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The Sad Parable of OS/2
Still-in-Mourning writes "IBM's first 32-bit version of its advanced PC operating system was released 10 years ago this month. It was better than anything around, yet it failed. Its hopes were pinned on many of the same things we hope today will bring Linux to the forefront. What lessons are to be learned? Will we learn them? A glimpse of a sorry chapter in computing history."
One of my professors in undergraduate school often quipped that IBM's OS/2 was exactly that, an OS by half.
It was the marketing, or lack there of. No one had heard of it.
First for Warp.
I used it 'back in the day'.
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
Elron Hubbard is the Way!
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
It lacked support for Beowulf clustering.
Thank you.
Our companies voicemail system uses OS/2. Has not dropped a beat in the past 8 years.. .
Ask Microsoft what is behind their 2000 OS...
I thought it was ok. : opinion
I don't think it was the greatest. The user interface was locked in. Much like NT (microsoft). So I never really cared for it.
I'm sad to say it, but I think it's true. I was a hard core OS/2 user through OS/2 Warp (I think that was 2.1). It was very good, but when windows 95 came out and was more stable, plus had better application support, I couldn't see why I should continue using it. OS/2's windows compatibility only got worse over time.
Don't get me wrong, I wish OS/2 took over and we were all using it instead of windows, I think we'd be far better off.
Hopefully the linux world can learn something from that. If Microsoft ever gets the upper hand in the areas where Linux excels, it will be very bad for Linux. Not as bad as it was for OS/2 though, if for no other reason than the price of Linux.
Nope
There's a few other simple reasons OS/2 might have failed. The first was that it was just too robust. You comment in the story that it was 10 years ago that it was begun. Well, think about the machines we had 10 years ago. Most people, if they even had a computer, they were in the 286 or 386 department. OS/2 is a heavy-weight. It compared more to what NT was soon to become back then. Yes, it had smaller hardware requirements, but most people's machines were just insufficient for running it. Other possibility was the amount of DOS software out there 10 years ago.
Games and multimedia software were mostly written for DOS because authors needed direct hardware access. OS/2, while having excellent DOS support, it was still too slow and unstable to play Falcon 3.0 or what have you (although, I admit I was able to get CrystalDream II by Triton to run... only after a LOT of hacking).
Aside from that, there were no direct hardware access API's available... ever (as far as I know). When OS had to start competing with Windows 95, Microsoft was introducing the WinG (Windows Graphics) library, the library that eventually lead to DirectX. I'm not saying that OS/2 had no multimedia support (it had a fantastic multimedia model), but it simply was not ambitious enough.
Too bad. OS/2 was never geared towards people with lower end (average at the time) hardware and those who wanted to play games.
Why bother.
"the fact that a lot of Team OS/2 members were Trekkies in much the same way that most Ross Perot supporters believe in UFOs."
;) -smiley included for the humour impaired.
I always knew there was something off about OS/2 advocates (Ross Perot supporters too, now that I think of it). I always imagined that when they weren't expounding the virtues of an OS most (read: normal) people didn't care about, that they were off sniffing gasoline and trying to run over furrey wood-land creatures.
That is...its our way or the highway.
Everyone took the highway.
I'm still working on a clever footer.
Not even close. There were plenty of other operating systems and GUIs around at the time: NeXTStep, UNIX workstations and GUIs, Smalltalk-based systems, to name just a few.
NeXTStep alone beat OS/2 technologically in just about every area. The only major OS that OS/2 was clearly better than was DOS/Windows, but that was not exactly hard to do.
OS/2 was an attempt by IBM and Microsoft to corner the market with a proprietary operating system and proprietary APIs. It is poetic justice that the effort went down in flames as far as IBM was concerned. It is unfortunate that the effort succeeded as far as Microsoft is concerned, which apparently moved bits and pieces of OS/2 into NT.
The lesson to be learned from this? Either be the monopolist, or go with open source and open APIs. That's why IBM is pushing Linux now and Microsoft is pushing Windows.
I remember when OS/2 Warp 3 first came out. The Commercials were stupid. I mean, sure a lot of commercials are stupid, but at least they show the product they are peddling. IBM's OS/2 commercials just showed a bunch of guys crowded around a monitor going "Wow! I can't beleive it can do that! Wow that's amazing!" but the Camera view was from behind the monitor so you didn't see anything they were doing. Then it had some catchy IBM slogan and that was it. All the commercials I can remember were like that, and I never knew what it was. I did however buy it after seeing it at a local computer shop. I think I bought it at Walmart, all 45 Floppy Disks. It ran BBS's well. It's sad it never made it very far.. I hear banks still use it though for certain applications.
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
How they survived those intervening 5 years is a long story, but it has a lot to do with IT people committing massive fraud and computers being horribly unreliable.
Heh, and now that MS has a stable OS, the apps have all gone down the shitter. You just can't win. Keeps the IT folks employed, though, so you win if you're a MSCE.
It's hard to believe, in today's day and age when Microsoft is the "evil empire", that there was once a day when Microsoft was the scrappy upstart and IBM was the "evil empire", but that's what the situation was like for most of the 1980's. In the end it did not matter how good OS/2 became... nobody was going to put their company at the mercy of IBM again.
By the time OS/2 Warp (32-bit OS/2) came out, if you mentioned OS/2 to anybody in the computer industry, they'd say something like "You mean that runs on something other than IBM PS/2 computers?". Unlike what somebody else here mentioned, everybody in the computer industry knew what OS/2 was and what it was capable of doing. But a) they didn't know it ran on anything other than IBM equipment, and b) they weren't interested in putting themselves back into thrall to IBM again.
In the end, politics, not technology, doomed OS/2. The politics of Linux are completely different from the politics that doomed OS/2, and I can't think of any lesson from the OS/2 saga that applies to Linux.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Mind you I was an IBMer at the time:
OS/2 on a PS/2, half an Operating System on half a Computer.
I'm not a big fan of any operating system that doesn't have a native TCP/IP stack.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
IBM dumped OS/2 itself, and not Microsoft. Moreover to that, IBM's devotion to OS/2 could have been seen as a competitor to its Unix line. So if IBM was about to fully support OS/2, that could have been considered as killing the Unix line. So I believe that IBM did the right thing. IBM killed OS/2 not Microsoft...
There is a OS/2 Warp Seti team that is in the top 40 of all teams.
In fact, they are number 29.
Take a look at the top 200 teams here: http://www.statsman.org/setistats/html/
Of course, many machines in the field promptly croaked when the new OS stressed their extended memory for the first time. Our work ground to a halt for weeks as we tracked down flaky RAM-related problems.
Chasing those types of ghosts was never any fun: Hook a logic analyzer to the memory bus, let it run overnight, find out that the impedance of the logic analyzer probes suppressed the bug, start again from square 1.
I'm guessing that memory interface designers today use better engineering practices than we did back then.
I always hear people saying how they loved OS/2 and think everyone would be better off if it had "won" instead of windows.
However, I believe that it would be no different. It would still be open source v.s the big giant. The big giant would just be IBM instead of Microsoft. Don't forget they too are a huge gigantic corporation with no interest except profit just like MS.
Everyone would instead say "geez I miss windows. I wish it had won on the desktop instead of OS/2. Sure the application support wasn't as good. And OS/2 compatibility in win9x got a lot worse over time but it was still a far better OS IMO."
Think about it.
--
Garett
I was working for a small software house when version 1.0 (I think that was the version) came out and I was given the job of porting some of our products to it. I was pretty impressed. It was the first time I think I ever programmed with threads, etc. and I got our product working pretty well. Then the next version came out and everything I'd done was broken. I couldn't even figure out a way to fix some of the critical things that needed to be done in the new version which seemed to have a completely different philosophy. I heard stories about a team in England having rewritten it, don't know if any of that is true. But my boss swore off Os/2 forever after that.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
The author of the article seems to think that windows compatablity played a part in the death os os/2.
He argues that because programmers could make just one version that one run on both os's, they didnt bother marketing an os/2 only version, which would have be optimized for the os/2 platform.
I hope this isn't going to happen with wine/linux. Its quite obvious that windows programs will never quite work perfect in wine, and I hope developers dont use wine as an excuse to not bother developing linux applications.
From the article:
Microsoft found it all but impossible to develop a useful multitasking operating system for the 286. This was not Microsoft's fault -- the design of the chip simply wouldn't allow much useful to be done with it.
What exactly in the in the 286 architecture prevents the use of a multitasking operating system? I seem to remember MS once touted Xenix, and there were also other Unixen out there. There were multitasking versions of CPM before the 286. Is the article writer missing something, or am I missing something. You don't need to have built in multiple instruction pipelines in the proceessor to multitask. It is almost trivial to write that into an operating system. Remember Andrew Tannenbaum's Minix that came on floppies included in his book "Operating Systems"?.
It appears to me that the article writer is trying to excuse Microsoft's lack of skill by pretending that the task was impossible.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
Needed your A Drive to be 3 1/2. Granted that didn't stop me, but it turned off some people who didn't have the inclination to jack around with their hardware. No stable Gravis Ultrasound Support. Yeah someone had written a driver but it was still flakey as hell. Wave Table synthesis smashed the hell out of FM synthesis and I wasn't going to play my games in FM anymore.
Supreme Bunny Overlord Zairius
Actually, it was (gasp) MICROSOFT (gasp). Think about that before you flame!
Here are googles top 2 links with more information.
and the google search itself
It's my understanding that Microsoft and IBM had a technology sharing agreement/contract. And they had agreed that Windows would be developed as an os for the home while OS/2 would be developed for business. Then MS decided to develop Win 95. They didn't want os/2 to be win 95 compatible (they would have had to let it be according to their contract with IBM), so they delayed it until the contract ran out.
So, if Linux just doesn't sign a contract with Microsoft...:-)
I used OS/2 for some time. I wrote software for it and on it and did systems integration with it. I am agnostic abou platform.
1. Spending a bucket load of money doesn't mean that you will gain users. It's a network econmony dummy - it has to be safe for users to test and migrate before they can migrate.
2. Don't make an OS with some really good features but forget the fundamentals that have shaped computing... the file system sounded great in concept, but proved to be difficult because it used different paradigms from the ones that users were used to.
3. It matters how things look. It matters a *lot*. Windows 95 and later just looked much better.
4. It matters that the applications that you are used to work flawlessly (and with no work on the part of the user) on the new OS. Otherwise people won't transition.
5. Speed matters. OS/2 sometimes felt slow slow slow. I used a dual boot machine. Windows at the time felt faster.
6. Don't sell the OS as something that doesn't crash when it does.
7. Support a huge range of hardware. It makes it difficult to switch if you have to buy new hardware. By contrast Windows pretty much worked on most hardware.
I liked OS/2 a lot better than Windows 95, but there wasn't much software out for it. It was a beautiful operating system though.
Deepak
seriously, it is a siple fact that with propriatary technologies - the best one always fails. The whole IT industry is built on the corpses of technologies that were better, but failed because propriatary forces kept them from reaching their maximum potential. think RISC vs CISC, intel vs motorolla, mac gui software vs mirosoft gui software, Amiga vs x86, tcp/ip vs token-ring, novell vs ms networks, etc... We shouldn't be sorry they failed, it is our own fault for beliving that it's ok to gain value by legally restricting the ability of others to copy through crack-pot licensing instead of trying to gain competitive advantages by service and speed of development.
when you realize that even the trolls do not bother writing "OS/2 is dying" anymore.
Many, far too many, moons ago I started a contract at Aldus Corporation as a SE/T (Software Engineer/Test). My job was to work with one of the first commercial applications developed for OS/2, a new version of Aldus Pagemaker.
Because no-one at Aldus knew anything about OS/2 (they were pretty much all Mac-heads and sneered at PC's, DOS and Windows) they gave me a brand new computer, a bunch of sticks of RAM and a pile of floppies they got from IBM. "Go figure it out." So I did.
The developers (who I was never allowed to meet for some bizarre reason) got Yesler (the codename for OS/2 Pagemaker) running about the time I was getting really bored with playing Reversi (the only real application on the OS/2 distribution I had) and I got started doing what they were paying me for; figuring out how to crash Yesler and/or OS/2 and emailing formatted dumps with my comments to the developers. It wasn't hard to find said bugs, although I was told "You can't crash OS/2, it is too solid." Hah!
