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This bullshit accusation comes up every time anyone mentions IBM and is a great way to get guaranteed mod points on oh-so-politically-correct-slashdot. Here's what "Foobar of Borg" doesn't tell you:

- the book was written by the former publisher of "OS/2 magazine", Edwin Black, who profited from his association with IBM for many years until its folding in 96
- Black also "co-incidentally" launched a high profile lawsuit against IBM that was summarily thrown out of court, but the press did not cover this fact.
- Many people have questioned the authenticity and accuracy of the accusations, which while juicy, do not stand up to close scrutiny.

Ultimately Black's assertions are like claiming that gun manufacturers are responsible for the murders that are committed with their products, or that manufacturers of crowbars are responsible for breakins, or that people who write Linux are morally responsible for the many people who die when it is used by the US military.

- Anonymous, because I will almost certainly be accused of being anti-semitic, even though I am jewish.

"That describes in a nutshell why OS/2 never caught on big"

Yea, OS/2 Warp never came near to matching Windows 95 in GUI functionality.

The author of the book was Edwin Black. He sued IBM at exactly the same time that he released the book and the suit was dismissed. Unfortunately for some strange reason, the dismissal of the lawsuit did not get nearly the same amount of media coverage that the initial suit timed with the book release got.

An interesting and little known fact about Mr Black is that before writing this book, he was publisher of "OS/2 Professional" when it went out of business due to IBM's killing off of the doomed OS. He seemed to have no problem with IBM's past while he was making money from a financial association with them.

Also, at least one historian who specializes in the Holocaust has called into question many of his accusations.. Again, few people care to listen to the other side, and prefer to simply assume everything Mr Black says is true.

Careful you'll upset the OS/2 fanboys and they'll rate your comment as "Troll" for revenge as they rated mine. They have meta moderator points to make sure their revenge sticks via multiple accounts and proxy servers.

The only person who thinks OS/2 is better than anything else is Commander Spock on the CNet forums who meta mod trolls here and mods down any comment that talks about something being better than OS/2.

AROS is more modern and has better driver support and better virtual machine support than OS/2 currently has. Some virtual machines cannot run OS/2 for some reason and modern processors cause SYS errors in OS/2 and it fails to even install. Which are reasons why AROS is better than OS/2 as it supports more processors and is multi platform in that it supports more than 32 bit Intel X86 processors. Also AROS has a much lower memory footprint than OS/2 so it runs faster. The OLPC laptop got AmigaOS running on it while OS/2 wouldn't run on it as an example.

Besides OS/2 would not be the way it is today without IBM licensing the best parts of AmigaOS for OS/2 Warp and above and AROS builds on AmigaOS and makes it more modern, unlike OS/2 Warp and eComStation that are still based on AmigaOS 2.0 but does not have the AmigaOS 3.1 improvements that AROS has.

So there, I just proved myself right in the parent post. Please mod it back up if you moderators are indeed fair. If not, I'll know you modded it down for revenge and petty jealousy.

AROS is based on AmigaOS 3.1 and historically

Yeah. I don't agree with the summary. I lived through the 80s, and I remember people, including some small businesses I worked for, ALREADY seeking alternatives to Microsoft. Many tried OS/2 and liked it quite a bit, as did I. Too bad it didn't survive. Here's a funny quote I found: "In my opinion, Microsoft was intentionally making OS/2 as difficult to use as possible - or the programmers they had assigned to write OS/2 were the stupid ones." The "problem" was Microsoft was smart and made developing for DOS and Windows very easy, not that the IBM imprimatur hurt to start out. The momentum of application development got going on Windows, which was "good enough," and hasn't ever stopped.

Larry

If you say so...

OS/2 was not a microkernel. There *was* a microkernel-based version of OS/2: OS/2 for PowerPC. However, it was never actually sold (there was no real hardware to run it on).

OS/2 was very much a monolithic kernel that borrowed heavily from IBM's mainframe OS experience (Reference). However, it suffered heavily from its 16-bit heritage (OS/2 1.x was targeted at 80286 processors). It was a modular kernel, but it used 16-bit protected-mode drivers for items such as network adapters (NDIS 2.0) and file system drivers.

In fact, it was OS/2's monolithic nature and 16-bit origins that made OS/2 for PowerPC such a difficult undertaking. Unfortunately, for OS/2 to be a realistic operating system moving forward, you really would have needed a major rewrite like that, just to get rid of the 286 heritage. However, with the lack of momentum behind OS/2 and the failure of PREP/CHRP that just wasn't possible.

"The numerous features such as ACLs that NT and VMS both have and OS/2 doesn't lend a lot more credibility to those 'urban legends' than some poster on /. saying it's an outgrowth of OS/2."

