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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.
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.
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.
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.
That's not totally true. I remember Super Bowl ads for it and a few ads in the months following it. Of course, that was a while before Windows 95, and for the most part, you are correct. The marketing I read and saw during the Windows 95 era was almost nonexistent.
What a great article. Just today, when I pulled up to the ATM machine and saw the beloved TRAP=0002 hex dump black screen of death, and I had to let out a little sniffle for my former fave OS.
Will Linux learn the lessons of OS/2? Who knows? For my time in OS/2, the company and the users were nice, knowedgeable, and professional. There were not many exaggerations and very few of Microsoft-style false promises. The lesson I got out of it is that consumers can't handle a straightforward approach, always going for smoke and mirrors and gold glitter sparkles. It doesn't matter if something exists, only that the something is "just around the corner."
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
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.
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?
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.
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?
Yeah, I tried to distance myself from that stuff. Same thing with the fact that I use linux today. Too many groupies and wild eyed zealot fanatics foaming at the mouth really helps denigrate an operating system.
All through these OS fads, I've still used BSD. BSD will outlive all of this crap. Good ol' low-key BSD.. it's always been there for me.
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
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.
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!
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
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
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
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....
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.
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.
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?
So if I got this right, Europe actually gives a shit about their computers. My plane leaves in five hours ; )
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.
1) Active developent continues. IBM was always terrified of breaking "legacy" application support, which is why there was never a proper fix to the Single System Input Queue problem.
2) There are practically no barriers of entry into Linux development. Compiler's free. Tons of libraries are free. Tons of programmers tools are free. The operating system is free. All the stuff that IBM charged you for and Microsoft charges you for, free, free, free. A 12 year old could afford to install the OS and tinker with it. Many do.
3) Marketing. Well... marketing in Linux is an interesting phenomenon. Largely it's word of mouth between clueful engineers. Linux takes a company over one computer at a time and management never has a clue. They just blink in their bovine way and ponder their managerial effectiveness which must be why no one ever complains about the file server crashing anymore...
4) Installation. Redhat install is pretty much point and click. The OS/2 install was painful. I did it for a living for a while. We had a document which specified the exact order in which you had to install our company's assorted software. Deviate at all from that order and you'd trash the Workplace shell and never get any icons, forcing you to fdisk, format and reinstall. The installation process was guaranteed to take 8 hours. I'd prefer Linux installs any day of the week.
The main thing is the system keeps evolving, bugs keep getting fixed, Linus doesn't mind doing major revisions if he thinks a design isn't right and if you ever have a question, you can always ask the guy who wrote the package you're having trouble with (Assuming you can find him.) Other factors might potentially kill Linux (I could see it getting made illegal in the current legal climate) but repeats of OS/2's mistakes will not be a factor.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
I too have heard this---from someone at IBM, no less.
Interestingly, he told me that this was one of the obstacles to open-sourcing OS/2. The banks are worried about people having the source to the OS that runs their ATMs.
"Never bullshit a bullshitter" All That Jazz
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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