Just about the time they got Yesler stable enough that I could put together a demo script the marketroids could use to show off the program (they had to follow it exactly or it would crash) I found a way to make OS/2 have a complete spastic seizure. It involved a fairly complex series of actions that had to be followed exactly, but when you did the last one the computer would freeze and waves of color would wash over the screen. Kind of pretty in a psychodelic way.
We called it the Colorshow bug and the developers claimed it was an OS/2 problem. This kicked off a shitstorm of finger pointing that ended with the developers working around the bug instead of IBM fixing it. Remember, at this point IBM was actually pretty happy about the Yesler project because it gave their new operating system some street cred, so it really surprised me that there was so much rancor. An earlier problem with printer drivers was fixed in a day from my reporting it.
But the punchline happened about a week after I found the Colorshow bug. One of the marketroids came by and asked if I could demonstrate the bug for a group of suits that were waiting down the hall. No problem, bring them on (and, yes, I promise to watch my language). So the suits crowd around the desk and I walk the dog and pony (click, click, drag, click, drag, click, colors, "OOOOHH!", nervous laughter). The suits thank me and they leave.
Then the guy sitting across from me leans over and says "You know who that was?" I shake my head. "That was Paul Brainard," (the CEO of Aldus) "and a bunch of Apple executives up here for a visit."
OK...
Jack William Bell
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
To say it failed is a bit harsh. From what I remember it was successful in some circles for quite a while. It had it's use in the early 90's, but it's long gone now. I'll miss it. :)
I remember when I moved from DesqView to OS/2 for my BBS. Things were so much faster. Multi node BBS on the same box that could barely handle 2 lines. I was so happy that it could do things like share IRQs for the COM ports. The UI sucked but it ran windows apps, and supported DOS apps, AND had a great scripting language. For my needs it was way ahead of the rest of the pack. In fact based on 2.1 I went out and bought Warp, even got Warp 4 for crying out loud. It was good for serving but as a client OS sucked ass.
Like Linux, many OS/2 users chose and stuck with their OS because they wanted, and because they changed.
OS/2 users often multibooted, and were quite familiar with Windows systems. Often far better than the Windows users themselves. :) This is in part because fixing the problems up in OS/2 often required a bit of poking around, and this habit passed onto fixing Windows systems.
What we do not really need is this "death threat" thing when advocates turned nasty.
OS/2 trives even now, not because of IBM or Microsoft, but, like Linux, because of the users themselves. It aims at a different market to Linux, but both have vigourous grass roots. No monopolist likes that :).
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
OS/2 was by far the best work that Microsoft ever did.
There was a wonderful quote from the head of the marketing team for Windows 95 who said words to the effect that " If you asked anyone at Microsoft they could have told you that OS/2 was a far superior operating system to Windows 95 - our job was to keep anyone else from discovering that."
The Microsoft marketing team did a great job and foisted off on the public the worst operating system ever on any computer.
By the way - if you doubt that W95 is the worst OS ever - here is a simple test: name an OS that was less stable - less secure - and more virus prone that W9x. There isn't one. Like I said; W95 is the worst operating system ever put on a computer.
-- I think that Microsoft supporters ought to be known as 'Renfields'. They have similar motivations, and like Dracula's servant they are on an "all the bugs you can eat" diet. --
Unfortunately... I think the fate of OS/2 might just befall Java.
When I was at the MIS center for Designs by Levi, I saw them configuring OS/2 1.0 text mode for one of the cash registers.
While on a contract job in 2000 for a cash register company, some of their cash registers still run under OS/2. And, they run their central control systems under OS/2.
Fight Spammers!
This article is from Sept. 1997. More than 4 years old. Not that it isn't important....but it's not exactly timely.
Theres only one reason why OS2 failed, it failed because Microsoft had an illegal monopoly, exclusive OEM contracts never gave OS2 a chance.
When I wanted to buy my first computer i tried to get OS2 warp, i even wanted mac. However to get OS2 warp I'd have to spend an extra $200, to get mac I'd have to spend an extra $1000.
Because Windows came with the PC itself, to buy or use anything else would be a waste of money, after all windows works, and it comes with the machine so why use anything else?
Face it, you could have had OSX out back when Windows95 was around and Windows95 would still have won because people never even had the OPTION to choose what OS came with their system, it was Windows95 or Windows95.
This is why Windows95 won.
I'm sick of people saying MacOS did this wrong and OS2 did that wrong.
No, thats not it, Its Microsoft had exclusive contracts and backroom deals.
Period, thats all it came down to.
OS2 can be better, it doesnt matter if no machines came with OS2, even IBMs own machines didnt come with OS2!!!
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
It's only a matter of perception.
Let's forget about OS'es for now, and talk about people.
Notice how sometimes very good people give very bad impression and other people won't give them their due? It can be at any level: professional or personal.
Most of the time, it is those people's fault. They don't care about how others perceive them.
Now back to OS'es. Microsoft has always been careful, before it became a monopoly, with its customer's. They'd give them what they wanted. Sure stability was not there, but people wanted ease of use + tons of fun ways of using your computer. Add to that the fact that its basis was the cheap PC and you've got a winner. Microsoft made it easy for developers to join its bandwagon. This is why you now have bazillions of apps for the Windows platform.
Of course, as soon as you become a monopoly, the temptation is huge to say &*^* off to anyone who steps on you or competes with you.
We can all bitch about Microsoft practices. In the end, a good initial (though maybe wrong) perception made the difference.
The question for Linux, but really more for Linux companies is: How do you present yourself to give that good first impression of care, competence and professionalism?
If IBM had the exclusive OEM contracts, then Windows95 would have been destroyed.
Why do people always ignore the illegal practices of Microsoft? IE is on top because it came with Windows.
Windows is on top because it comes with every PC.
Its IMPOSSIBLE to compete with a product which comes with the OS itself, and its IMPOSSIBLE to compete with a product which comes with the PC itself.
A user is not going to spend money on something they already have. Thats why OS2 didnt sell, why buy OS2 when you already have Windows?
Now, if Linux can manage to get OEM contracts, Linux can actually compete.
Apple couldnt / cant get OEM contracts so they sell their own Machines, Linux may have to sell their own box's to be successful, Sun did it, SGI did it, Apple does it, Linux may have to do this if they cant get OEM contracts.
The key is OEM contracts, thats the key.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Had IBM chosen CP/M instead of PC-DOS (later MS-DOS) as their OS for the PC, the computing public may not have known Windows, and they would have become used to operating system names with slashes in them.
Lesson learned... hopefully.
OS/2 2.0 marked the first time I actually got excited about an operating system. I had worked with Macs in high school, but could never justify the high cost. I also worked on Unix workstations at Cal, but as a non-CS major I found them to be lacking in usefulness for most of my computing tasks (flashback to writing an English paper with jove). OS/2 offered a bit of everything: a flexible GUI, a decent multithreading kernel, and DOS/Windows compatibility. I joined the cult in the spring of '92 and was immediately hooked.
Some problems were apparent immediately. The Workplace Shell had some really cool ideas, but it was pretty rough around the edges when 2.0 came out. Also, I could only afford 8MB RAM at the time, so I was constantly swapping to disk. I had done a little Windows 3.x programming, so the advantages of the OS/2 32-bit API were really obvious. Unfortunately, nobody bothered to write any software to it.
Then there was the problem that most of the divisions of IBM itself were standing in the way of OS/2 deployment. And Microsoft was just starting to get the hang of its most predatory marketing tactics. During the '93-'95 period, they were masterful at manipulating the press into touting "Cairo" and "Chicago", while shrouding the already available OS/2 Warp with an SEP field. I remember when MS put out a whitepaper explaining that nobody actually needed preemptive multitasking and 32-bit addressing. A couple of years later they had the media giving them credit for inventing those capabilities (scene from one of the home shopping channels: "Preemptive multitasking...only with Windows 95!").
In the meantime, Microsoft kept gradually improving their products until Windows was just good enough for the people using it (though with the preloads, it hardly mattered). OS/2 fell behind in the feature race, and never got out of the gate in application and driver support. Once PC games started coming out exclusively for Windows instead of DOS, OS/2 was completely eliminated from the consumer market. By '98, it couldn't claim any real advantages over NT except possibly a cleaner API.
So now I'm mostly platform-agnostic, but I do try to support Linux and BSD where I can. The free Unix systems have the advantage of not being burdened by old-school IBM marketing, but I still fear that the free software community could make some of the same mistakes that sank OS/2. Open source licensing will keep free platforms from ever being completely lost, but they can fall behind to the point where they become largely irrelevant.
Here's hoping that things go a little differently this time.
No one went to a store and saw a box with OS2 on one side, and a box with Windows on the other.
No, you went to buy a PC and Windows was on it, you had NO OPTION to buy OS2 at all.
You had no option to buy BeOS.
The only way to compete with Windows is from your own platform, because Microsoft has a monopoly on OEM contracts.
How can any OS no matter how good it ever becomes, compete with an inferior OS thats packed in on every machine?
Face it, if a person buys a computer and it works, theres no reason to ever buy a new OS.
Sales of Windows95-98-2000 werent from people going to stores and buyingg boxes or the upgrades, most of the sales came from people buying PCs which came with Windows included.
Perhaps there should be a law, no more OEM contracts period.
Then let the user actually choose their OS, I guarentee that Windows95 wouldnt have beaten OS2.
I didnt want Windows95 when i got a computer, I thought OS2 was cooler in every way, but when I got a computer, it already had Windows95, there was no reason to get OS2 because Windows95 worked.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
OS/2 was a truly great OS. The only other Truly Great OS I can think of is Mac OS X. "Linux+GNU utilities" is a very good OS for a number of reasons, but it's not particularly innovative.
:)
:)
:)
OS/2 2.0 (the first fully 32-bit version that also supported running more than one DOS session at one time) ran WELL on my 386sx-16 with 6 megs of RAM. Granted, it was slow as molasses, but I was able to run my BBS in one window and do other stuff without a problem. (I still remember my disgust when I tried to do this with Windows 3.0 on the same hardware - it didn't work well at ALL.) The environment was very graphically rich, and the jewel in the crown was the WorkPlace Shell, the likes of which I have yet to see on another OS (even BeOS didn't quite cut it).
The workplace shell was completely object-oriented; it was so far ahead of its time that most people had a really tough time understanding it which may have helped lead to its demise. You could drag "things" or "attributes" from programs to collections of objects, etc. I could open up the paint or font panel and "drag" color & typefaces over to any part of any open folder or application, and they would stick. The links were stored *in* the filesystem with the objects they affected, instead of a monolithic pseudo-database or oodles of unwieldy text files. As long as programs were written to take advantage of the object-oriented aspect of the WPS, it was a thing of beauty to watch how seamlessly everything worked together. (I used to spend hours customizing colors & fonts on all of my folders & windows by dragging... no OS since then has really been quite as fun to do this with, as they all "feel" very rigid and inflexible in comparison.") WPS also had the concept of templates as stacks of paper that you would literally rip off the top and fill in, not worrying about what the underlying application is. And WPS brought us the first tabbed-divider interfaces, which were pervasive throughout the system.
But OS/2 was released in a time when PC users were just starting to think graphically and Mac users were almost literally on another planet. Microsoft capitalized on this by releasing version after version of an OS that was essentially a menu-driven system overlaid on top of DOS. OS/2 was so advanced that people simply couldn't grasp its potential. And yes, people viewed IBM as "evil" at the time, and IBM sucked at marketing, etc...etc... there are really a ton of reasons why it didn't make it, but luckily I don't think most of them apply to Linux. No, Linux has a whole list of other problems that will hamper its adoption by the masses, but I digress.
It is a small consolation that OS/2 is still in heavy use in banks, and in Germany (I believe some user groups still exist there). They like their finely engineered products over there.
Like Mac OS X, (and unlike Windows or Linux) OS/2 wasn't simply a "list of features available in an OS" - it was designed from the ground up to deliver a complete & refined experience to the user. It disappeared into the background as you concentrated on the task at hand. It's what an OS should be. It's the last OS I ever used (until Mac OS X) that was truly a joy to use on a daily basis (and this includes several distributions of Linux).
It's nice that at least Apple finally gets this.
I read through the article, and it was full of weird conclusions. I am very familiar with what was going on in the computer industry during the time period discussed, and I disagree with much of the article.
The story of OS/2 is what taught me that in the computer industry, revolution is not what the customers want; they want evolution. You can sometimes pull off a revolution (Macintosh) but it is much easier to offer a smooth upgrade path.
OS/2 was not killed by some weird conspiracy by Microsoft. Some of the other causes of death listed were not doubt contributing factors, but the major cause of death was: incompatible APIs.