Well, it was. They even shared filesystems, until Microsoft took their ball and went home. It's not "just some guy on /." (me) saying it's an outgrowth of OS/2, but everyone else that lived through that era from 1987 until the virtual death of OS/2 sometime in 1997.

http://www.os2bbs.com/os2news/OS2History.html

"1990 - The Schism

In 1990, IBM and Microsoft were still working together on the development of OS/2. Microsoft, however, had found that Windows 3.0 - released in May 1990 - generated more revenue for them and therefore allotted increasingly more resource to Windows and correspondingly less to OS/2.

By late 1990, Microsoft had intensified its disagreements with IBM to the point where IBM decided that it would have to take some overt action to ensure that OS/2 development continued at a reasonable pace. IBM, therefore, took over complete development responsibility for OS/2 1.x, even though it was in its dying days, and OS/2 2.00. Microsoft would continue development on Windows and OS/2 3.00. Shortly after this split, Microsoft renamed OS/2 V3 to Windows NT."

Dave Cutler wasn't "just some guy", true, but OS/2 and NT were the _same product_ up until Microsoft re-released OS/2 as Windows NT 3.1

The whining from DEC was that supposedly Dave Cutler brought Mica code from DEC with him, but we'll never know that because the agreement is secret. (the bits that are public, though, the negotiators on DEC's side didn't get much). Microsoft didn't steal Cutler, btw, they hired him outright after DEC cut off his project (Mica).

Microsoft likes to endorse the legend that NT came from VMS. They do it because it gives NT an air of "legitimacy" that it somehow is _directly_ descended from a "real operating system", which it didn't.

Yes, NT has a some of the concepts similar to VMS (DACLs), and descendents of VMS in the years after NT 3.1 included concepts developed in NT (the Registry) and ported into VMS all as a result of MS and DEC becoming buddy-buddy after the Agreement. Nothing is created in a vacuum. But to say that NT is a direct descendent of VMS, well, that's just plain wrong.

For a graphical representation:

http://firedrake.org/paddy/images/non-unix_os_hist ory_0.3.12.pdf

Notice the solid lines tracing from OS/2 and the _dotted_ lines from VMS.

And lastly, if NT is a direct descendent of VMS, who is the idiot that removed the stability bits?

--
BMO

Windows compatibility is a moving target.

Not only that, it's Microsoft's business model! Fortunately, there are those who do their part by carefully aiming and re-aiming, like wine, and the Odin project which provides OS/2 users a similar Win32 layer to run those apps natively.

you are bound to bump into a software patent on something down the road eventually

In the case of OS/2's Windows compatibility, that was provided by using genuine Microsoft Windows code within OS/2, the alimony in the corporate divorce of IBM and Microsoft. The children of that divorce, of course, were OS/2 and Windows NT. A good timeline on all this can be found here.

Little known fact...
OS/2 Warp version 3.0 IS Windows NT.
Microsoft bought the rights to the never released OS2 version 3 from IBM and rebadged it as Windows NT.
Link to OS/2 history
http://www.os2bbs.com/os2news/OS2History.html

I recall OS/2 2.1 being out before Win95, but I'm pretty sure Warp came out later.

Quite incorrect. OS/2 v2.1 was released in 1992, whereas OS/2 WARP v3 was released in November 1994, about 10 months before Windows 95 was released (ref: http://www.os2bbs.com/os2news/OS2Warp.html). I still have the boxes to prove it.

2.1 was still better than Win95...except for software availability when developers started developing to the Win9x-specific libraries.

Well, that's what happens when you abuse your monopoly position. Let's not all forget this was the time period when Microsoft was at their worst, with per-processor licensing (you paid for DOS and Windows on every machine, whether it came with DOS and Windows pre-installed or not, causing OS/2 machines to be more expensive), threats to hardware manufacturers ("Install only our software or we'll raise prices on you"), and secretive pricing schedules (so you never knew if your competition was getting a better price then you were).

Yaz.

A bit of OS/2 history - Warp Connect seems to have beat Win95 out by a few months. Which seems to coincide closely with when I bought it - I recall buying Warp Connect early in 1996, and I remember that I had waited and agonised over the decision for a long time - many months. Had to buy a CDROM at the same time.

Regardless, MS has obviously won that battle with OS/2 support being withdrawn in 2006. MacOSX having more features than Longhorn is not a guarantor of success for MacOSX either. MS consistantly wins on fewer features.

/Side track

IBM has never actually gone up against Microsoft before.
OS/2 was created in a partnership with Microsoft and IBM.
Windows NT IS OS/2ver3 with a win32 shell.

History of OS/2
http://www.os2bbs.com/os2news/OS2History.html

Here.

OS/2 and NT share a considerable code base, the first three versions of OS/2 and the first version of NT. OS/2 v3 became Windows NT 3.0.

Uh, other than the fact that Windows NT *was* OS/2 v3, that it contained the full OS/2 subsystem, and that Microsoft worked with IBM on OS/2 v1-v3 until renaming v3 to Windows NT?

Actor: Its 2003, we were promised flashbacks! Where are the flashbacks?

Voiceover: With IBM, you can have flashbacks.

Fade to picture of OS/2 Warp...

