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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."
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.
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 a little known fact that many ATM machines use OS/2... even the new ones. That means millions of people use OS/2 every day and don't even know it. The funny thing is that they WOULD know it if they used an M$ OS. How would you like the "blue screen of death" when you're in the middle of a transaction?
What exactly in the in the 286 architecture prevents the use of a multitasking operating system?
That was not the problem. The problem was writing a multiasking operating system that would run all the DOS apps (which were important at the time).
When the 286 was in protect mode, some of the instructions worked differently than when it was in "real" mode (8086 compatibility mode). Result: you could not execute DOS apps; they wouldn't work.
So, how about making a DOS virtual machine? Well, the 386 has features that make it easy to spin up multiple real mode virtual machines, but the 286 didn't have those features. A purely software virtual machine would be very slow.
So, how about switching out of protect mode and running real mode code in the 286's real mode? That was the only option, so Microsoft took it. However, Intel had not designed the 286 to do this. There was an instruction to start up protect mode, but no instruction to leave it and go back to real mode! Microsoft wound up programming the keyboard controller chip to actually reset the CPU, many times per second, to switch to real mode.
Because DOS apps ran in real mode, they owned the whole machine: all memory, all devices, etc. So if a DOS app crashed, it would take the whole machine down with it; a crashing DOS app could trash OS/2, and there was no way to prevent it.
Even worse, the 286 did not have features that would let you virtualize the hardware, and DOS apps liked to talk directly to the hardware. All DOS apps liked to write directly to the video card, rather than going through the BIOS, and the 286 didn't really help you solve that problem.
So the OS/2 1.x "compatibility box" could only run a single DOS app at a time.
Meanwhile, Microsoft sold Xenix 286, which worked perfectly well. Alas your Xenix 286 programs either had to be less than 64KB each, or else they had to deal with near/far pointers (yuck), but Xenix 286 worked. Microsoft never tried to do a GUI desktop for Xenix, but it would have been possible.
It appears to me that the article writer is trying to excuse Microsoft's lack of skill by pretending that the task was impossible.
No, it really was impossible to write an OS that would run decently fast on the 286 hardware of the day, would multiask old DOS apps, and would be reliable. The 286 was just too broken.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Heh, and now that MS has a stable OS, the apps have all gone down the shitter.
What apps? Just about every commercial application on the market five years ago has been replaced by a Microsoft clone.
He's right, and the exception that proves the rule is Quicken. The only reason Quicken still exists is that the FTC (for reasons that are still unknown, given how merger-happy it seemed then, and still does) nixed the MS buyout of Intuit.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
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.
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.