It was not possible to take a Windows application and compile it for OS/2; you had to substantially re-write your app. It wouldn't be quite as much work as re-writing your app from scratch, but it was close. Microsoft didn't want this. Microsoft wanted to make OS/2's windowing API compatible with Windows, but IBM had some other API they thought was better, and they insisted it be used.
This had the effect of forcing companies to decide whether they wanted to write for Windows, or write for OS/2. That was totally dumb of IBM. If people could have just recompiled for OS/2 and offered an OS/2 version of their app, they would have done so. IBM was asking developers for a revolution, not evolution.
But let's go back to the first version of OS/2. Because it was written for the 286, its compatibility with DOS apps was poor. OS/2 1.x offered a "compatibility box" for running a single DOS app at a time; it worked poorly, and it was often called the "Chernobyl Box" because it would often crash (and it would take the whole OS down with it). So, any company that wanted to adopt OS/2 had to plan on getting new versions of all their applications.
But in 1990, Windows 3.0 shipped. It sold like hotcakes. The article makes some bizarre statements about Win 3.0, but the reality was that it would multitask your DOS applications very well. DOS applications were preemptively multitasked, not cooperatively, and DOS apps could very well crash but usually Windows would not crash with them. In other words, Win 3.0 allowed companies an evolutionary upgrade path: they could keep running the same DOS apps they were using, and then phase in Windows apps over time. The same companies that were unwilling to commit to OS/2 were willing to commit to Win 3.0.
Win 3.0 was what made Microsoft decide to walk away from OS/2. The customers were voting with their dollars, and what they were voting for was Windows. It didn't hurt that Microsoft had covered all bets: they had applications for DOS, Windows, OS/2, and Macintosh. (They even flirted with a few other platforms: my favorite word processor for the Atari ST was Microsoft Write.) When Win 3.0 took off, Microsoft was ready, and sold lots of Word and Excel.
So, to review: IBM forced developers to choose whether to develop for OS/2 or Windows, and Windows became a runaway hit. That's it right there. That's what killed OS/2.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I was an avid OS/2 user until Doom was released. I had nothing but troubles running id games under OS/2.
On a side note, I still have 2 OS/2 1.2 servers running some kind of proprietary database that we can't live without. I just keep hoping that these pentium 120s don't die taking my database with it. It takes an average of 3-6 boots for OS/2 to even start right these days.
I love being behind the times.
Twenty-one floppies, over and over. One bad click, one bad assumption, start over. I swear there was some sadistic dys-feature whereby the more rationally you behaved, the more inscrutable the behavior of the install program.
Good riddance you patronizing sonzabiches! I don't care if they were all billable hours, they were hours of pure misery, and I will never, ever forgive IBM for putting me through them.
At least not the old IBM. The new one is fine by me.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I use OS/2 just about every day at work, and i can tell you it's very much still alive and kicking :) when the software that runs our equipment was first designed, windows 3.1 just wouldn't cut it, so the programmers decided to use OS/2. since then, each new version has been built on the last, and new equipments' software borrows elements from the previous generation's. so to this day, all our machines use OS/2 version 3 in their embedded computers, and all field engineers are given laptops that dual boot into Warp 4 to run simulations. (ironically, OS/2 is not supported on these IBM laptops, so it's sometimes hard to find drivers.) it looks like the big push to port everything to windows NT is finally on, though. but it will still be around on all our machines in the field for quite some time to come....
Thats because no one was even given a choice if they wanted to buy it or not. Why would they need commercials when everyone who buys a PC buys Windows automatically?
How was IBM supposed to compete with a product which comes with every PC?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
This author for this article, even for September 1997, seems a bit biased. He doesn't have much regard for the IBM/MS agreements (the companies did try to make the relationship work, at least initially), and doesn't even point out that MS did release software to customers call "Microsoft OS/2" (which I have a copy of).
His timeline also ignores NT--many people don't see to be aware of (or ignore) the fact that NT 3.1 came out in 1993, and he doesn't make any mention of NT until the timeline reaches 1996. NT factored a lot more into people's decisions than Windows 3.1 did.
IF IBMs OS2 was packed with every PC sold Windows would have beat OS2?
You are saying every PC owner would burn their OS2 backup CD, format their harddrive, and run to the store to spend $200 extra to buy Microsoft Windows?
if the tables were turned, the result would be OS2 is the winner.
It was the OEM contracts.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
In the beginning, there was a collaborative project between IBM and MS to produce a 32-bit, client server OS. Client server in the sense that it would support the concept of a "native" API, and adapter/wrapper APIs that resembled standards, such as POSIX, that brokered requests to the native API. It featured an advanced (for the time) filesystem with metadata features and a binary tree implementation of the file lookup table/cluster map. Eventually, IBM and MS parted ways. IBM sold the product as OS/2; Microsoft as Windows NT.
Yes, there are a TON of differences between the 2. But they began life as one.
meh.
No kidding. My first job was with Le Grand Bleu here in the Research Triangle Park, NC area. There I was, fresh out of school , and I found myself writing very-close-to-kernel code. (Remember, this was back in the days when Linux barely existed if at all, during the last spastic twitchings of the reign of Bush the Elder.)
The OS internals themselves were pretty slick (multi-threading, flat memory model), and the driver interface was decent, even in the 2.0 days, but Christ, IBM couldn't market lemonade in the desert. No TCP stack, no developer tools without mortgaging your soul, and as far guaranteeing compatibility on other manufacturer's 386 boxes, well, you were on your own.
Having said that, it was a great OS to cut my driver-writing teeth on, even if the APIs were butt-ugly to behold (definitely MSFT's influence there; IBM preferred things to be more Unixy IIRC).
If you wonder what it was like watching a product being made and poorly poorly marketed, I'll say this much: I was getting totally fscking tired of watching great developers get screwed. IBM recruited, and got, a wide array of very talented technical people, only to have their efforts (as developers and evangelists) stifled by suits. Yes, the same kinds of suits who gave MS-DOS to MS in the eighties, and who never had a clue about the PC software market until it was too late. Despite the developers' best efforts, IBM management and marketing always managed to find a way to lose to Microsoft. Really snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. They had either no will to win, or not enough brains to do it. Quite a few of us just ended up leaving in disgust.
Again, that was another life. My main dev platform these days is the Penguin, and I'm using MacOS X at home. I still don't have much of a tolerance for x86-based machines, let alone their corporation-generated OSes. And I'll never return to a large mega-monolithic corporation for a job if I can help it..
".sig,
It's that simple.
Nuff said..
OS/2: Half an OS
Remember AmiPro? Now it's called WordPro, and it's a part of the IBM/Lotus office suite that comes with a lot of computers for free but never, ever gets installed or used. Ever. There was a time, however, when AmiPro was a serious, bona-fide competitor for MS Word. I used to use it on my 286 with Windows 3.0, and it was fantastic. It did everything, it gave me real WYSIWYG (something that I associated with seriously high-end apps like Ventura, but not Word), it was just great. IBM had been promising a native OS/2 version of AmiPro for ages, and this was it - the last hope, the last light for OS/2. This was still a viable product, people were still using it and paying actual MONEY for it, and this was the suite that could (maybe) save OS/2. The release was pushed back time and time again, and when AmiPro for OS/2 finally saw the light of day, everyone wanted to put it back in the ground. It was awful, buggy, evil stuff, didn't install properly, crashed non-stop, ate files, and just plain didn't work. That was when even the faithful started jumping ship. A working version of AmiPro could have made OS/2 an operating system that you could actually accomplish normal office tasks with, but instead gave MS-boosters yet another thing to point to when they dismissed it. Ahh well.
Most people think Microsoft Windows comes "FREE" with their PC.
Microsofts tricky Marketing has made Windows as free as Linux.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Windows 2000 came out in February 2000.
Linux isn't it?
I.e.: an OS that is great as a server but has a rudimentary UI at best and a horrendous one at worst.
Simple: don't partner with Microsoft! A lesson that has been learned over and over?
I was selling this stuff on launch and the better than anything else tag is hilarious.
OS2 1 was a disaster
What about the steepest resource requirements around ? (you didnt have 24mb of ram forget it - in those days the standard systems i sold with 3.1 had 8mb)
What about random crashes for no reason?
buggy software ?
unpredictable performance?
Installations that wouldnt work for no apparent reason?
Issues with Vesa equipment ?
Cryix processor issues ?
IBM's legendary lack of support?
price of the OS - well above windows 3.1? ($50-90 more from memory)
Applications that didnt work properly ?
and thats just off the top of my head
I mean come on OS2 Warp was getting there sort of but V1 was a big steaming heap. OS2 never got to the point where it could compete on stability with win3.1 and IBM's half hearted on again off again support and marketing for it didnt help.
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
We evaluated OS/2, it was much closer to true multi-tasking then WFW and superior in a lot of other ways. I couldn't understand why, given the superiority of OS/2, management wanted WFW. I think that management just wanted to "go with the flow" because Microsoft pretty much controlled the desktop already with MS DOS. The fact that OS/2 was superior was irrelevant.
Did management make the right choice? One could argue that they did being that OS/2 languished. But one could also argue that it was a self-fullfilling prophesy.
I think that it is human nature to try to back the company with the advantage rather than take a chance and back the company with the better product.
The advantage that Microsoft had was that their name was already associated with PC operating systems. IBM was (and is) a big name too but it was associated with mainframes.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Compared to what else was out there, OS/2 was way ahead. It was stable, an elegant api, etc. But, it needed more memory than anyone could afford at the time (remember memory at 100 /mb). Win3.0 could run on a machine that os/2 couldn't. Microsoft has been very lucky, although you could say they made their luck.
Developers couldn't get a realisticly complete api for the workplace shell. Everytime you wanted to do something, you ran into an undocumented interface. IBM was loosing money right around then, and had to refocus. The real death of OS/2 wasn't win95, but NT. IBM ported all their middleware and db's to NT, and OS/2 died.
I think within IBM that OS2 came to signify the bad old days. Too much MS and mainframe infighting. Think of OS2 as windows ME. Microsoft had the sense to realize they were in the same hole.
Interestingly, within IBM, linux is selling the big iron. IBM will never support/push another desktop.
The lessons to learn for the open/free software movement is not to count on compatibility with MS software for any measure of success. They will change the api/ interfaces to break it. Remember Windows 3.11? No? Anybody who used OS/2 does.
Mono and other initiative to hook into some kind of MS software will eventually fail. Same with any attempt to reverse engineer the office data. And Samba, as successful as it has been, will increasingly run into walls.
Free software will succeed on it's own merits. As it already has. I await the day when I read reviews of software that say this app is good for a microsoft shop, but otherwise choose this one.
Derek
The stupid IBM decision to release an OS that did not take advantage of the 386 multiple DOS boxes is what doomed OS/2 against Windows 3.0.
During those days, people were looking for a solution to allow them to run multiple DOS boxes. Windows did not have any serious apps and was not a threat. 3.0 allowed people to finally run multiple DOS boxes under a cute little GUI.
I made a lot of money from OS/2 consulting and was an avid fan. As much as I detest Microsoft, IBM did the OS in. They had no clue and they truley cared about thier stupid PS/2 line (mostly 286's) at that time. What a bunch of goofballs.
It was in there, IBM was forced to drop supporting OS/2 on the desktop if they didn't want to pay a big penalty for Windows licenses. IBM fought a good fight, but was not ruthless enough. Hopefully linux will fair better, but don't count on it as long as people refuse to learn about history, they will be forced to repeat it.
>>>please remove "nospam" from email address
IBM's biggest mistake, though, was implementing Windows compatibility. This killed the application market. Why write for OS/2 when you could write for Windows (and OS/2 could then run your product under emulation)? Because of this, OS/2 could never, ever have had a "killer app."
RIP, OS/2. I wasted a lot of brain cells, time, and money on you. If IBM were smart, it would release all of your code under a BSD license, thus giving every one of Microsoft's competitors -- commercial or not -- a leg up. But, alas, I don't think it's that smart.
--Brett Glass
There's absolutely no doubt that OS/2 was a vastly superior product to Windows (and probably still is).
The only problem was that IBM really didn't have a very clever strategy for dealing with the competition from Microsoft.
Their single biggest mistake was to treat developers as a cash-cow rather than a valuable resource.
I did some development work for OS/2 and it cost me a fortune to tool up with all the necessary compilers, libraries, tools and documentation.
