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."

Comments

LIES OS/2 March 1897 = manuals and OS for sale

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:OS/2 subsystem for NT

[Locutus]

No, it was mainly to give NT it's networking back in the rev 1.0 (3.1) days. Microsoft owned Lan Manager and it was a 16bit OS/2 server process. They eventually wrote native NT networking into NT but it was probably not until v4.0 that the OS/2 subsystem wasn't used much.

LoB