I'd just like to point out a misnomer in the previous replied to article that "SMB was originally invented by Digital Equipment Corporation". Looks like SMB can trace it's roots to IBM in 1985. I believe the story goes that Andrew Tridgell wrote Samba to communicate with DEC's Digital Pathworks and quite by accident discovered that it also successfully communicated with Windows Netbios. Microsoft must have "invented" SMB right around the same time they "invented" Windows.

i believe ibm still has support contracts out (2004 i believe) for os/2 warp. i had a friend who worked at tivoli and he mentioned it to me. here is ibm's strategy for 2003. i believe os/2 warp 4 has been out since 1996.

>there was no alternative to Win95 at the time it was introduced.

Say Again?

Windows wrote theirs from scratch...

Wrong! Windows 9x came from DOS, which Microsoft bought from Tim Paterson. Windows XP came from Windows 2000 which came from Windows NT which came from a joint project between IBM and Microsoft.

And why would they? IBM didn't even hype it and it was their thing...

No, at the start it was a joint project by MS and IBM.
Read more about the history of OS/2 Warp here

BTW, one reason why OS/2 died was that its Windows emulation was too good, so no-one would care to develop natively for the OS. Think about it, WINE fans/coders!

> This may sound mean to the EQ coders, but I can't imagine what they're possibly doing that could require 500MB of RAM if they were coding properly. I mean, do they trickle-load levels at all? Where on earth could that be going?

It doesn't appear to be much of the code bloat, it is instead the high-polygon player and equipment models, enormous textures, motion-captured animation sequences, etc. I think there probably is a lot of room for improvement on how they handle it to reduce the memory usage. Using the new graphics engine in the days prior to the Luclin release, the game could still run on a machine with 64MB RAM easily. At the release of Luclin, resident memory usage spiked to nearly 800MB before they reduced it.

I would say there is some massive room for improvement. However, it has definitely helped fuel hardware upgrades among the gaming population...

> Always thought that NT was a pretty direct child of VMS

The biggest OS/2 relics in NT are the HPFS filesystem, now extended and called "NTFS", and LAN Manager networking (SMB + CIFS). Windows NT 3.0 and 3.1 included native HPFS support; I'm not sure about recent revisions.

There's a link below to a nice history of Microsoft, IBM, and OS/2. Even casual reading can illuminate to one that there is zero, or nearly zero, relationship to be extracted between OS/2's support for MS Windows executables, and GNU/Linux's support of same via Wine/WineX. VMS is very prominent in the development of Windows NT, and IMHO the NT series (NT 3.0, 3.1, 4.0, 2K, XP) are a nicely-engineered, functional piece of work. However, GNU/Linux is more usable for me on a day-to-day basis at this point...

http://www.os2bbs.com/os2news/OS2History.html

A format, language, or protocol that has become a standard not because it has been approved by a standards organization but because it is widely used and recognized by the industry as being standard.

Funny, when I got into computers back in 1991 I started with DOS and only began the love affair when I discovered OS/2.

Keep in mind, though, that OS/2 was originally a joint MicroSoft/IBM effort. Of course, comparing the products that emerged after MicroSoft split off makes it obvious that all the good stuff comes from IBM. See this page for some more background on the history of OS/2 (as well as some other PC OSs).

The work is going on for porting OS/2 to ReactOS (Freeware NT clone). For me this seems to be the most promising project. There're already a lot of developers for OS/2 subsystem as well as horde of them for the OS itself. Site is under construction but mailing list is >20 messages a day.

For all who wonder - there's still life in OS/2 though not too much of it. OS/2 links:

• OS/2 News and Rumours
• ecomstation site working link
• Hobbes forever

When did you first think OS/2 was a "superior" operating sysem? The day I tried the first beta of OS/2 2.0. I had used OS/2 1.x before, and although I could see the potential, I really couldn't use it.

Have you ever tried using another operating system? Yes, pretty much every other major PC OS except *BSD, including BeOS.

Have you tried different other operating systems? Huh?

Is anyone else in your family an OS/2 user? My father uses it every now and then, but he rarely uses a computer nowadays.

Did you have OS/2 experiences as a child? Heh. Sorry, I was in college when OS/2 1.0 came out.

Are you a 100% OS/2 user, or do you occasionally use other operatings sytems? My day job is a Linux driver programmer, and I use my wife's Mac for playing games and a few other things that I could do on my OS/2 PC if I weren't too cheap to buy more hardware. Why buy a second CDR drive when I can make an ISO image and ftp it to the Mac?

Do you consider using OS/2 normal? As normal as using any "alternative" OS.

When did you first 'come out' and tell your friends and family that you were an OS/2 user? Back when I started using OS/2, everyone thought it would be the future, even Bill Gates.

Have you been critized because of your OS orientation? Sure, but these people have never been able to explain to me why I should switch. They make it sound as if I'm missing out on something, but they never tell me exactly what that is.
--
Lord Nimon