Most developers at the time already had the tools I needed to develop Windows 3 programs so it made little sense for IBM to raise a barrier to developers by charging like a wounded bull for its tools -- but they did.
IBM mistakenly thought that they could just spend $50 million on advertising the product to the end-user and ignore the needs, complaints and hearts of the developer community.
They paid dearly for this neglect -- simply because it resulted in a dearth of good quality "off the shelf" OS/2 applications to rival those offered for Windows.
Even worse, IBM kept touting its great ability to run Windows 3 programs alongside native OS/2 apps.
How smart was that? Not very!
Faced with IBM demanding outrageous prices for new tools (and even more outrageous upgrade fees for the same tools) -- or simply writing Windows code that OS/2 users could run anyway -- the choice was obvious.
Mainstream programmers kept pumping out Windows applications while almost completely ignoring OS/2. Oh sure, there were small groups of devout OS/2 developers who cherished the technical superiority of the operating system -- but that old catch-22 soon popped up.
Despite all that expensive advertising, consumers said "why buy OS/2 just to run Windows 3 software when you can buy Windows 3 for less?" Don't forget that OS/2 really needed about twice as much (expensive in 1992) RAM to properly run a Win3 program than did Win3 itself.
All in all, the public weren't about to pay extra without some real benefits -- and there wouldn't be any such benefits until there were enough native OS/2 apps to rival Windows apps.
And (here it comes) there wouldn't be enough native OS/2 apps until there were more OS/2 developers -- who were not about to fork out the price of a good used car just to write code for the tiny community of OS/2 users.
If IBM had half a brain they would have realised that the hurdle to the acceptance of any new OS is the availability of applications.
In stead of trying to screw big profits out of developers they should have given away their tools, SDKs, etc. This would have endeared them to the developer community (rather than alienate them as they did) and the result would likely have been some damned fine apps that matched Win3 versions for functionality and blew them away from a reliability perspective.
Of course this is what's happening now with Linux but I fear that it's simply too late to overtake the beast. Ten years ago there were many more large software companies and competing with Microsoft was hard but not impossible. These days you're sunk before you get your boat to the water.
Maybe 20-20 hindsight is a wonderful thing -- but I was telling them this ten years ago -- except they were so arrogant that they felt they didn't need to go out of their way to help developers and that end-users were far more important.
Well, OS/2 3.0 Warp was great, I used it for a year and a half and it was really stable and powerful.
It did have its share of bugs, the keyboard queue could hang for example, leaving the system running but non responsive to user input, or it didn't protect the swap file (one could hang the system, if I recall correctly, by writing into the swap file!).
Despite, it was clearly better than Windows 3.x and Windows 95. It run almost everything DOS related, even games (Mortal Kombat 2 in a window anyone? ) and most Windows apps, sometimes faster than Windows itself and surely more stable.
Pricing for personal users was also right, I recall I bought it for less than the equivalent of $50.
It had a number of powerful commercial apps, a lot of shareware/freeware good ones, a very active user/developer community...
But it didn't have proper support from IBM itself. Period. What killed OS/2 was IBM as a company, since it never showed faith that it could succeed and never had a consistent plan as to what it should achieve.
Was it a big company OS? A personal computer one? Was it a Windows replacement? Something entirely different? IBM used to shift positions and the result was that the killer big name app never came.
The result is that now OS/2 is a niche product, used mostly in financial institutions and getting replaced slowly but steadily by alternatives.
Is OS/2 related to Linux? In a way. But OS/2 started as the next big thing and became a niche product, while Linux was not even a niche product and now is the next big thing.
Applications are here, support is here, publicity is here, only one thing can reverse Linux's course; inconsistency.
Diversity is a good thing, but some well chosen standards are better. Give the choice to those who need it, but have a common set of choices defined for those who don't.
If Linux is to succeed in all these different markets it targets (server, desktop, embedded), there a must be a clearly defined path and set of options for each. One size fits all was never the answer in computing.
OS/2 was killed because IBM didn't have a consistent vision as to what it should have been, while Windows was everywhere and good enough for most.
Linux could succeed, by not repeating this mistake.
Without digressing as to who actually wrote the crappy 1.0 version, IBM made OS/2 for businesses. It was a business-class OS from a business-class company. Years later, it's failed in the consumer market but is still being used by its core customer base: businesses.
Similarly, Linux is a geeky OS, written by geeks for geeks. Years later it will fail in the consumer market but will still be used by its core customer base: geeks.
OS/2 was a better DOS than DOS and a better Windows than Windows. When I ran it, it was a better kernel for the GNU toolset and X-Window system than Linux. (Linux has improved, thank god.) The sole advantage that Linux has is that IBM can't pull it off the market.
There was a real drought. And OS2 definitely needed much more RAM than did Microsoft's dreck.
I'm 45, I remember quite clearly wondering at the time: Why couldn't OS2 get market, how could that lame Microsoft stuff capture market share?? ... but the RAM drought was the reason ... IMHO.
A couple of the top-level posters danced around this issue but didn't quite hit it.
fred@welho.com
Much (most) of the first versions of the Windows NT operating system was just OS/2 code repackaged.
OS/2 is far from being dead - its just called Windows XP.
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
Did the OS/2 subsystem for Windows NT/2000/XP have any role in killing OS/2?
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
WinG huh? It wasn't until IBM showed ID's Doom running in a window on OS/2 that Microsoft got off their ars and build WinG. IBM build DIVE with IDs help but something happened in the process and ID dropped out of the partnership. I think it had to do with culture clashes. Just a guess. From what I remember, there were huge groups of people around the OS/2, Doom-in-a-window demos at COMDEX.
You're talking about apples and goats here. Running DooM in a DOS window is only a demonstration of, well, DOS. WinG and DirectX after it are API's for writing Win32 programs that can access the hardware by more sophisticated means. If IBM had demonstrated DooM ported to OpenGL, that would have been something impressive. But it wasn't. Running a DOS window is not impressive.
Gesh, OS/2 v3.0 had OpenGL support builtin too, though it never got hardware OGL support.
Saying an operating system has OpenGL support built in just does not make sense. What you mean is that OS/2 came bundled with native libraries that provided OpenGL routines. If you want to "add" OpenGL support to an operating system, you just port (devil of details here) it and recompile. Windows 9x had support for OpenGL if you went to SGI's web site and downloaded their runtime libs. However, Microsoft just bundled them eventually. Big deal. As for never getting hardware support... well, case in point.
There is very little, if anything, Microsoft ever did first in the computer industry. Most was just copied and they dominated by the anti-competitive leveraging of their monopoly. IMHO.
This is the only point on which I'd say you're absolutely correct.
Why bother.
I was involved with the development and support of OS/2 products since its first release and I read all this praise and wonder what product did you people actually use. Okay interfase is a personal thing, I hated it if you liked it fine. But did you really look at the architecture it wasn't that robust as many would like to think. One misbehaving application could crash the entire system. As for Warp what a mess, I had to work with the IBM developers because our product that IBM used was crashing. Bottom line don't believe the OS/2 API things don't work as documented. Then Warp was a performance dog. IBM tried to hide it by speeding up all the interface code. but test timings on non-interface code and pre-Warp versions were faster. Even IBM wanted to kill OS/2 off years before they did, but for political reasons they couldn't. OS/2 was a nice idea, but bad implementation. No tears in the end.
1. If you had anything that interesting to say, you wouldn't have to start FIFTY FUCKING THREADS in every story you comment on.
2. If you'd pause for a minute you'd realize that you aren't saying anything that hasn't been said 800 FUCKING TIMES on slashdot already.
3. But you don't, and apparently you haven't, so my only advice to you is to either STFU, or learn to troll more creatively. Also, you might want to work on your communication skills, if you're actually interested in communicating with post-adolescents.
4. Not that you'll find a lot of those here anyway.
5. There must be something better you could be doing with your time. Homework, possibly?
Oh well, I tried
used OS/2 since 2.0 to Warp. The base was
pretty robust but the pm with it's extended
attributes was not so pretty. especially the
version for FAT. Otherwise, the integration was
pretty neat and GNOME or KDE aren't
really there...
but they will!
Linux ads were all over cars, sidewalks, billboards, all around the city, People who dont even know what linux is know about the pengiun
Linux's problem isnt marketing at this point, not only is there a league of linux users willing to market it via word of month, theres also hackers who market it, IBM Markets it, Sun, etc etc, Marketing is not the issue with Linux.
Maybe IBM didnt market itself, that is true, but Linux has very good marketin
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
It fascinated me that in the revenge of the nerds, it was pointed out that IBM was paying Microsoft based on K-LOCs (thousands of lines of code). I think it was Ballmer who pointed out that it was hardly an incentive to code something tight and efficiently...
Also, IBM got wind that MS was developing Windows in parallel. That's when that 'partnership' started to unravel. I believe there was meant to be a fundamental difference about supporting older DOS applications. With earlier incarnations of OS/2, you had to be lucky to have a program work in the DOS box. With Windows, you had to be a lot more unlucky...
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
for some time two of the biggest german computer computer market chains - vobis and escom - had os/2 bundled with their computer. they did it because microsoft wanted dos/windows license fees for EVERY computer, not only for those with dos/windows preinstalled. of course vobis and escom were pissed so they bundled their pcs with os/2. it wouldn't last long tho... too much power on microsoft side.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Back when i got my first PC, a Mac was over $2000 and the PC was hundreds of dollars less.
Still even now, Macs are more expensive. Sure theres some cheap Macs now, but its too late, the Imac should have been around in 1996, not 1999.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
This is something most people dont know or understand: OS/2 isnt dead, it just lives on in a different form.
Windows NT 3.1, 3.51, 4.0
Windows 2000
Windows XP
are ALL based off of some OS/2 kernel code!!
I run nt 4, and therefore, I also run a portion of early OS/2 releases!!
Microsoft didnt kill OS/2, they helped it to SURVIVE
this will be mod'ed down for troll bait, but sheesh, I used OS/2 and it sucked.
It wasn't stable when you ran many apps, it was too easy to write code that locked the system up, and it was gawd awful to install.
Yeah, I saw the speech rec software for OS/2 ver 4(?). It barely worked.
Yes OS/2 was cool next to DOS and CPM. But it was way behind the Mac and also behind Windows once Win 95 came out.
this is not a sig
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I bought WARP as a Christmas present, the first time I paid for retail software instead of copying it, so you can imagine I really had faith in OS/2, I wanted to get rid of Windows forever.
But, it never worked for me, I had some strange BIOS/HD combination that made it impossible to install.
After many failures and talks with support, I gave up.
I bought a new computer after some months, but I was so bored with OS/2 that I never tried again and of course, now I regret having spent money and time in something that I never used.
If Linux is ever to succeed, the first time experience will have to be completely painless, that is, easy to install, easy to run, visually appealing, no troubles with that new device just bought...
I run Windows and everything works fine for me, if I change, I want to be able to read my documents, play my music, use my LAN adapter, my new digital camera, my webcam, my printer at its full capabilities, I want the energy settings to work, I want to connect my cellphone to my address book... everything that works now has to work in Linux and then, provide something extra so that switching to Linux is worth it.
I'm affraid right now, I cannot change, (and I have tried!), but my LAN doesn't work, no drivers for my digital camera, the same for my cellphone, the sound is crappy... I know it's getting better, but Linux, still, is not good enough for me and many, many other people. I hope it changes...
In my opinion, IBM top executives with little technical education killed OS/2. They called OS/2 "Warp", a term for something so bent that it is useless.
They aren't any smarter today. They have contracted with their ad agency for those stupid DB2 ads which show dorky guys in space suits. The ads show the lack of knowledge and interest of the ad agency writers in IBM's products. The IBM execs are not smart enough to know they're horrible.
Only technically educated people can manage a technically educated company.
Bush's education improvements were
Excellent comment and I agree completely. OS/2, like MacOS X, has that polished, finished, and well thought out feel to it that I was missing in a OS for a long time. Lack of applications and hardware support is what killed off OS/2, but with the pile of open source applications being rapidly ported to Cocoa/Carbon on OSX, and apple's excellent hardware compatibility - e.g. what's there, works - will help it to overcome the historic stumbling blocks of a new OS.
..don't panic
Comment removed based on user account deletion
OS/2 2.x was a great piece of software in many ways, but IBM missed the mark on several important points, some of which the linked story gets.
