-like alternate reality movie. There's surely lots of context missing and stories that nobody will ever tell, since most of the decisions taken by all the key players seem so anti-business. Computers may have changed a lot from back then, but business is still business and all the decisions made seem either "irrational" or based on "hidden information" that is not part of the story.)

vesinisa 13y ago
I guess because, as the article describes, IBM was all for protecting its workstation business as well as the lucrative mainframe business. A workstation back then was defined as an expensive high-end computer that was designed to be used by only one user at a time (i.e. not a multi-user mainframe), yet was suitable for high-performance applications. They were intended mostly for corporations and academia where extra juice was needed and that could afford to buy workstations (think scientific computing, CAD and graphic design in the 1980s). IBM did at this time already manufacture workstations with UNIX as the operating system (see e.g. http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=867&st=1 http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=867&st=1 ) But they were way too expensive for the home user. PC (personal computer) was the low-end product that you could afford with a normal salary. I understand UNIX back then was a mainframe and workstation operating system. Licensing was expensive and the hardware requirements beyond that of a PC. Few people had access to UNIX, mostly at universities and at big corporations. These were the very reasons why GNU and Linux were born - to provide a mostly-compatible UNIX clone for the home users with an affordable IBM PC compatible. So my theory is that IBM was protecting its mainframe business - it did not want to put the powerful UNIX to the PC because it wanted to sell more expensive special hardware to those who wanted UNIX. So it hired a maverick company (Microsoft) to write a low-end, feature-poor operating system for PC (DOS). It was (and continues to be) a business strategy to bundle better software with better hardware so that you can ask customers that want only the superior software for a higher price (still essentially the business model of a certain Cupertino, California based manufacturer)

derleth 13y ago

> So the new System/360 mainframe line would run the also brand-new OS/360. Bad example. Really bad example: Not even IBM could standardize on a single OS for the System/360. The System/360 went through a few OS iterations before OS/360 came along: OS/360 was late, as recounted in The Mythical Man-Month, so DOS/360 came along, then BOS/360, then TOS/360, and even PCP, which didn't support multiprogramming. Other OSes were CP-67, which became VM, MFT, MVT, and still more OSes on top of that. To this day, there are multiple OSes for the architecture descended from the System/360, including Linux.

jgeorge 13y ago

One of my fondest memories of OS/2 (there weren't many, sorry) was finding a media file on one of the diskettes called IBMRALLY.MID which was a little piano rendition of "Ever Onward, IBM" from way back when in the Way Back When Days of IBM.