For example, it should be perfectly obvious by now, and was to many even at the time, that preloads were a critical factor. Microsoft appreciated this much earlier than IBM, who couldn't even convince their own PC company to preload OS/2. Remember that OS/2 2.0 came out long before Windows 95 - If OS/2 really was a better Windows than Windows, like IBM claimed, no threat Microsoft could make should matter. The IBM PC Co should have been happy to preload OS/2 2.0 and dump Windows 3.x. (Remember IBM even had their own DOS on the same code base, they didn't need Microsoft at all.) The fact that IBM PC Co could never be convinced to preload OS/2 is damnimg evidence that it was never all it was cracked up to be.
There were dozens of important problems. Among which:
Microsoft was hardly friendly to OS/2 after it washed its hands of it in the 1.3 days, but all the big reasons for its failure in the market have IBM's fingerprints all over it. Them and a gang of fanatics that make the worse Linux advocated look downright boring.
The elevator in our building has a little LCD screen in it that displays time/temp/weather information as well as the individual company names of the floors its on.
Last week the marquis application crashed and had a blue screen of death on it....NO ONE USED THE ELEVATORS until the building management rebooted the display software and sent out a notice that windows was only used for the marquis, and NOT in the operation of the Otis elevator
Old age and treachery almost always overcome youth and skill.
It still bugs me that KDE and GNOME still seem to be aspiring to be Win-clones. IMHO, the OS/2 WPS is still way better than Win-anything. But even if I want to accept that something better than the WPS can be done, it simply isn't. The "advanced" desktops of Linux are just chasing Windows.
At least in the desktop arena, Microsoft has nearly completely destroyed innovation, unless you want to call minor variations in colors, icons, and product bundling innovation.
I run DFM, and have played a little with the ROX filer.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
As far as I could tell, no one outside IBM was buying the PS/2. At least, I've never seen a single one outside the company. At the height of its popularity, it was estimated that OS/2 had over 10 million users.
IBM could have stayed ahead and taken over the industry, but a lot of factors conspired to prevent it from happening. Much of it was due to IBM attitude. First off, mainframe mentality ruled (And still rules, to a large extent) the company. Upper management still viewed the PC as a toy. Certainly they would never have dreamt that a user might actually want to multitask with it, even though OS/2 featured preemptive multitasking.
Further there was the IBM tendency to do a thing and then sit back and rest on their laurels. They go into maintenance mode and don't continue active research and development of innovative new features. IBM business process is still not geared toward a completed project where live development is still taking place.
As for marketing, well it is said that IBM couldn't market eternal life if they had sole rights. They had no idea of their target demographic and they tried to market the product to Joe Average User. This resulted in Joe Average User getting pissed off with the painful installation process. And the installation was painful. IBM could have done something about that, but they were resting on their laurels (See previous point.)
Furthermore, IBM's own software did not strive to show off the operating system at all. Most of the utilites they shipped were straight windows ports. This resulted in poor performance on the platform. I made a comment in a forum at one point that Netscape for Windows 3.1 actually did a better job of multi-threading than the OS/2 web explorer did. I actually ended up using the DOS version of the document explorer that IBM shipped for documentation because the OS/2 version would block the system input queue while it indexed documents, thus hanging the entire system.
Most people will agree that the death blow was PCCO's refusal to preload OS/2 on their systems (Due to illegal Microsoft bullying.) Since the install process never improved and there was no way to get the system preloaded, that was pretty much all she wrote.
There are still some companies out there using OS/2, and they're paying IBM a lot of money to maintain the product. It's mostly banks or other shops with other IBM iron. OS/2 always did talk to the mainframes very well. But OS/2 lost its chance to be a (or THE) mainstream desktop OS when Microsoft introduced Windows 95. Windows 95 was less stable, still didn't feature preemptive multitasking for all programs and had a far less robust interface, but it was good enough that most people didn't care.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Which means more advertising dollars, and more ads. Sure they arent as organized or as planned, but everyone has heard of linux even if they dont know exactly what it is yet. Thats all you really need.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
So if I got this right, Europe actually gives a shit about their computers. My plane leaves in five hours ; )
LIES OS/2 March 1997 = manuals and OS for sale to developers.
March 1987
Check Wallstreet Journal and other magazines if you dounbt this fact.
The Mac II (supporting multiple montitors, ability to use multiple simultaneous keyboards and mice and much more) shipped two months after OS/2.
But this crappy liea bout OS/2 shipping in March 1992 is crap.
Its buggy slow as hell history goes way back to 1987.
Slow ? OS/2 could only transfer SCSI data in commands packets of 4Kilobytes per gulp!!!! The Mac II could hanfle 16 megabyte transfers and was over 6 times faster.
Buggy? OS/2 could only support interrupts from serial protocols in little packets of minimum of one interrupt per two bytes safely without losing data. The Mac II and its full color OS in that year could handle interrupts for serial a few different ways but could handle Zmodem out one port and in the other serial port on the same machine at 38400 baud.
The OS/2 was a command line oriented pile of swill in 1987 and the Mac supported 8 meg of RAM for a single program, and had digital sound, animation grade video calls, and much more.
OS/2 programming manuals in 1987 cost 5000 dollars and came with free video tapes of lectures on OS/2 that IBM had no time to put into paper notation.
The Mac had Inside Mac volumes 1 through 4 already on store shelves.
But this crap about OS/2 coming out in 1992 is a lie.. they just want to forget the half-born bastardized lame versions for the first 5 years that actually SHIPPED.
The ISA machines in the PS/2 lineup came after some of IBM's major customers refused to buy a MCA version of the computer, I remember them later being re-named as PS/1 computers in an attempt to flog the PS/2. The MCA-based PS2 line did NOT survive until the mid 90's -- it was long dead by that time -- by the mid 90's IBM had migrated to PCI like everybody else, and had computers named "PS/2" but they were just generic clone machines.
I see no reason to do research about something I lived through when you're the only anal twit on Slashdot who cares. I'm sure that nobody else here cares that the PS/2 was released in 1987 rather than 1986. The point is that IBM was trying to hijack the personal computer market -- not that it was 1987 rather than 1986.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Comments to the final paragraph....
>Post Script: In the years since this article was >written, independent developers have kept OS/2 on >life support,
Not to mention a plethorial of regular fixpaks since 1996 from IBM... latest Jan'02... and IBM has stated support thro'2008.... so OS/2 will take another 10 years to actually... looks like I will be dead before OS/2....
>with projects such as eComStation, which seeks to >produce updated versions of the operating system >and applications that run under it,
Hardly 'seeks'... they are doing it, it is real, and it works....
>and Project Odin, which works to provide a way to >run 32-bit Windows applications under OS/2. But >claims that OS/2 is alive and well are mostly of >the sort of claim that imparts such characteristics >to Elvis Presley.
Wasn't he one og the Beatles...?
Running fine on SMP, with JFS, and blows Linux and windozes out of the water in terms of high volume multitasking...and running winbloze apps under Odin quite necely thank you....
>The ironies abound: A hopeful community waits in >hope that a federal judge will slap down Microsoft >and level the playing field. Quality even now does >not govern the success of operating systems or >application software.
It is of no interest to me what US psuedojustice system attempts to do to mickeysoft.... the point is I do not, will not, and never have done business with mickey soft.... because I have chosen to use a better alternative.....
>IBM, which failed with its Microkernel project, now >offers a single operating system with all of its >computers except the consumer desktop models. A >better desktop operating system exists -- John C. >Dvorak mentiuoned it, and this site is devoted to >it -- and already the talk is that it's only good >for businesses and less of a desktop operating >system than even OS/2 was. What was it about "those >who fail to learn from the lessons of history . . >."?
Singularly appropriate last sentence....
why indeed should so many continue to pander to the greatest organised crime in commercial history, and continue to buy mickeysoft overpriced abandonware...
(Buy XP today, and get your incompatible upgrade same time next year...LOL)
An otherwise very informative article was ruined by the authors laziness in being unable to do even one hours research into the current state of OS/2... if you are going to comment on something at least have the courtesy to your readership to actual know something about what you are attempting to pontificate upon....
Bloody amateurs...
You said OS/2 was cool or had features better than a Mac"
LIES !
OS/2 March 1997 had manuals and OS for sale to developers.
March 1987
Check Wallstreet Journal and other magazines if you doubt this fact.
The Mac II (supporting multiple montitors, ability to use multiple simultaneous keyboards and mice and much more) shipped two months after OS/2.
But this crappy lie about OS/2 shipping in March 1992 is crap.
Its buggy slow as hell history goes way back to 1987.
Slow ? OS/2 could only transfer SCSI data in commands packets of 4 Kilobytes per gulp!!!! The Mac II could hanfle 16 megabyte transfers and was over 6 times faster.
Buggy? OS/2 could only support interrupts from serial protocols in little packets of minimum of one interrupt per two bytes safely without losing data. The Mac II and its full color OS in that year could handle interrupts for serial a few different ways but could handle Zmodem out one port and in the other serial port on the same machine at 38400 baud.
The OS/2 was a command line oriented pile of swill in 1987 and the Mac supported 8 meg of RAM for a single program, and had digital sound, animation grade video calls, and much more.
OS/2 programming manuals in 1987 cost 5000 dollars and came with free video tapes of lectures on OS/2 that IBM had no time to put into paper notation.
The Mac had "Inside Mac" volumes 1 through 4 already on store shelves.
But this crap about OS/2 coming out in 1992 is a lie.. they just want to forget the half-born bastardized lame versions for the first 5 years that actually SHIPPED.
And saying OS/2 EVER was better than a mac for a single moment in history is a sick joke.
Cite a feature and date : and do not discount MPW from Apple.
Regarding IBM and Microsoft and OS/2, I've read some reminiscing by one of the industry pundits who was there at the meeting where IBM blew off Microsoft. Bill Gates showed up with all these charts showing Windows as a little side project on top of IBM/Microsoft OS/2, and IBM blew him off. Yep, that's right, IBM blew off Microsoft -- NOT the other way around. That was apparently when Bill decided that Windows was going to be a totally seperate operating system not reliant upon anything IBM (Chairman Bill does NOT like being blown off by arrogant IBM execs!), and that was when Bill decided he was going to borrow some tactics out of the IBM monopoly handbook, such as bundling, "vaporware", and per-CPU pricing.
Now, I'm not going to argue about whether the Microsoft monopoly on personal computer desktops is good or bad. I'll just point out that an OS/2 monopoly would probably have been even worse -- because IBM is a hardware company as well as a software company, and undoubtedly would have used their hardware muscle to squeeze out the kind of white box clone business that kept Linux alive for many years before the major vendors discovered Linux.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
The interface could be plugged in much like a Unix interface. I remember they had a win 3.1 interface that made OS/2 look exactly like windows 3.1!(?) Also, the default interface, being totally object oriented, was infinitely configurable. True oo is really cool for an interface, things can be put anywhere and configured anyway you like!
-Sean
Gee, I installed Windoze way more times than OS/2. It's given out as a "standard fix for anything."
And you obviously have not seen NT install :)
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
As an employee at MS at the time, working on DOS and Windows, with many friends on OS/2 I can only say everyone is just wrong. I had written a big article about it, but decided it was too big a pain to set everyone straight; just know this, what you think you know about OS/2 and its relationship to Microsoft are almost certanly wrong.
Just wasn't that good. It's about time someone said it. Yea. it had some nice features but it was a pain to install, in fact, I only got OS/2 Warp to install correctly *once* in my life, which covers about 10-20 attempts on various hardware.
Driver support was dreadful, the GUI was good conceptually but was often too cluttered to really be effective.
It was also pretty slow, not any slower than Windows but, as this article does point out, most people stuck with DOS apps because of speed issues, and even if OS/2 had been really popular I think a lot of people would have kept using DOS anyway.
So there it is. OS/2 was just never very good. It had potential and a lot of people confused that with quality. Not all together unsimilar to what killed linux's chances of making an impact on the desktop. Progress and potential are NOT the same thing as a usable product.
This is one of the poorer "why os/2 is dead" articles constantly being rehashed. Got Ecs running on my file, mail, http and ftp servers, and all is good. Why not xp - i don't waiste money on things i don't need. Why not Linux - i have a life and i want to keep it that way
"Ten years ago IBM was considered the big monopolist threat in both hardware and software. "
Not really. Maybe 20-30 years ago, but by 10 years ago, it was pretty clear that Microsoft had beat the snot out of IBM on the low end.
The funny part is that when the Apple ][ was the most popular computer, everybody said "ooooh, just wait until IBM releases their minicomputer (that's what we called them), they'll own the market!". Never happened.
IBM was a big player in the PC market for about 3 years. Their day is past.
The latest release of OS/2 is by Serenity Systems.
Take a look at www.ecomstation.com.
The desire to try and emulate the Windows GUI way of doing things is so people who are used to the Windows GUI don't have a harder time in picking it up.
The Gui that OS/2 originally used, and Windows 3.0 were so alike that it was not that hard to move from one to the other.
Both were expanded to include extra features, but I reckon that both Microsoft and IBM did not want a product that looked and felt like each others.
So there was a redevelopment effort of the GUI on both sides. The changes in the OS/2 GUI were small between versions (I have not had a good look at OS/2 Warp though).
However Microsoft had their "Chicago" project, which was eventually called Windows 95. This was a complete redevelopment of many aspects of the GUI interface, in the pursuit of being more "user friendly". Nowdays the GUIs of Windows 2000, et al, are still referred by some people as the Win95 GUI.
At the time that Windows 95 was released, followed by NT 4.0 later. The GUI was .. a problem for organisations that already had a large number of staff trained on, and using the existing Windows 3.x GUI interface. This meant the use of "Program Manager" and "File Manager" which OS/2 also had, etc. Win95 had the start button, and task bar.
The Windows 95 interface was supposedly easier to get around for a joe bloggs, who knew nothing about computers, and was just dragged off the street. I remember a promotional video shown years ago that showed two complete idiots trying to find and open notepad on a Widnows 3.x and a Windows 95 GUI. It still required prompting for both of these people, but it appeared blatantly obvious at the time that the person helping the idiot #2 using the Windows 95 interface, was being a little more helpful.
However this video meant nothing to the corporate managers out there who had to completely retrain their staff on using the new GUI system. After that Microsoft have made no real effort to try and change away from the start button, and task bar. Besides it makes the GUI look more like an Apple Mac anyway.
I read the press, ran out and bought an early version of OS/2 (at that point in life I ran CP/M with ZCPR, DR-DOS, PC-DOS, MS-DOS, Win 3.1 with Norton Desktop, NDOS). The friggin OS/2 desktop was ugly. Now, at that time I did most of my work without a GUI, and DR-DOS + NDOS was just fine for that. But when I went into a GUI it was to do something that really needed it - graphic design work - and why would I do that in a GUI that was ugly? It's a different part of the brain, and it wants to be happy in its workspace.
Then I grew up to Solaris and Linux, and spend most of my working hours in xterm - but will still boot into Win 95 if I really need Pagemaker or Freehand or whatever. But I'll never believe OS/2 was a superior GUI - may have been a superior underlying OS, but the market momentum was about the GUI then. It lost to Windows because IBM actually managed to present something uglier. It's like a really fertile woman who never bathes - great if you're just rating fertility, but do you want her to have your kids?
___
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Ah, so the Apple execs REALLY loved it, eh?
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
"OS/2 1.30 (SE and EE) was the first version which was written entirely by IBM. There was still some Microsoft code in it - that would not go away for a couple years yet - but all of the new code and a good portion of the existing code for OS/2 1.30 was written by IBM. As a result, OS/2 1.30 was smaller and faster than previous versions, more stable, and there were far more device drivers available, though still not nearly enough."
This is from your own link #2. Many users agree that the quality of OS/2 peaked around version 2.1. At this point there was very little Microsoft code left in there. Reading the original article that \. linked to, these early releases weren't very good at all. Only after IBM re-wrote it and brought it beyond the simple *text-mode* support of 1.0, did it gain a following. If Microsoft was able to create a system as good as the OS/2 written by IBM, it wouldn't have tripped and stumbled through NT 3.51 and 4.0 before releasing something decent like 2000. This comment sounds real juicy at first glance but is highly misleading. Sheesh, if only I had some moderator points.
Correction -
The slash engine took out the less than sign before the 1.3 in the subject line, since it can be interpreted as an html tag. I meant to say "So what?, Only versions (less_than_sign)1.3, which stunk anyway."
Wine is considerably more, err, byzantine.
Hardly surprising given what the OS/2 Win16 compatibility layer was: Windows 3.1 run in a virtual 286 (thus in standard, not enhanced mode, which is why some apps wouldn't run), without the Program Manager. IIRC there were two versions of OS/2 you could buy at one point, one with a cut-down copy of Win3.1 included (that Microsoft let them include it was a legacy from agreements signed during the Microsoft/IBM co-operation days, although Microsoft was still getting a licence fee from it) and a cheaper version which asked you for your Win3.1 disks during installation.
A much more fair comparison would be with Win4Lin, which attempts to do much the same thing with Windows 98, i.e. run it in a virtual machine without Explorer, and display the application windows on an X desktop.
Win4Lin is actually a more impressive achievement, as in order to run Win98 it has to virtualize a 386 in protected mode, which is hard, as opposed to virtualizing a 286, which is really really easy (the 386 and above has hardware especially designed to do this).
Either way, whether you run Win16 apps in OS/2 or anything Win98 can run in Win4Lin, you have paid the Microsoft tax and are running Microsoft code.
The other approach to running Windows software on other systems is to reimplement the Windows API. Some projects that do this are basically ports of Microsoft code (like Mainsoft's MainWin, which is used in the HP-UX and Solaris versions of IE). Just two projects have ever done this without using any Microsoft code: Wabi and Wine.
Wabi was very successful in its time, providing a complete Win16 layer on lots of UNIXes, and something that even Wine doesn't do: an i386 emulator for people who want to run Windows apps on non-IA32 architectures. Unfortunately it never got much Win32 support and, being a proprietary product, died a death a few years ago.
So we're left with Wine, the most ambitious Windows emulation project of them all: efficiently reimplementing all of the Win16 and Win32 APIs and ABIs, without any Microsoft code, and all as free software.
it seems like the developers are more interested in using the code for proprietary emulation for running specific programs (games, plugins) or porting (corel stuff, etc.) than producing a general, Free, universal windows emulator.
They are effectively rewriting about 30% of Windows, with only Microsoft's published documentation and reverse engineering as references. They have to be bug-for-bug compatible (this is the real killer). The core team is absolutely tiny compared to Microsoft's Windows development group.
Is it any surprise that they are trying to do what they can as they get things working? They are doing stuff that people would have thought near-impossible just a couple of years ago, even by an extremely well-funded corporate behemoth like Sun or IBM.
It would seem that Wine is the most underappreciated of all the major free software projects out there, which is such a shame given its promise.
Give Wine some time. I know it's been a long wait already, but the pieces are falling into place right now, and it shouldn't be too long (measured in Wine time, of course ;) before Wine gets to version 1.0. When that happens, expect repercussions for years to come.
At the time I didn't want Windows, but the pricing scheme forced me to buy it anyways. Rediculous. Once I got it I discovered that the memory requirement of 8MB was a joke -- OS/2 was never happy doing any real work with less than 32MB, and as a student I could never afford to buy that much RAM...
I bought a copy of OS/2 Warp 3.0 in 1994, shortly after it came out. I liked it quite a bit, then.
It did take me awhile to get it running.
- Sound Card/CD gremlins. I had an Ensoniq sound card, which was pretty damn nice at the time. It supported a standard Panasonic 2x CDROM. All of this stuff came in a package by the now-defunct company Reveal (anyone remember those guys?). The card didn't really do anything via hardware; you'd have to boot DOS, initialize the card, then do a quick three-finger salute to get OS/2 to recognize the drive (had to do this with Linux, too). I finally gave up and bought a SB16.
- HPFS. It was very, very cool at the time. No, it wasn't considerably faster than FAT (as so trumpted by IBM...and I did benchmarks on this to test). Of course, if you didn't buy the expensive version with a second copy of Windoze, you had to have a FAT partition somewhere. And that none of the existing Windoze applications could use long filenames....
- REXX. I enjoyed messing around with it quite a bit. I'd like to see a nice version of it for Linux.
Once I got things working with OS/2, I used it for several months, until MS decided it liked me and started giving me free software (I beta-tested MSN.....so shoot me). I also started running Linux about this time, ran short on disk space, and OS/2 went away.
A couple of years later, with more RAM and more disk space, I re-installed OS/2 on my old machine. On a P-66 with 24MB, it absolutely flew....totally blew Win95 away. Netscape 2.something ran fine, as did the 16-bit Win apps I was still running.
I ran short on cash one day and decided to auction my copy off. I think I sold it for fifteen bucks. Now, that old P-66 is sitting in the corner. I wish I had a copy to install on it. Instead, I think it'll probably become a diskless workstation running Linux.
Advertising.....Anyone remember the "IBM OS/2 Warp Fiesta Bowl?"
It's an interesting reversal (and one not noted in the article since it was written in 1997) that the "freshly inked rubber stamp"ing Jackson, who's made out to be in MS' pocket compared to the quixotic Judge Sporkin ends up in pretty much the same straits as his predecessor: exposing Microsoft for who they are, but then being marginalized by an eager Justice Department and Administration. I wonder what Judge Kollar-Kotelly's opinion will be in a few years.
V+1=W
M+1=N
S+1=T
take the VMS people, make another OS: WNT, Windows NT
Of course everybody already knew that, so I'll probably burn some karma for getting 'redundant' rating here...
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
can we try to revive CP/M, just for a little while? Oh, when 16k was so much more RAM than anyone needed.
Get over it.
IBM's OS/2 commercials just showed a bunch of guys crowded around a monitor going "Wow! I can't beleive it can do that! Wow that's amazing!" but the Camera view was from behind the monitor so you didn't see anything they were doing. Then it had some catchy IBM slogan and that was it."
Looking back, I find it laughable how computer-illiterate I was when those came out. I don't think I even knew what an OS back then. When I all of those people huddling around the screen going "Ooh! Ah!" I remember thinking: "What the hell are they looking at? Porn?"
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
Here is an interesting tidbit that I gleaned from the article. In the first anti-trust investigation of Microsoft (circa 1995), the original judge disapproved the weak settlement that had been reached between Microsoft and the DoJ. However, the appeals court removed the original judge and replaced him with none other than Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson!
From the article:
"The following June, a federal appeals court ruled that Judge Sporkin had overstepped his authority and assigned the case to a different judge, Thomas Penfield Jackson, who had a freshly inked rubber stamp."
It is ironic that in the second anti-trust trial, it was this same Judge Jackson who was removed from the case on appeal.
------
www.moneybythenumbers.com
I don't care what you think IBM 'told the world', it didn't happen. Just because PS/2 and OS/2 share 75% of their characters doesn't mean they're tied together. OS/2 from version 1.0 ran perfectly fine on non-IBM machines, and MS-DOS ran on PS/2 machines, if you were stupid enough to choose it over the superior DR-DOS or PC-DOS.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
The year was 1994. I was still kind of newbish about operating systems, but had a real burning desire to learn. My little Packard Bell 486 DX2-66 with 4 megs of memory came preloaded with Windows 3.1. I was working at Babbages at the time, and we had just recieved a shipment of OS/2 Warp, including a couple free(beer) versions for employees to take home with them so we would know more about the product to sell it. A friend of mine had just gotten in his 85+ boxed set of linux slackware floppies in the mail (kernel version 1.1.18 if I remember correctly but it could have been prior). We sat down side by side that night, him on his 386 with 2 megs of memory, and me on my 486. OS/2 took me a good 4 hours to install, mainly due to the fact that I was so limited on memory, however he had linux up and running within what seemed to be minutes. I was aghast at how blazingly fast he was able to start doing things while I was still watching the stupid install screen. I had used the HPUX system at school and remembered all the neat stuff I learned I could do just from a telnet session, and that was all she wrote. That evening I was running slackware on my little POS Packard Hell, and the OS/2 box was in the trash can.
What killed OS/2 more than anything was the people like me with 4 megs of ram, back when an 8MB stick would cost you around 400(us) dollars. The timing of 95 hit perfectly with manufacturers(coincidence?) rolling out systems with 8 megs or more memory.
On a side note I trashed my linux install the day after I installed it with a recursive delete and had to reinstall windows to have an operating system. It didn't detour me from using Linux, just made me accountable for my actions from then on out. I never made that mistake again (just one very similar; ).
Windows 3.x couldn't even run serial communications over 19200 bps reliably without a third-party driver. I've seen it in my modem manuals from the time. I used one written by some Joe Programmer and distributed for free that worked great up to 57600.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
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:
In case you have never used OS/2 and you are interested in what it looked like (as I was), this essay is chock full of screenshots.
...it just wasn't popular. There's a big difference, what with corporations dictating mass appeal. OS/2 just didn't have the $$$.
DIVE stands for DIrect Video Extensions. It's not running DOS games in a window. What IBM had done was allow OS/2 programmers quick access to the display adapter instead of having to use the slow GDI, just like WinG would do later. You see, when you don't want your programs to crash your spiffy protected-mode OS, you have to virtualize your hardware.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I was weaning myself away from the Amiga at the time by buying a Windows laptop. I was aware of OS/2 Warp and wondering if I should buy it. (I recognize now that the laptop couldn't have hacked it!) However, IBM ran an OS/2 Warp TV ad that totally turned me off.
The ad showed a goup of youthful folks clustered around a computer, oohing and ahing and generally making sounds of enthusiasm and approbation. It never showed a hint of what was supposedly on the computer display to generate such excitment.
I assume that some high-level marketdroid thought the ad would make the viewer eager to see what the excitements was all about.
I don't know how other folks reacted, but my conclusion was that OS/2 Warp had nothing special worth showing or else they would have shown the computer display. Therefore, why should I even give a thought to OS/2 Warp.
My loss? I think not. I didn't invest any money in OS/2 Warp and it remained a non-factor in my life.
During that period, I was phasing out of the Amiga market and had purchased a Windows laptop. I wondered if I should consider OS/2 Warp to replace Win95. (I recognize now that the laptop could not have hacked it with OS/2 Warp!) Then, an ad appeared for OS/2 Warp that showed a group of youngish folks gathered around a computer, oohing and ahing about what they were supposedly seeing on the screen. No hint of what was supposely displayed on the screen was shown.
Evidently, some high-level marketdroid thought that viewers would be motivated to go post haste to a nearby computer store to see what the excitement was about.
My take was that something exciting would have been shown if there was anything like that to show. I concluded that OS/2 Warp was an empty promotion and I never chose to even look at it.
My loss? I think not. It cost me nothing and I have survived.
I used to be a fantaical os2 user. Reading this brought back lots of sadness, and even more at Be, because Be wasn't fucked up in all the ways the IBM was, and the BeOS wasn't as crappy as os2 (said in retrospect - it was never that stable, and the browsers were a disaster). Be did everything within their power right, and Microsoft still swallowed them.
Believe with me, my saplings.
http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/esdd/articles/linux_c .html?t=gr,l=805,p=OS2toLinux
This was posted on slashdot not so long ago.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
IBM Info about porting OS/2 to linux
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Paul Allen and Bill Gates named their company Micro-Soft, not Microsoft.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
The interface was not locked in, it was trivial to change and not only that it was really easy to just boot to a prompt if you so desired.
It had too many damn floppies. Took all evening to install on my 386 computer. Has it really been 10 (!) years?!?
OS/2 was my first "alternative" OS to use. The multitasking was really impressive, and overall much better than DOS/Win3.1
Ever say the striking difference in colordepth, and in 3d (raised buttons) between OS/2 and Win 3.1/95?
/Dread
OS/2 was UGLY.
Seriously, lack of IBM marketing killed it.
Gr
Click here to see some Warp 4 Example Screens
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
There is one very simple reason to why OS/2 failed and Windows did not. Microsoft gave their all to make Windows win, they didn't have hardware sales to worry about as well. Just as Sun today are not willing to put all their eggs in one basket with Java but also wants to push slow expensive hardware and an outdated OS.
To win you have to want to win, bad. For this is what Bill and Steve wants to, they want to give people what they want (that is normal people, they don't want to pay extra for a bunch of stuff, they want one package, and have all they need. I want that too, and I consider myself a computer geek after all) and they want to win. Though I personally don't think they try to be some "evil empire" and gets accused of a lot of things they haven't done. Anyone dealing with software on that scale knows how hard it is, and interfaces etc are bound to change. Heck, free software is even worse.
So, this turned into a rant again. So for all you linuxnerds out there. If "Linux" is going to succeed, Mandrake/SuSE/RedHat/etc better join forces and put all their eggs in one basket. Produce one OS that looks and works the same all the time (you won't get away with several desktops, Apple and Microsoft is going to tear you to shreds, with good reasons) with a good set of applications and tools to go with it. Yes, to integrate and bundle *IS* good for the consumer. Anyone who says anything else must be mad. I buy a car, not a bunch of parts to build a car with (we all know the cost for that).
I used to play around with OS/2 a long time ago. It was wonderfull, fast, reliable, etc. I could even compile some basic unix softwares written in C on it! I used to had 2 servers running OS/2 and average uptime was far higher than windows NT on the same machine (dual boot).
Fabio - Sumare/Sao Paulo/Brazil/South America/Earth/Solar System/Milky Way/Universe
http://www.morroida.com.br
OS/2 is still being used for some things. It's still used to run the Octel 0100 voicemail system and it's just plain solid. It runs. I have *never* had an 0100 crash.
Bryan
(who came very close to running Warp on his home system but never quite took the plunge)
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
I could never figure out why IBM PCs didn't have OS/2 pre-installed. Instead, they had Windows pre-installed. To get OS/2 you have to pay an additonal $120.
It seems to me IBM should had OS/2 pre-installed on their PCs, and sold OS/2 for about $10 a copy until OS/2 caught on.
I could never understand the marketing.
"It was better than anything around, yet it failed."
bs, it was WORSE than EVERYTHING around. no wonder it failed!
I remember being exposed to OS/2 on a project I was on circa 1994. Our machines were configured to dual boot between OS/2 and DOS/WFW. My experience was that it was sluggish, non-intuitive, and did not come with a TCP/IP stack. I preferred WFW then, and Windows 95 completely blew it out of the water. The only people I remember using it were people with a serious anti-Microsoft jones.
I surprised some postings were wishing OS/2 would have won the "desktop" wars. Even if it was superior (and I don't think it was), would you really want to trade one monopoly (Microsoft) for another (IBM). Their seems to be some feeling in the Linux community that IBM is some benevolent sugar daddy. These same people obviously don't remember the IBM of the '80s and earlier. Nasty bunch. Just because Microsoft got the better of them doesn't make IBM a tragic hero. More likley just desserts.
--- igiveup ---
And no, I'm not talking about the Sony box.
OS/2: another case of M$ stepping on the little guy!
Actually, I started with OS/2 2.0 back when the alternative was Windows 3.1. OS/2 2.0 was a bitch to install, and the WPS was a bit on the unstable side--patch o' the week from IBM was the norm---
/etc/lilo.conf; lilo -v" (and nowdays add "make modules; make modules_install" before the "cp").
--but in 1992 it could multi-task a GUI and input from multiple serial ports at once, without dropping characters on the floor or forgetting to draw on the screen, which was just what certain applications needed that I was writing for the company I then worked for. Windows 3.1 couldn't do that, and DOS sure the hell couldn't.
A lot of that was fixed with OS/2 2.1, and OS/2 3.0 (Warp) cleaned up the remainder. OS/2 Warp was a dream compared to Windoze 3.11 or 95. Much more stable, and could multi-task cleanly.
I learned GUI programming with OS/2 (ignoring some early dabbling with X/Motif), and got my first exposure to multi-threading with OS/2. Later, I applied what I had learned from OS/2 to learning Windows programming (that and Petzold's book), and have been stuck programming Windows ever since. (Professionally only).
I had OS/2 at home, and even wrote some command-line and GUI utilties for my Traveller (RPG) stuff. Some of them are still on my website, but not maintained for obvious reasons.
<digression>
(No, I'm not going to link it from here. I pay for bandwidth; it ain't no free Geocities site! Especially since that Altavista spider went amok and tried to download every eBook and zip-file on my site several hundred times every three hours for a month. Had to deny access to the av.com netblock to stop it. Word of advice: if you pay for your bandwidth, check it now and then; something might be eating it up for you.)
</digression>
At one time, my home machine dual-booted Win95 and OS/2. One day I found out that this Linux thing I had heard about in college (back in '91) was now available on CDs for a reasonable price. (I had only a 2400bps modem back in the days of Linux 0.96 and the SoftLanding distribution, so downloading all those packages was Right Out). So, I ordered my first Linux distribution, Slackware '96 (or was that my second?)
It was cool; I fell in love with it right off. It was no worse to install than OS/2 2.0, and in some ways easier: I had fewer hardware incompatibilities. There was no KDE or GNOME in those days; I used FVWM as my window manager. Worked fine. But the greatest thing was the feeling of sheer power I had compiling my own, custom-tailored kernel. You can't do THAT with OS/2, Windows, or DOS!
<digression>
Do you know that kernel compiling hasn't changed much since the days of 1.x kernels? Sure, there's new menu options, and they introduced those new-fangled "module" things, and "make zImage" is now "make bzImage", but it's still "make mrproper; make config/make menuconfig; make dep; make bzImage; cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage <somewhere>/vmlinuz; vi
</digression>
For a brief time, my home computer multi-booted OS/2, Windows 95, and Linux; but eventually I noticed that I never booted OS/2 anymore. I had moved most of my hobby-programming to Linux, and had decided that local web pages were an even better way than OS/2 help files to organize my vast amounts of data, writings, and RPG info. My games were all Windows games, so I didn't use OS/2 for that. Finally, Linux came with lots of free networking stuff, which worked better than the early OS/2 2.x TCP/IP packages, so I didn't need OS/2 for telnet or FTP, anymore. Besides, as I mentioned, the Linux TCP/IP implementation worked better and didn't bog down CPU and memory as much. Frankly, the only reason I still used OS/2 was for the PMTAPE tape backup program, and I eventually moved to LS120 super-floppies. (Now I burn CDs for data backup).
There finally came a day when I was re-installing my OSs on a new hard disk that I decided there was no point in re-installing OS/2 Warp, because I never used it. In my house, Linux killed OS/2. It's been gone for several years now, but I still have fond memories of it.
I love Linux!
---dragoness
The one thing that no one (that I see) is addressing is
MARKETING MARKETING MARKETING
WinBlows does just that. But it's successful. Why? Your mother and your boss think it's the best thing since sliced cheese -- even if it sucks.
IBM NEVER did any marketing to let your boss or your mom know what OS/2 was. Consequently they followed the path of lease resistence and bought Microsoft.
I believe the LINUX project has nothing to learn from the demise of OS/2 because since the marketing of LINUX by the LINUX community has been phenominal.
W. Sandman III
Two problems with this argument: In the era of 2000 and XP almost every system boots off the CD, so the floppies are now irrelevant; and Windows is usually preloaded anyway.
I was a long-time user of OS/2, through every version after V1. Great OS, but the battles of living in a corporate desktop world where the admins only acknowledged Windows and MS made the apps increasingly OS/2-unfriendly eventually wore me and my (all mainframe folks) out. Today the only OS/2 application we have running is the HMC (hardware management console) that is the central point of control for the mainframe. It's a good choice for the function as you really don't want a box like that taking GPF's and BSOD's and the apps that run on it are written strictly for those functions - it's not a MS Word/Excel/etc kind of workstation. What I find interesting, and very telling, is that IBM recently shared with us that a future version of the HMC will be Linux based. I can't think of anything that signals the death knell of OS/2 more resoundingly (or IBM's commitment to Linux) than IBM saying that the mainframe will be managed from a Linux console. I still miss some of those OS/2 apps. Comm Mgr was hands down the best emulator package for my uses. Obviously, as a mainframer, I have specific needs and biases, but neither Reflections nor Exceed are at the same level of what I got from OS/2 Comm Mgr (ESPECIALLY support for my 122 key, 24 PFKey, weighs ~3 lbs, keyboard that nobody will ever take away from me!).
"The bigger the lie, the more they believe." - Det. Bunk
But alas it didn't do the gotta-have javascript, and IBM decided that it would be better to drop the Web Explorer and port Netscape, which was so far behind it's non-os2 counterparts that it was discouraging to users.
Of course when Microsoft PROHIBITED the IBM PC Company from pre-installing OS/2 EVEN ON THEIR OWN PC's, OS/2's death was certain.
I don't see a single desktop system in use today that multithreaded like OS/2. (Amiga perhaps?). Personally I find that pretty pathetic. But not suprising in an industry that locked itself into the Operating System equivilent to the Ford Pinto, exploding gastank and all, when a Mercedes was available for the same damn price.
rant over...next one due at 20 year anniversary of OS/2...when I suspect I'll be able to just cut and paste this one and have it be relevent. Innovation my ass, ms.
What's the buzz?
:wq
I used OS/2 3.0, waited impatiently for OS/2 Warp, and used it for years, with WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS and QuattroPro 4.0 for DOS and ProComm and, greatest of all, Galactic Civilizations for OS/2. Difficult to set up and keep running, but more stable than Windows, and besides, I could always reboot to run Win apps that wouldn't run under OS/2.
Finally, though, I needed to run Windows more and more, and more and more, the software that I need to work with wouldn't run under OS/2. Eventually, the only thing I used OS/2 for was GalCiv.
OS/2 was picky about hardware, and drivers for OS/2 were rare and rarely good. When I bought a motherboard and associated parts to build a new machine, I gave up and never quite got around to installing OS/2. I was pro-OS/2, certainly, and it hurt to finally admit defeat.
I still have the 3.0 and Warp disks in the back of the closet. A friend called me up last year and wanted to install OS/2 on his laptop, and knew that I had experience with it. I suggested Linux as an alternative to Win98, but he said he wasn't technical enough and didn't want something that complex. It hurt more than I expected to tell him that he was wasting his time looking at OS/2, and that he should install Win98.
This article was painful to read.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
UPS is still running OS/2 in most of their major hubs, and it runs some of their most critical systems.
Daniel J. Kelly
Speaking of which, there was this guy who founded OS/2 Professional magazine and edited it for the longest time. His name was Edwin Black. When Big Blue pulled the plug, he started writing what would eventually become IBM and the Holocaust", in which he accused IBM of being complicit with and profiting from Nazi Germany.
Funny, since OS/2 is dead, how come IBM mailed me (and many other users) a brand new copy of OS/2 a couple of weeks ago? Hmmmm....
I've used OS/2 and Linux extensively. How many of you whiners have actually used a recent version of OS/2?
OS/2 provides one of the most consistent interfaces around. It's more configurable than Windows, and easier to configure for Joe Average than anything on Linux.
Linux GUI's, even the latest KDE or GNOME have a long, long way to go to catchup to OS/2's PM + WPS. I only wish those people working on Linux would take a good look at OS/2 and see what's been done already and take some good ideas from it.
Uhh, wasn't NeXTStep around at the time? If I'm not mistaken, it was introduced with the NeXT Cube in 1988 (four years before OS/2). It had UNIX stability, display postscript, was great for multimedia applications...
NT tries hard to emulate UNIX (and does a pretty good job, I suppose), but UNIX has been UNIX for thirty years...
All you closet OS/2-lovers are right, this o/s is rock-solid and needs very little active systems management to run. As well, we run all of our OS/2 desktops in RIPL-mode - which is akin to treating them all a 'network stations' sucking their o/s off a server at boot time. These desktops only have hard disk for swapping. And I could go on ad nauseaum about the PM API, file system, etc. etc.
As to OS/2 murky history, it's the stuff of legend. MS was there to handle the desktop interface while IBM was bringing it's mainframe skills to bear (swapping, pre-emptive multitasking, etc.). When things went sour, IBM had the OS/2 kernal and MS had some pretty desktop icons and a vague notion of what a real o/s might be. The rest, unfortunately, is history.
So, dear friends, where to go? What real choices do I have? MS with their obscene pricing and inferior technology (next to what I have today)? Otherwise, it's Linux with its low cost-of-ownership and less-than-clear (but getting clearer) support from mainstream vendors?
Fact is, nothing today comes close to matching OS/2's combination of solid technology and ease of support. Regardless, I have to choose.
Anyone got any bright ideas?
CrazyLegs
"Pork!!" said the Fish, and we all laughed.
It can't be denied that IBM let OS/2 wither on the vine. Whether that's a good or bad thing seems to be a matter of personal preference and is definitely a moot point anyway. But has anyone noticed that IBM has developed a web browser for OS/2 that is based on Mozilla? At least someone cares enough about OS/2 that they bothered. It's funny that people always used to count out Moz/Netscape, but lately they've been roaring back. Maybe if IBM open-sourced OS/2, it might be put to good use by more people. However, I suspect they may not be able to because of some ancient licensing agreement with MS (especially because of the fact that some old code is still put to use in NT/2000/XP). Maybe someone out there knows for sure.
We tried OS/2. We really wanted to use it. I tried installing it on three different machines from three different PC manufacturers. On the first, there was no video driver to go beyond 640x480. On the second, there was no compatible hard disk driver, so it wouldn't boot. On the third, the BIOS was incompatible, and it wouldn't install at all.
Tried again with Warp. Same problems. Gave up at that point.
OS/2 may have run on machines other than PS/2s, but it was very very picky about which ones.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Unfortunately, the product was effectively hidden from view. IBM didn't make any effort to publicize its existence becayse Apple was already in the process of killing the CHRP platform.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
It's ironic that when I viewed this story, there was an IBM banner ad present trumpeting how their DB2 database runs on operating systems like Linux, Windows, AIX, and OS/2.
I do miss OS/2. All it really needs is a re-write for 64-bits.
Chip H.
Version 1.x of OS/2 was, indeed "half" an operating system. It was a completely different beast from OS/2 2.x, which was a fully-featured pre-emptively multitasking operating system with strong memory protection, kernel-mode device drivers, and other features you would expect from a modern OS.
I suppose I'm not violating the NDA or the detailed legal notice that's stamped on the back of every page in it: I still have my copy of the original manual for Microsoft's 286DOS operating system... the working name for OS/2. Got it along with an *early* alpha release a very long time ago when I worked for the company that invented the chipset market. It was as revolutionary at the time as it was when I worked on the first multi-processing version of 1.2, and as Warp was a few yeas later. To bad it couldn't keep up with Windows, and indeed a good lesson to the Linux writers and users out there.
At work (banking industry) we run 3000+ IBM PCs with OS/2 on token-ring against IBM servers with MCA, talk about being in IBMs lap!
English is not my first language, so cut me some slack -: Om du kan lasa det har sa kan du Svenska
Okay, more down the threads I found the name
of the book and felt remembered.
It was called "Showstoppers!" and describes
the evolution of NT from EA F0 FF 00 F0 to
start of the sales.
My Karma isn't excellent, damn it! (And
Dude, on a 486/66 with 12 ram, I coudl run doom2 in one dos box right next to heritic. You could see the whole thing but smaller, and it was real time, not paused when you was playign the other window.
This was on os/2 warp 3. Damn, I loved that OS. I could run anything, anyway I wanted too. Well, until DirectX came out. (32bit windows dlls put a damper on things for a while too)
But I had an easier time running dos games back then, remember the two major memory usages for games and having to reboot dependiong on the game or application playing? OS/2 didn't need any of that.
OS/2 problem was that IBM should have sold it to someone who could leagle push a major os w/o litigation about monopoly praticies.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
OK, so I know that not enough people bought the Amiga and also that it's long "dead", but I am still sometimes amazed by the compactness and flexibility that was provided by the Amiga OS. I programmed on it for 3 years for the Prevue Guide (actually Sneak Prevue, for those who ever saw that), and the OS seemed simple yet powerful. I haven't done too much programming on Linux, and only a small amount on Win32, but even the user features of the Amiga OS still had things that LInux is starting to get (thinking of modularized filesystems, for example), and that Windows never will have.
.info files for "Workbench" cluttering up my file structure, but the idea of a compact, small yet flexible OS was adhered to rather well.
...just wanted to point out that other OSs should be given their due for what they brought to the table.
AutoConfig was something that worked great, and allowed drivers to be installed from the devices themselves at boottime instead of having a separate disk/CD for them. Of course you could do it the other way too...
Of course the preemptive multitasking was great, and you could have your system up and running multiple programs with the basic 512kB memory. I remember Microsoft was commissioned to write BASIC for the Amiga, but it was buggy, crashed often, and was dumped later for incompatibility reasons with the 68020 (go figure).
Naturally the AmigaOS wasn't perfect either. Its prototypes were developed in BCPL (did I remember this right? - I know it was some kind of off-base BASIC-like language), and had a kind of glue layer for C compatibility. And yes, I hated the
Many of the design philosophies from the Amiga team have made it into other OSs... the fact that it's survived so long in spite of terrible management and business gaffes proves that its ideas were founded on solid ground.
PC bus history:
ISA
MicroChannel Architecture (MCA, the PS/2 bus)
EISA
VESA Local Bus (VLB)
PCI
Everbody's so freaking eager to forget VESA. It was FASTER than PCI (32 bits X 40(!) MHz), which it coexisted with later on as PCI appeared.
MS did not pioneer the "reset the CPU" method for enabling preemptive multitasking on the 286, Novell did.
And, to my recollection, OS/2 was not fully 32-bit until 2.1 GA.
And OS/2 Warp crashed all the damn time if you were doing something so outrageous as to trying to play an AVI file it didn't like. Fall down, go boom, either the whole damn thing or whatever had control of the single input queue, another single point of failure in the system that would completely lock you out of your 'puter.
Tastes Like Chicken
You said:
"How weird. I've had four computers in my
life and none of them came with Windows."
Yeah
Computer #1: Commodore PET
Computer #2: TRS-80
Computer #3: Original IBM-PC, with ROM-BASIC.
Computer #4: Apple III.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The decline in RISC operating systems (such as the PPC), came more as a result of that these chips never took the market by storm. Yes, there was a OS/2 for PPC in the pipeline.
The reason more often pushed forward is, that MS was quite happy with OS/2 when it was a console session, and even alright when it had the PM layer. But the moment it grew WPS, MS was not keen on it because, were it to succeed in the market place, MSFT would not control it.
Microsoft essentially forked OS/2 (and all its bits), just as they forked HTML, Kerebos, etc, etc.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
And you are Dumb as Ass. Clearly your disfunctional mind is comparing OS/2 1.2 with Windows XP or something. . .Comparing Warp3 with Windows 3.1 is a little more appropriate and Warp 4 with Win9x. OS/2 1.3 looks almost identical to NT 3.5.
The icons were a problem for you? More adventuresome or competent users changed the ones they didn't like. . .Really pretty easy on OS/2.
How long was it before Windows supported transparent backgrounds for icon text? Having an opaque text background was butt-ugly.
Howabout bitmaps for folder backgrounds. . .I assume that M$ implemented that at some point after the challenge of keeping suckers like yourself convinced of the superiority of their desktop became too expensive.
I like your final thought. . .you had that one some years ago and have not had another since, right? With a little imagination (very little. . .but you aparently lack even that much) the drives objects combined with Launchpad objects make a remarkable file management system. In fact, Microsoft's latest offerings STILL lack desktop tools as powerful yet simple to configure as Launchpads (Warp 3 and later) or the WarpCenter (Warp 4 and later). The cheezy Taskbar/System Tray isn't even in the running. And then there are Workspaces. . .Windows thralls don't know what they are missing without Workspaces. . .
More about ugly. . .let me see if I can visualize your Windows desktop. . .dozens upon dozens of icons crowding each other. . .sitting pretty much where the application's installer dropped them or if you are neat, aligned in row after row. Like most Windows users you are probably afraid to move the icons off the desktop to their own folder because Windows might forget what the icons are for. . .Don't tell me about ugly. . .I have yet to see a windows desktop that someone actually works with that isn't ugly.
Since I'm writing this using an OS/2 Warp machine, Warp cannot be as dead as the majority expects it to be.
So much for that.
I must agree that rather sad things happen at IBM's. But in spite of their favour for Linux in all flavours I have to remind the kind reader that OS/2 resembles that good old Phoenix lately by being burned (by it's inventors) and rising up again with some new feathers and appearance. Since IBM doesn't want this bird to be recognized they chose to let someone else sell it as eComStation (eCS). This thing looks much more like a consumer OS (but still not like something Xtremely Problematic my kids smuggled into the trolley at toys'r'us) while featuring a journalling filesystem (when MS kept brushing up their 'good' old FAT filesystem to something with 32 in it) and much more.
We indeed have our problem zones, but at the moment there's the situation that eCS can almost do anything Linux can concerning hardware and driver support. Well, eCS still is a single user OS and would never run on an IBM z/series machine, but for everyday work it does it's tricks (and you're always sure your data gets stored instead of going up in (blue) smoke.
MS had enough time to work on their mediocre stuff, so we finally have XP. If somebody had invested the same sums into OS/2 (plus the advantage that it surely wouldn't have been MS), who knows what we (or better, they) would be able to do with their PCs today...
I'd say, let OS/2 live, let Linux live, and don't let them put gates all around us. Maybe we should join forces and kick them out! Linux and OS/2 make a much better combination than Windows and... well, Windows.
...still flying with OS/2...